COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Lifelong fans get their faith tested by Bills
This is what faith looks like. If you want to put an image to the attribute, here it is: It peers through thick glasses. It favors cardigan sweaters and dress slacks. It has white hair, and it lives in a retirement community. That is where — in this case — faith can be found.
Faith lives, against all odds, in the hearts and minds of Dick and Sally Munschauer. Dick is 84, a retired radiologist with a square jaw, steely eyes and a soft voice.
Sally is 85 and as conversational as a dinner party hostess. The Munschauers, who live at Canterbury Woods retirement home in Amherst, are testaments to aging with grace and style.
They are also among that most beleaguered of sporting breeds: the longtime Buffalo Bills fan. They were there at the start. They are still there, nearly a half-century later, through one of the most disheartening seasons in memory.
They remember walking to games at the Old Rockpile from their Elmwood Village home. It was the era of Jack Kemp, “Cookie” Gilchrist, Billy Shaw, Elbert “Golden Wheels” Dubenion and Tom Sestak. The team won two championships before the AFL’s 1970 merger with the big-brother NFL. But there has been no Super Bowl trophy. “I don’t know,” Dick Munschauer said, “if I will ever see that Super Bowl [title].”
Their faith has not been rewarded. Their hope has gotten little positive reinforcement, particularly in the last decade. Yet, while more fickle fans turn their backs, the Munschauers stand tall in the wind.
That wind Sunday was figuratively at gale force. The Bills lost their fifth game in the last six, a demoralizing 10-3 failure at home against the mediocre 49ers. The early promise of the season has devolved into despair. The 5-1 start of a young team with an emerging quarterback had fans giddy, with visions of playoffs dancing in their heads. It proved to be no more than a cruel tease.
“They won all those games and you think, ‘Ah, this is the year,’ ” Sally Munschauer said. “Discouraged, we are. . . . It’s like chasing a rainbow.”
Rooting for this team can be an exercise in communal self-abuse: The unexorcised demon of Wide Right. Ten seasons since the playoffs, 13 since the last playoff victory. This year’s raised hopes and shattered dreams. Instead of salving a community’s wounded self-esteem, the Bills often deepen it.
Yet the team is one of a small city’s few connections to the big time. In good times — although the memory grows dim — they lift spirits and, by association, make a case for the worthiness of a downtrodden, underappreciated region.
That is partly why fans in this small-market city still fill the stands. That is why Dick Munschauer’s mother, at age 95, ignored her doctor’s orders to stop watching the games because she got too excited (she lived to be 104). That is why winning and losing mean more here than in a multidimensional metropolis.
“You want a winner for Buffalo,” Sally Munschauer said, “to show to the rest of the country, that looks down on us.”
This is where faith enters the picture. This is why such descriptions as “diehard” and “long-suffering” precede the word “fan.” This is why the Munschauers will be in front of the big-screen TV in Canterbury’s entertainment room Sunday, with friends and fellow Bills fanatics Alan McCarthy and Helen Neubert.
When Trent Edwards drops back to pass, when Marshawn Lynch takes the ball into the line, they are not thinking of the Munschauers — or the thousands of others like them. But all of those people are watching the Bills — and hoping. Despite history. Despite the odds. Despite a catalog of disappointments.
“I’ve been hoping all of my life,” Sally Munschauer said. “I am not switching teams now.”
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