COVID-19 grounds Bills Mafia, most famous of Bills tailgates

I’m giving lifelong Buffalo Bills fan Ken Johnson some leeway. Pandemics don’t respect the sanctity of a consecutive game streak, but I do. Besides, the guy owns a red Pinto with a toilet in the back seat that serves as a beer cooler while he takes whiskey shots out of a bowling ball.

How are you going to downgrade that sort of ingenuity?

“I had been to 423 straight games, home and away, until now,” said Johnson, whose streaked ended with the season opener against the Jets, a game in Buffalo that did not allow fans. “However, I’m amending my statement.”

He went to the game in Miami the next week where he was allowed in as part of a limited number of fans. “So now I’m saying that I have been to 424 straight games that allowed fans. It’s just a big ol’ asterisk at the back end.”

The coronavirus not only has taken fans from most NFL stadiums, but it also temporarily has silenced all pregame tailgating. This includes perhaps the most renowned — and in some ways most denounced — of all such parties.

Bills Mafia, for now, is grounded. Which is a good thing for the health of those nut jobs hurling themselves onto burning tables.

Buffalo plays the Raiders on Sunday, and you can bet your last plate of Cajun-style blackened wings from Elmo’s there will be more than a handful of Bills fans welcoming their team as it arrives at Allegiant Stadium.

Bills better now

There is no shortage of prominent NFL tailgates. Kansas City and its red sea of friendly sorts. Green Bay and its brats and cheese curds. Houston and that Texas barbecue. Philadelphia and its cheesesteaks. Buffalo and those having sex in the parking lot. But only after wins. So, you know, score one for game day decorum.

Johnson is known by the first name Ron. There was a misprint in a story written about a tailgate party he began in the late 1980s. His weekly gathering isn’t part of the wacky Bills Mafia scene, organized via Twitter by a new generation of fans.

I first met Johnson for a story on the Pinto Ron tailgate in 2017, when the Raiders traveled to Orchard Park, New York, and lost 34-14. The Bills are even better now than three years ago. For it to be a game Sunday, the Raiders also need to be better than the side that lost four fumbles and that game on a rain-slick field.

“I feel lost and sad right now,” said Joanie DeKoker, a Buffalo native who had attended 158 straight Bills games before the pandemic and will travel to Las Vegas for Sunday’s meeting. “I saw the television shots of the home game against the Rams last week and almost started to cry. An empty stadium. They need us. We need them. We’re a family.”

The Bills are 3-0 and considered good enough to make a Super Bowl run.

I’m not sure they need much more than that right now.

DeKoker wasn’t certain where she would watch the game while in town. Johnson has chosen to do so from a Bills fan club party in Northern Virginia. He’s still traveling, just not always to the same location as the team.

That wasn’t the case for the season opener. Johnson watched his beloved team from where he did nearly three decades ago.

“Same routine, only now I’m 63 and then I was 37,” said Johnson, a software developer in Rochester, N.Y. “I went back up in the attic. I never watched games with anyone else at home. I pace too much. Television on top of a dresser. Same as in 1993 … It’s not like this is traumatic or anything. It’s just different. I’ll probably have just as much fun this season as ever.”

But now the team is really good …

“It was pretty good in 1993, also,” Johnson added of the Buffalo side that made a fourth straight Super Bowl.

Pass the shovel

He didn’t unpack tailgate needs this year. Didn’t bother finding the shovel in which he whips up pancakes and omelets. The rake on which he makes grilled cheese sandwiches. The medicine cabinet for baked potatoes.

There is also no need for bottles of ketchup and mustard, which fans douse Johnson with shortly before they all make pilgrimage into Bills Stadium.

“I don’t miss the (dousing) part very much, but I do have a good clean-up crew,” he said. “This will all mean more when we can finally come back. You take things for granted until they’re gone.”

Godspeed, Pinto Ron.

Go grab yourself a Labatt Blue from the latrine in the back seat.

Ed Graney is a Sigma Delta Chi Award winner for sports column writing and can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard on “The Press Box,” ESPN Radio 100.9 FM and 1100 AM, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Follow @edgraney on Twitter.