I’ve never lived closer than a good day’s drive to Buffalo, NY.   I lived in northwestern New Jersey from the ages of 11 to 16, that was the closest I ever got.  I mostly grew up in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. 

I’m a Bills fan because my dad is a Bills fan.  He and Mom grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York, so there you go.  But my route to Bills fandom was not that simple and direct.

I was a passionate Chicago Bears fan as a kid, as much as I was a Minnesota Twins fan.  I seem to recall being asked as a kid why I was a Bears fan by some adult in my life.  Struck by my lack of a rational answer to this question and fearing embarrassment, I scrambled for an answer and, as I recall, I said bears are one of my favorite wild animals.  That was a complete load.  I didn’t have a favorite wild animal, I never thought about such a topic.  I loved dinosaurs when I was really little. 

Baseball fandom came easy to me because Dad pitched to me as far back as I can remember.  I am pretty sure we have pictures of him pitching to little me holding a fat red plastic baseball bat, maybe three years-old.  It also came easy because the hometown baseball team made it all the way to World Series victory when I was merely six years-old, 1987.

I never really felt any attachment to the NFL's Minnesota Vikings.  As I recall, football fandom came to me around the age of 7 or 8 courtesy of a Sports Illustrated video tape that Dad owned called “Crunch Course”.  It dramatized and glorified football in a way that drew my innocent, defenseless mind in.  It profiled Howie Long, Lawrence Taylor, Walter Payton, and Larry Csonka. Ahh… Walter Payton.  Is that responsible for my Bears fandom?  Probably a little, but, I’m not so sure. 

I seem to remember a short period of searching for a favorite team after that video established football’s appeal to me.  I don’t specifically remember the other teams I courted.  I don’t remember how I started with the Bears or why they stuck, but they did.  They really did, I really came to care about the Chicago Bears. 

When I was young, every chance to watch a Bears game on TV was a thrill for me.  My dad had a friend in Chicago, when the family went for a visit when I was about 9 years-old, I was treated to a Bears/Packers game at Soldier Field.  What I remember of the game was that it was high-scoring, the Bears won, at one point a chorus of “Bull Shit!” went up in the crowd, and my dad complained to someone sitting in front of us who decided to light up a cigar.  The person apologized and offered me his cigar-holder as a token of apology.  I remember rolling my ticket-stub up in it.

I was also treated to a Bears/Vikings Monday Night Football game at the dome once.  To my delight, the Bears won that one, too. 

I remember having a fascination with the city of Chicago when I was little.  I wanted to grow up and live there.  Again, I am not fully sure why, and I am also not sure which came first:  the Chicago fascination or the Bears fandom (probably the Bears fandom).  I have little doubt that one spawned the other. 

Oddly, I had to leave Minnesota to develop any connection with the Vikings.  We moved to New Jersey in 1992, in time for me to start 6th grade there.  In my new school, one of the cool kids in my class was a Vikings fan.  He said he really liked (former Vikings wide-receiver) Anthony Carter.  I know I continued to root for the Bears, but I wanted to make friends, and allowed the cool kid to develop kinship with me via his Vikings fandom and my Minnesota roots.  He had, by the way, no Minnesota connections before me that I was ever aware of, but still had developed true Vikings’ fandom.

So there was me, mostly Minnesota-bred with family roots in New York’s Finger Lakes region, a true Chicago Bears fan, attempting to befriend a kid born and bred in northwestern New Jersey, a proud Vikings fan.  You explain it to me.

(to be continued)