Mutt

i grew up a stone's throw away from Buffalo on the Canadian side - it's a great area with great hard working people with big hearts. i'm old enough to remember Buffalo when it was still somewhat of a major city though my memories as a kid in the 70's was that it was beginning to fall apart downtown. my parents would take us 'over the river' to the suburbs for movies and mini golf. Shap's wife grew up in the same place. We moved away when I was 14.

now for my parent's generation, Buffalo was the shit, for nightclubs, live theater, Crystal Beach where my grandpa owned a little hotel right in the shadow of the big wooden roller coaster. I still drink Crystal Beach Loganberry when we can find somewhere selling it. A bunch of my aunts and uncles met at the Crystal Beach dancehall in the 50's, why I have so many American relatives.

I've been a Bills fans forever, OJ was a god. The Sabres are as big a part of Buffalo as any Canadian team is to its city. Ralph Wilson is a senile bastard, playing with the people of Western New York's hearts and emotions - he's Mr Burns. He knows how important the Bills are to the city, it's Buffalo's last remnant of being relevant nationally, the emotional attachment to the Bills for people in WNY is the same as it is for Green Bay and their fans.
Ralph bought the Bills franchise for $60,000 and they are worth today just under 1 billion dollars. He is now 91 or 92 years old and refuses to reassure the people that after he dies the people of Buffalo will have a chance to keep the team in Buffalo. Nobody expects him to just hand over the franchise to the city, what he should do is assure them that if somebody rich or the community can come up with something close to market value they will get the team. But he refuses and cruelly makes comments that are meant to hurt and scare people. The NFL I think will do its best to keep the Bills in Buffalo, they are a heritage franchise like Green Bay BUT as Buffalo continues to die rapidly it really might become unfeasible.

I understand why some people leave the Buffalo's and Cleveland's, they go to college and there aren't job opportunities in the area for them so they move away. I have no idea why but the most popular destination for people who leave Buffalo is North Carolina.

People who just leave because Buffalo isn't warm and hip enough for them, traitors. They are as responsible for the death of Buffalo as the death of the steel industry and the other factors that are killing the cities in that list. It's inevitable that those cities are going to be dead, 50 years from now the Rust Belt will be a giant ghost town. They are already tearing down areas of Detroit and returning it to nature. Pretty creepy, giant burial grounds.

Phoenix, Tampa, San Diego and the rest of the cities where Rust Belt refugees end up - soul-less places.

__________________