How ‘30 for 30: Four Falls of Buffalo’ Made Me Love My Loser Bills

Okay, right off the bat I’m going to cop to something: that title is misleading. I have never not loved the Buffalo Bills. I was eight years old when I first remember following the Bills, watching road games on my couch next to my dad. For the home games, Dad worked at what was then called Rich Stadium as an usher, though at least once a year he’d sneak my brother and me in and let us watch with him from his perch in the upper deck, where we’d combat the freezing of our little fingertips with hot chocolate and hot dogs and cheered on the best sports team we’d ever see in person. This was 1988, a really good time to start being a Bills fan, as they were just emerging from a decade of disaster and were suddenly one of the best teams in football. They famously made it to the Super Bowl four years in a row, from 1990-1993, a feat that has never been accomplished by any other team in football. The Bills early ’90s success is somewhat akin to the kind of rags-to-riches stories that have recently been enjoyed by baseball’s Kansas City Royals and basketball’s Golden State Warriors, with the major exception being … well, we’ll get to that.

I’ve wondered over the years, as the Bills have slid back not just away from the realm of the elite teams but to experiencing the longest playoff drought of any team in major American professional sports (the jokers at the Washington Post are even blaming them for the rise of Trump), why I haven’t been able to connect with any other sports team the way I did with those Bills. Was it a perfect storm of their success combined with my impressionable age, with an “it’s never as magical as your first time” nostalgia glaze? While I think that’s all true, watching 30 for 30‘s excellent documentary Four Falls of Buffalo — which is now available to stream on Netflix — was a reminder for me that there were good reasons why that team was so easy to love.

There were some real characters in that group. Four Falls of Buffalo features interviews will a whole spectrum of interested parties, but the filmmakers focus in on a few; quarterback Jim Kelly, running back Thurman Thomas, defensive end Bruce Smith, and head coach Marv Levy. Thomas and Smith are seen watching footage from the four Super Bowls on TV, re-living their own nostalgia and occasionally cracking jokes. Two friends, bonded for life, re-living the agony of four Super Bowls reached and four Super Bowls lost. Levy’s scenes are filmed at the Buffalo public library, fitting since his coaching style was famously peppered with literary quotes and allusions; he was the college-professor grandpa who somehow ended up coaching football. Jim Kelly’s story is the stuff of countless sports movies. The hotshot quarterback who went to school in Miami, ditched the Bills at first for Donald Trump’s upstart United States Football League, came back to become a local hero, then endured the illness and death of his son, Hunter, and in recent years battled mouth cancer (for which he is currently in remission).

The main thrust of the documentary is this central question: the Bills went to four Super Bowls in a row, they lost all four Super Bowls in a row, and so history paints them as losers. Not only losers, but the avatars of loser-dom. The 1990-1993 Bills were dominant, crushing opponents, staging improbable comebacks, entertaining fans with a high-octane brand of no-huddle football, and they lost the big one four times. How do the players from those teams grapple with such a distinction? Does the perspective of history allow us to recognize just how good those teams were, despite falling short?

For me, someone who lived through those years, who experienced a fan’s heartbreak and a hometown booster’s resentment of the scorn heaped upon those teams (I’ll still never forgive the Daily News‘ Mike Lupica for being such an unrelenting dick about it), what struck me most about Four Falls of Buffalo were the parts about Scott Norwood. Norwood was the Bills kicker on the first two Super Bowl teams, and it was his leg that kicked the 47-yard potential game-winning field goal wide right in Super Bowl XXV, in what would ultimately be the Bills’ closest shot at winning the big one. That kick is remembered as one of the most heartbreaking plays in the history of sports, and just one look at Norwood’s face afterwards communicates a vast chasm of regret. The documentary shows his teammates rally around Norwood, as teammates will do (the good ones anyway). But the big moment came the next day, when the Bills were greeted home by a fan rally in downtown Buffalo. As a fifth-grader at the time, I can tell you with stone-cold certainty that the city of Buffalo had pre-emptively cancelled school that Monday, in anticipation of a rally (so if you’re looking to blame anyone for putting the jinx on, blame the school board), and win or lose, that rally happened. Not only were the Super Bowl losers cheered by their hometown fans in massive numbers, but the supposed goat of the team, Scott Norwood, was specifically cajoled out for a curtain call. All less than 24 hours after the fans’ hearts had been ripped from their chests.

Looking at those scenes now, I felt a great deal of retroactive pride in my city. And I also thought of the Boston Red Sox. That was another team with a storied history of losing, who had their own goat in Bill Buckner, beneath whose glove the 1986 World Series slipped under. Buckner was lamented and reviled in New England after his blunder, his name a pained cry of anguish for Sox fans. He received an ovation when he returned to Fenway Park in 1990, but he would go on to be harassed and derided in Boston for years. It was only after the Sox finally won the World Series in 2004 that Red Sox fans were finally able to let it go and “forgive” their scapegoat. Buffalo didn’t make Scott Norwood wait. They didn’t make him crawl. They didn’t make him beg. The very next day, they cheered for him and chanted his name.

There’s a scene in an episode of The West Wing (one of the few things in life I’ve enjoyed as much as those early ’90s Bills teams), where President Bartlet and Toby Zeigler are discussing a scene from the film The Lion in Winter. “As if it matters how a man falls down,” Toby paraphrases, before Jed answers, “When the fall is all there is, it matters a great deal.” Whether or not the fall of those four Super Bowl losses is all those players (and fans) have of those years, the Norwood rally is as powerful a statement as I’ve seen about why the fall matters.

[You can stream 30 for 30: Four Falls of Buffalo on Netflix.]