As Damar Hamlin Recovers, Buffalo Waits—and Wonders What to Do

It’s become almost cyclical: When their city is in pain, the Bills help them heal. Now, with the team mourning an unthinkable on-field tragedy, Buffalo tries to figure out what to do next.

Hanging in Del Reid’s office is a cartoon from The Buffalo News. Around the outer edges of a rectangular space are swipes of paint in various thickness; curved and connected into an abstract thicket that entraps various colored dots and, on the very outer edges of the fray, a martian character of some kind who seems to be tumbling, end over end, through this continuous loop of chaos.

And then there is white space. Lots of white space. Clarity that brings the eye dead center, where we see the Bills’ logo in full color.

The cartoon, by Adam Zyglis, is called The Bright Spot (Year 2020). It doesn’t take an art major to posit that the martian, struggling to find its footing, is a resident of western New York. The brushstrokes and colored circles are the obstacles we faced, the feelings of confusion and helplessness. The Bills are the one thing that made sense in a pandemic world that we could no longer relate to, at a time of great sadness and anger and tumult. Reid, who coined the term #BillsMafia and is an unofficial spokesperson for the team’s beloved fan base, keeps it there to remind him of a place the team has occupied in his life. All he knows, for the better part of five decades, is that this community has gravitated toward a group of people that seems to love them back—that, for a few hours every Sunday, take on this form of superhumanity and deliver them from all the world’s problems.

Joshua A. Bickel/AP

When a Bills player is alone on Christmas Eve and you invite him to your house, he’ll show up and stay for two hours, just like Isaiah McKenzie did this year. There’s a good chance you’ve played Call of Duty with Josh Allen, the starting quarterback, and may not have even known it. You might have shoveled one of their cars out of the snow. They might have shoveled out yours. And when one of them falls, you overwhelm a fundraising page for his foundation. That’s just the way it is here.

“They’ve been our port in the storm,” Reid says in his office, a trendy warehouse space in downtown Buffalo that houses his T-shirt business. “They are a beautiful distraction for a lot of us.”

What happens when the port itself is toppled? What happens when there is just … storm?

The Bills were in the middle of saving Buffalo yet again. Now, they are trying to figure out a way to save themselves, while coming to grips with the danger they must go through to retain this hero’s mantle. It has been 60 hours since defensive back Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field in Cincinnati. He remains at a hospital there, with sporadic updates coming through family members, team and league statements. Far more questions exist than answers.

All at once the world has had to come to terms with reality penetrating the one place so many go to escape it. The violence of the sport they love, and the ways we all respond when that violence spills over into tragedy.

What happens now when no one is quite sure what happens next?

There are still a few candles lit underneath the digital billboard that bears Hamlin’s name. Here at Highmark Stadium, on a gloomy afternoon, the sun weakly trying to force its way through a blanket of gray clouds over Orchard Park, the thick rain has not yet come down.

A prayer vigil was held here the night before and went well enough that some Bills fans wanted to come back another time. They gathered around a statue that says “Love” in script, outlined in blue-and-white zebra stripes as a nod to the Zubaz pants worn by so many in these parking lots. Jill Kelly, the wife of Buffalo Bills legend Jim, led the service.

Left behind were two bouquets of flowers, one buried into the mulch and another leaned up against a statue of the Bills’ longtime owner, Ralph Wilson. Inside one is a note: “#3, Prayers for Damar Hamlin, his family and the Buffalo Bills,” with a heart drawn at the end.

Most of the candles feature various saints, like the Virgin of Guadalupe and San Judas Tadeo. One smells like pumpkin and clove. One is called Mantra. The whirr of miniature bulldozers scooping snow into red trucks drowns out the nearby traffic. There is a sense that it’s business as usual, even though it is not.

The scene outside of Highmark Stadium :: Joshua Bessex/AP

A pair of news trucks sits idly in a parking lot, covered by pop-up tents, providing countless hours of live coverage. Inside the Pro Shop, a few people browse through mountainous walls of jerseys, hats and LED ornaments. A woman behind the counter mentions to a coworker how nice it is that every NFL team changed its Twitter profile picture to a “Pray for Damar” icon. The Bills themselves are walking through a practice a few hundred yards away, at their indoor facility.

Buffalo is firmly in the prayer phase now. A few miles away, the live updates from the stadium parking lot are broadcast behind the bar at a local hangout called The Place. Everyone knows that their phones would explode if any new information about Damar Hamlin surfaced, and yet they all check every few minutes, anyway.

Rory Allen owns a printing company in town and has been responsible for connecting Buffalo and the Bills through viral signage. He was the guy who put a massive poster of a leaping Josh Allen over Hertel Avenue (temporarily renaming the street). He made Josh Allen–Stefon Diggs campaign signs so realistic and popular that a local politician wondered who was running in the district.

He was watching with his young children Monday night.

“You don’t know how you’re going to react,” he says. “You’re trying to process it. Wait, what? This is the human experience with all of it. This is a weird time to be in Buffalo.”

Just a few weeks ago, Rory Allen was trudging through the streets trying to deliver an inflatable tube to police officers rescuing a woman who’d been trapped in her car, covered in unrelenting snowfall, for more than 30 hours. It took him three hours to drive a few miles the day before, with the world going from color to padded-room white in a matter of seconds. Thirty-seven local residents died in that storm.

He says that Buffalo is the kind of place that converts people. You get there. You wonder where on Earth you’ve been dropped off and what you did to deserve it. Then you don’t want to leave. The city takes you in like an old couch. And, when times are tough, it helps when the Bills pummel someone by 30 points.

“The Bills shine a spotlight on all of it,” he says. “The Bills are good.”

But when Hamlin collapsed, it just added another layer of fear and uncertainty to an area that has seen so much of it lately—another slice of anxiety to feed into the brain’s processing unit, which is already on overload.

Over a plate of chicken wings, Allen wonders what a worthy tribute would be. A show of support that is exclusively and uniquely about Damar Hamlin and nobody else.

He also talks about sending his kids to bed Monday night without a resolution to what they’d just seen. The entire cycle of an on-field injury always culminates with a thumbs-up, letting us know it’s O.K. to return to our escape. This time, the thumbs-up never came.

There will always be candles lit here on the 1200 block of Jefferson Avenue, at least in some way. At the corner of this Tops market is a sign depicting the memorial flames for the lives lost in a racist shooting here in May that killed 10 people, letting bystanders know that the trinkets they leave will be picked up and stowed to survive the harsh winters.

Still, there are popsicle-stick ornaments strewn about and a white Christmas tree held down by bags of birdseed.

This is what comes up along with Hamlin. Along with the snow. This is what makes a hard year seem impenetrable. Rory Allen says these were the kinds of body blows a town may not sustain over a decade.

The Bills were there. They prayed with Buffalo at that moment. People came up and thanked them. They got close enough so the town had something to lean on.

Hamlin was among those there in May :: Seth Harrison/The Journal News/USA Today Sports

After the vigil Tuesday, Reid tweeted about hating the reason why everyone was praying together but loving the way in which it happened. Underneath, fans replied about the many outpourings of love and generosity made by Bills fans over the years. To Andy Dalton’s foundation. To a Kansas City hospital. To Tua Tagovailoa’s charity.

From afar, it isn’t hard to see all of this being somewhat cyclical. The Bills love Buffalo. Buffalo shares that love. Love comes back when they need it the most.

In that way, they have an answer to the question, at least for now. How do they help? Keep that cycle going.

No one knows what will happen this weekend. The Bills may play. They may rest. They may mourn. They may celebrate. Reid just knows that whatever it is, he’ll be doing the same.