John Riordan: A Buffalo God still loved by the fanbase

Fri, 16 Dec, 2022 - 06:54

Jim Kelly really needs the Buffalo Bills to beat their arch rivals, the Miami Dolphins, Saturday night. There are many reasons but let’s start with the annual bet he has with his former foe and fellow NFL Hall of Famer, Dan Marino.

At their pomp, the iconic pair battled routinely, not just in the AFC East but also in the playoffs and even in Kelly’s third of four AFC Championship successes. For almost two decades, Kelly and Marino have added a friendly wager to the retiree trash talk: if the Dolphins sweep the series of any given season, Kelly owes Marino a steak dinner. If the opposite happens, it’s the former Miami quarterback who is compelled to buy a meal of Florida Stone Crabs.

“He keeps telling people that I’ll buy him chicken wings which, number one, I never said chicken wings! And number two, the Dolphins haven't swept since the third grade picnic so you better keep your mouth shut,” Kelly roars down the phone in his Western Pennsylvania drawl when we spoke on Wednesday.

“He's one of my best friends. So I'm looking forward to seeing him this weekend.”

Both of these legends enjoy ambassadorial roles for their respective teams, still beloved by their fanbases. Kelly jokes that he’ll have to visit Marino in the warmth of his suite at Buffalo’s notoriously windswept Highmark Stadium where the perennial advantage the Bills hold over the Floridians is the bitter Western New York State winter.

The Dolphins took the opening salvo in late September on a starkly contrasting day of extreme heat during which the Bills suffered the away team’s usual fate of occupying a sideline exposed to direct sunlight. All of a sudden, the AFC East is competitive and each of the four teams is still in with a shout for a postseason adventure. And all of a sudden, the Bills Dolphins rivalry has deep meaning across the NFL for the first time since the Kelly Marino showdowns.

Outside of Buffalo, Jim Kelly is most well known for losing four Super Bowls in a row. In spite of its tragic nature, it is probably the most admired losing streak in the history of US sports. Reaching even one Super Bowl is quite obviously an incredible achievement.

In and around Buffalo, Kelly, retains god-like style status to this day. The Bills were a struggling nonentity before he arrived in 1986. The city itself was reaching its Rust Belt nadir. Such was the unattractiveness of the proposition, Kelly refused to play there after being drafted against his wishes. He instead opted for the short lived USFL, which tried and failed to usurp the NFL. Its demise forced his hand and team owner Ralph Wilson invested in key positions and convinced Kelly that they were ready to provide him with a suitable platform, befitting of his talents.

Throughout the late 80s, they gathered enough steam to make a postseason push and the turn of the new decade brought four AFC championships in a row (effectively the semi-final on the way to the big day). The Super Bowl which rounded out the 1990 season ended with Bills kicker Scott Norwood's last-second missed field goal that went wide and right. Kelly wouldn’t come as close again in the subsequent losses to Washington a year later and the Dallas Cowboys at the start of 1993 and 1994.

His career was absolutely ravaged with all manner of injuries. Even as a student athlete, he was forced to aggressively rehab a shoulder injury in his throwing arm which has been deemed serious enough to end his career before it started. The third Super Bowl loss included a torn ACL for good measure. “Why do we deserve to lose the way we did today?” he asked reporters afterwards.

Of course, the concussions he shipped overshadow his retirement most seriously, not helped by a couple of battles with cancer. The earliest forms of astroturf were simply thin layers of artificial grass on top of concrete. When the big men opposing him managed to breach his protective line, they didn’t just take the opportunity to thwart his dart-like passes and swashbuckling runs, they also sought to drill his head into the hard ground.

He tells me almost reverentially about New York Jets nose tackle Joe Klecko who gamed the system by charging offside when Kelly’s offence had but one yard to score a touchdown, knowing full well that the harshest penalty he could expect was half the distance to the line. The upside was drilling and dazing the quarterback who wasn’t ready for the illegal hit.

"He caught me really good and all he got was a half yard penalty."

And yet, his sympathies these days are with the Klecko successors for whom rule changes aimed at protecting quarterbacks have rendered the work of defences much more difficult.

“Sometimes they go way way overboard nowadays,” he says. “I would have gotten up and started laughing at the officials if I got some of the decisions they get today. Don't get me wrong. I agree they need to protect the quarterback, but not to a point where it's embarrassing. A lot of times it's a bunch of bullshit calls. And that's coming from a quarterback.”

A few hours after we spoke, I watched the concussion that ended his career in 1996. He has been forced to rewatch it over 20 times over the years which is his only way of knowing it happened, The Bills lost to the Jacksonville Jaguars after he was carted off, clueless as to where he was after one tackle sent him crashing helplessly into another.

Today’s rules would have allowed him an extra four or five years of playing, he believes.

“I loved football. I grew up in a family of six boys. And that's all we did. We had fun. We played football. I loved it. But I was ready to go when I did.”

Proud of his Irish roots, Kelly finally got to visit his grandparents’ home town of Newry in June during a golfing trip which was a winning $100,000 auction item benefiting the foundation he and his wife Jill began 25 years ago after the tragic loss of their son, Hunter.

Hunter was born on Kelly's 37th birthday but soon mysterious symptoms emerged. He was diagnosed with globoid-cell leukodystrophy (Krabbe disease) shortly after his birth and died at the age of eight without ever enjoying anything resembling a good quality of life.

The foundation helps with awareness and diagnosis and will be a beneficiary of a golf fundraiser at Adare Manor on May 23 and 24 next year which is being led by his Waterville-born friend Dennis O’Carroll whose DOC’S Golf Tours specialises in bringing American golf lovers to the courses back home.

Fairways Fore Hope will send vital funds to Hunter’s Hope, Cork’s Rainbow Club which specialises in autism and also a new foundation set up in memory of Dillon Quirke, the young Tipperary hurler who passed away tragically while playing for his club Clonoulty Rossmore in Semple Stadium in August.

There are plenty more icons to accompany Kelly for the event, known on one side or the other of the Atlantic. Liam Brady, Peter Schmeichel, Paul Merson, Robbie Earle and Niall Quinn who is also part of the organising committee. And even Chris McDonald who starred as Shooter McGavin in the 1996 golfing comedy Happy Gilmore.

Kelly’s retirement has even been beset by the cancer treatment ten years ago which affected his jaw and now slightly affects his speech, only slightly curtailing him and the career anecdotes that trip so easily off his tongue.

There is finally a worthy successor in Josh Allen, one of the greatest quarterbacks of the modern era which is stacked with talented players benefitting from those rules which Kelly never got to enjoy.

“The only thing I heard before Josh Allen was, 'man, we need to get a quarterback and we haven't had one since you played in the 90s'. And I'm like, boy, I'm getting tired of hearing that.

“We've got a guy right now that not only is a great player on the field, but he's a great person that does stuff for Children's Hospital here which I know firsthand because of my son. So it's good to have somebody that's good on the field and off the field too.

“I mean, he's one of those guys who will have a beer with you and shoot the shit. He's just a good kid from a small town and just enjoys playing - maybe a little bit too much when he runs.” Does he give him any advice from his playing days?

"Quit running so much," he laughs, “we don’t need him going out like I did.”

fairwaysforehope.com