The big news arrived last week, and we’re still buzzing about it: The new stadium is a done deal — and the Bills are here to stay for as far as the eye can see.
We have not had this kind of certainty since, well, who can remember? And yet somehow we didn’t pop the champagne.
Shouldn’t this have been cause for more civic celebration? Cue the music! Let’s dance in Niagara Square!
Our reaction has been more muted than that, for several reasons:
• The public cost is $850 million, so we know we’re paying the piper plenty for our ironclad lease.
• The new stadium will go up across the street from the old one, rather than in the city, where it belongs.
• PSL should stand for Paid Sick Leave, or Premier Soccer League, not Personal Seat Licenses.
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Besides, stadium negotiations carried on in slow motion for so long that it felt as if we already knew the news long before it became official.
As it happens, construction on Rich Stadium began 50 years ago this week — and now construction on this richer stadium is all but assured. Still, we are not two-stepping a Buffalo boogaloo. Maybe this is because we felt our first jolt of hallelujah in 2014, when Terry and Kim Pegula bought the Bills.
That, after all, is when many of us concluded that the team was here to stay. Terry Pegula had been a Bills season ticket holder, and we figured that made him one of us. Our civic psyche threw off the existential terror of a Bills-less Buffalo in that moment.
It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. There was still the matter of a new stadium. And now that, too, seems settled. But let’s not forget what it felt like to live for so long under the Sword of Damocles.
This Damocles fellow didn’t live in Buffalo, but he did live in Syracuse — the Greek city of ancient Sicily. According to the parable told by Cicero, Damocles lived in mortal fear of a gleaming sword suspended over his head by a single horsehair.
That’s what it was like for us when it seemed as if the Bills, at any moment, could box up their shoulder pads and move to some bigger market. We knew Ralph Wilson would never leave. But when he was gone, what then? Who here could afford to pay what an NFL team would be worth somewhere else — Los Angeles, say, or Toronto — and keep it in Buffalo?
In ancient Greek theater, a plot device that resolves a seemingly insoluble dilemma is called deus ex machina. (It means “god from a machine” because actors playing gods were lowered to the stage by manual crane.) Aristotle is among the many critics who thought of this as a cheap trick for finding a happy ending out of nowhere.
The Pegulas paid $1.4 billion for the Bills (which, as it happens, is also the cost of the new stadium) only a few years after they had bought the Sabres. Before that, we knew almost nothing about them. They are, in that way, our very own deus ex machina. A billionaire who could pay cash and wanted to keep the Bills in Buffalo seemed to all but descend into Orchard Park from above.
The story of Damocles is more than 2,000 years old, and the metaphor is ever with us. We can think of his sword as the nuclear threat that hangs over us all — as recent weeks have reminded — or even the simple act of living a life that ends in death. These modern interpretations, though, lose an original meaning of the story.
Damocles was a courtier who thought how wonderful it would be if he could be king. Dionysius, ruler of Syracuse, invited him to sit on the throne and supplied him with every luxury. Only then did Damocles see the sword hanging above the throne by the hair of a horse’s tail.
The lesson: Even those with immense wealth and power — like, say, the owners of NFL teams — live under the weight of worry.
The sword of Damocles no longer hangs over Bills Mafia. The new stadium — coming soon to a suburb near you — will beat our sword into, if not a ploughshare, then perhaps a backhoe.
