I have to admit, it is pretty hard for me to write something emotional about someone I never met. I’ve been lucky for most of my life (knock on wood). I have only been to a funeral for one person, my grandfather, who I only saw like once or twice a year. Obviously, death comes to us all. I’m sure I’ll be attending more funerals as I get older so I’d better get used to mourning.
As we all know, Ralph Wilson has passed away and I really don’t know how to react. On one hand, I feel like I should be crying the blues and thinking about how great the Bills have impacted my life. On the other hand, there have been so many years the Bills have just irritated the shit out of me and a lot of it stemmed from him. Sure, I could just write a piece about all the good times at Bills games and so on like you’ll read elsewhere, but I could also write a novel about the bad times. Having just the pleasantries of Ralph’s obituary wouldn’t exactly be truthful when remembering Ralph.
I can’t just go on and on about how much I love the Bills and what they mean to me and how grateful I am that Ralph Wilson brought the team here, because there’s always that “but.” It is really complicated for me.
At times, I was grateful the Bills were here and we do owe that to Ralph because he could have gone somewhere else with the team. But at the same time, he would never waste an opportunity to remind us that we were so lucky to have the Bills and how he turned down going elsewhere.
Sometimes I felt our love of football was used against us, to make us feel we were just lucky to have a team, and to drive home the point that we could never get a good night’s sleep about the future unless we kept buying tickets and showing the NFL we could support a franchise. All I really needed was for Ralph to tell the fans that this team wasn’t leaving after his death..and boom! I’d be farting out the words about how great his legacy has been.
If you think I’m a complete asshole and callous for thinking about the future of the team and how, if you take out the ’90s this team was a disaster, well, maybe I am.
But how often have you cussed out the name “Ralph Wilson” while being a Bills fan? It has to be in the 1000s and I’m not going to tell Ralph Wilson’s story without mentioning the faults. Again, it is complicated and maybe I’m too complicated of a person to figure out how to remember him.
So, in death we do what we always tend to do and that’s remember the good times, right?
Outside of the football memories, my favorite moment was when Ralph was pissed off after the NE game in 1998 (“Give it to them” game). He was enraged about the refs sucking after calling a completed pass to Shawn Jefferson from Bledsoe – it was incomplete – and flagging the Bills for pass interference on a Hail Mary at the end of the game which led to the Pats scoring the game-winning TD. It was probably in my top 15 #becauseitsbuffalo games and Ralph at the end represented just how I felt about that game.
I remember he looked at the camera after the game and just yelled “THAT WAS THE WORST OFFICIATED GAME I’VE EVER SEEN!” While owners/coaches have caused a storm before about referees, what made it different was that after Ralph got fined by the league for his comments, he released a statement complaining about the fine. Wilson said he thought Paul Tagliabue had zero respect for him for the way he faxed him the notice of the fine. I think he used the words Tagliabue treated him like a child in follow up interviews. Hell, he may have gotten fined again.
It was classic and I think I loved it because as a fan, I just always wanted Ralph to stick up for us and not make us out to be lucky to have a team. I wanted him to acknowledge that he was lucky to have us too.
No one is perfect and that includes Ralph Wilson. He may have thought we needed him more than he needed us but we probably felt the same way about him.
Ralph wasn’t a friend of mine. I didn’t know him personally. And I’m not really taken aback by his death because he was 95 after all. We should all be so lucky to live almost a century on Earth. And yet Wilson’s fingerprints have left lasting impressions on every part of my life, some times good and sometimes bad.
Who I am — what Buffalo is, really — is shaped by a man who we simultaneously needed and resented. You can laugh at the thought of Buffalo being known because of its football team, and yes, if I told an outsider that, they‘d probably think we were a bunch of rubes, but that’s the truth and I’m proud of that truth.
Like any personality, and like any man with deep pockets whose endeavors became more a matter of public trust than personal benefit over time, the life of Ralph Wilson was…complicated. And so too is how I feel when I look back on the legacy of that man.
I do think we won’t really have a final chapter until we figure out where the franchise goes from here. Pretty strange for someone’s legacy not to conclude when they have passed on, but that’s how I view Ralph Wilson. While it is complicated between us, there’s no denying there was no complication about my love of the Bills. It was clear and true and always has been.
And for that, I’m grateful, Ralph.
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