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October 20, 2008
Yesterday
So Dom and I were at our seats basking like blue & red lizards in the sun, lapping up beer, surveying the 72,000 assembled before us, watching the opening fireworks explode behind the scoreboard. 62 degrees, all sun, no wind, no clouds, 1:04 PM. We watched the Bills run out of the tunnel, jump around, and get ready to kick off to the Chargers. Fueled by Labatt Blue and Chips Ahoy, I was in a sunshiney, feel-good mood. I had spent the morning throwing the football and watching the frost disappear as the sun got high in the sky. It was Ralph Wilson's 90th birthday, and one old AFL champion (Bills, 64-65) was about to play another (SD, 63).
Inspired, Dom gets loud: "TURN ON THE JUICE!!!" I started laughing, like - "DOM! They are the CHARGERS... we want to turn off the juice! We want a BLACKOUT, homie!"
As I sat there yapping excitedly, what I didn't know was that the power to Ralph Wilson Stadium had, in fact, burned out a half-hour earlier. That's because at 12:30 EST, as I was stuck in line getting into the stadium, three Mylar hot-air baloons became tangled in the main power lines feeding the stadium and managed to short the whole fucker out. Apparently the players got dressed in a dark locker room, lit only by emergency lighting, and the scoreboard was black and quiet until five minutes before me and Dom got inside.
And even though they got the power back on before the game, it didn't hold. Four minutes or so into the first quarter, everything cut off. It actually took a couple minutes to figure out what had happened - mostly because we were sitting there in the bright autumn sun, but also because we had drank a lot of beer that morning. After a few minutes, we realized that this wasn't a TV timeout and nobody had got hurt. We weren't alone - it slowly dawned on 72,000 people that the power was out. All of a sudden we found ourselves in a mass psychology experiment: What happens when you have a stadium full of people, but no way to make a public announcement?
The beatific calm that ensued made me proud to be a Buffalo Bills fan. For the most part, everybody kept real cool: the wave was started, people chatted with their rowmates, etc. The general attitude seemed to be a kind of collective yearning for the lights to go back ON so the game could continue as planned - like the way you feel in any blackout ("Fuck, I can't listen to music...and the fridge!"), except times 72,000.
Scoreboard in the middle of the blackout. That's me in the yellow circle.
I went inside the stadium hallway in search of beer and was astounded by the thick darkness as you walked in from the seats. Oh, and believe me - the men's bathroom was a trip. Lines of dudes holding cellphones and lighters, illuminating the way to the pissing trough.
After about fifteen-twenty minutes, the officials got the go-ahead from the league HQ in Manhattan that they were free to run the game as they saw fit. So the Bills and Chargers plowed ahead into the first quarter without a scoreboard, without game clocks, without the PA, without cameras or replays. The refs kept time on stopwatches, counting off the last fifteen seconds of the play clock with their hands. Likewise, coaches used hand signals to get their plays in to the field. Fans told each other the down and distance.
Sans power, CBS lost their broadcast and untold thousands of ad dollars, but John Murphy, the play by play voice for the Bills, called in to the station via cell phone and called the game that way. (You can hear a snippet of it here.) I've read reports from Bills fans talking about how alternately frustrating and hilarious it was to be watching the game on TV in packed bars across the country when the power cut out, crowds gathered around somebody giving a play-by-play via their friend at the stadium.
Funny to realize later that no video record exists of nearly the whole first quarter and a big chunk of the second. If you weren't there, you didn't see it go down and you gotta take our word for it. When the Bills scored a couple field goals during the power outage, every section got their own version of the Shout song going, resulting in a gloriously cacophonous round. It was fun - you shoulda heard the crowd go nuts when they got the video going again. Then, when the power cut back out with two minutes left in the first half, the entire staidum said FUCK at the same time. Plenty of jokes about Ralph not paying the bill and overloaded surge protectors and Niagara Mohawk (WNY power company). When the power finally came back online for good at the end of halftime, you could hear the Windows start-up chime boom out over the stadium as the scoreboard operating system booted up.
Of course, the fact that the Bills won it in the end made a bizarre day sweet to remember. I marveled at the experience all day today, sunburnt and hoarse. Go Bills!
UPDATE TUESDAY MORNING: The Buffalo News has an interesting article in this morning's paper dicussing the implications of Sunday's blackout. For one thing, the Erie County Sheriff says the team should consider the blackout a wake-up call, pointing out that if this had happened during, say, the Monday nighter, the lack of emergency concourse and bathroom lighting would have been a goddamn disaster. There's also quotes from unhappy fans complaining (justifiably) about the piss-soaked men's rooms and (unjustifiably) about the fact that beer sales continued during the blackout. Also, law enforcement says arrests were down for this game... I knew it felt a little more relaxed than usual. Anyways, interesting stuff.
Oh yeah, P also saw the Chargers at the Buffalo airport on the way out of town after the game:
Last night I watched the entire chargers team get hammered at the Buffalo airport. It was strange. They all look and act like big dum college meatheads. They didn't seem upset at all either, they were smiling and taking shots and watching the red sox game. Need to get Iphone for those moments.
Posted by caps at October 20, 2008 05:27 PM