ARLINGTON, Va. — I was walking out of church Sunday morning when a boy darted in front of me and said these magic words:
“Go Bills.”
This caught my attention for two reasons. First, St. Ann’s is in the Diocese of Arlington, in Northern Virginia, not in the Diocese of Buffalo. And second, I happened to be working on a story about that very phrase: why so many people say it, what it really means, and how it serves as a sort of aloha for Buffalo. (You can read that story here.)
Turns out the boy is Donoghue O’Brien, age 9. He had noticed I was wearing a Bills coat, so he rushed over and pointed to the charging buffalo on the front of his own jacket. We exchanged a fist bump, and I turned to see what family this lad belonged to. I didn’t see his parents at first; he had run ahead to greet me.
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My immediate assumption was that either his father or mother, if not both, was from Buffalo. This turned out to be wrong. Danny O’Brien, his father, was born on a U.S. military base in Japan and roots for the Las Vegas Raiders. His mother, Julia, was born in Dallas and doesn’t root for any NFL team. His brother, Teddy, 7, roots for the Kansas City Chiefs. (That might be a minor act of rebellion for the son of a Raiders fan.)
So why is Donoghue — pronounced DUNN-a-hue — a Bills fan? Well, that's thanks to his maternal grandfather, Alex Douds, who is a Bills fan from birth — theirs, not his. Douds, who turned 78 last week, attended his first Bills games in their inaugural season, in 1960, when he was a student at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute. He still comes home most years (these last two pandemic seasons excepted) to see a game or two at Highmark Stadium. And he was at War Memorial Stadium on the day after Christmas 1964, when the Bills beat the San Diego Chargers for their first American Football League championship.
Now, decades later, Douds teaches his grandson the finer points of Bills history, including the Hit Heard Round the World that he witnessed in ’64.
“Donoghue knows about Mike Stratton and Jack Kemp and Elbert ‘Golden Wheels’ Dubenion,” Douds says. “He knows about Cookie Gilchrist, too. And he knows how to say, ‘Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie!’ ”
Donoghue is named for his great-grandmother — Julia Donoghue of County Kerry, Ireland. His given name is unusual, but then so is his fandom. If those things make him different, he doesn’t mind a bit.
“He is a real sports lover, and this is his first season in fantasy football,” Douds says. “He has Josh Allen on his team.”
Douds grew up on Forest near Grant. His father and mother were born in Ireland and met in Buffalo, where they had five kids. Alex, the youngest, was a starting guard on the St. Joe’s basketball team in 1961, his senior year, when he scored the winning basket in a one-point win against rival Canisius in the Manhattan Cup title game at the Aud.
Douds graduated from the University at Buffalo with a degree in history, then earned a master’s in social work at UB. He met his future wife, Barbara Goris of Black Rock, at a miniature golf course at Grant and Amherst. They married, joined the Peace Corps, and were sent to Malaysia. They returned to Buffalo after two years but didn’t stay long. They have lived since in Dallas; Tucson, Ariz.; Montpelier, Vt.; San Diego; and, for the past 30 or so years, Northern Virginia. But Douds has never forgotten his Buffalo roots.
“Go Bills” was not a go-to phrase during the early years of the franchise, as he recalls. It's just one of those things, he figures, that evolved over the years and is now passed down from one generation to the next.
“When I’m talking to my family in Buffalo, that’s how we say goodbye. To me, especially in-season, it is just the natural way to say goodbye.”
Douds goes on walks for exercise, he says. Sometimes, when Donoghue was younger, they walked together.
“I would teach him how to talk to people we didn’t know when we would meet them along the way,” Douds says. “How to look them in the eye and say hello.”
That’s just what Donoghue did with me walking out of church. He said hello the way his grandfather says goodbye — with the aloha of Buffalo.
Go Bills.
