BUFFALO — The guy across from me claims he is The One.
If I’m being honest, I’m not sure. What he’s claiming is big, and he knows it.
His name is Jordan Grills, and he and his fiancé, Shawna, drove an hour, from Rochester to Buffalo, to meet me in a back room of Bar Bill North. He’s been telling this story to friends and acquaintances for years. Some believe him. Some don’t. But it’s time the truth gets out.
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He pinpoints the date when it happened: Sept. 20, 2015. He shows me a time-stamped video: 11:50 a.m. He knows he’s probably not the first person to ever do it at a Bills game, but he also can’t find any evidence that he’s not.
“I shot the musket ball that started the American Revolution,” he grins.
The waitress walks over. Jordan orders us 20 medium wings and two Blues, plus a beef on weck to split. He tells the waitress it’s my first time in Buffalo. She smiles.
“Welcome,” she says warmly. Then: “You’re not getting any ranch.”
I’m here because of the tables.
That was the pitch to my boss: “What if I went to Buffalo and tried to find the origin story of the table smashing?” Other than a vague Reddit thread, I couldn’t find anything. Our Bills writers didn’t know either. It was as if one day folding tables were safe in Buffalo and the next they were under siege.
Now it is a full-on thing.
A couple years ago, Joey Chestnut went to a Bills game with some Buffalo friends. Drinks were consumed, a table was summoned, and one of Chestnut’s buddies asked if Joey would put him through the table. So Chestnut chugged a LaBatt Blue and obliged.
“It felt right,” he says.
Jason Corey, a longtime Bills fan, owns a bar in the East Village. Four years ago, he showed Bills games at his place every Sunday. But he had to stop after Bills fans brought a table and smashed it on the sidewalk outside his bar.
“It was getting too crazy for my neighbors,” he says. “But I love it.”
Spencer Brown, an offensive lineman from Northern Iowa, smashed a table when the Bills drafted him this year. A man jumped off the front of a bus and smashed a table as part of a gender reveal. An 11-year-old boy smashed a cardboard table to celebrate his cancer-free diagnosis. There are even videos of Bills fans gently lowering newborns through baby-sized tables, a kind of ritualistic induction into Bills fandom.
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As the face of the franchise, Josh Allen knows he’s not supposed to condone the table smashing, because his employer — and a segment of their fans who think it gives Bills Mafia a bad name — are anti-table smashing. But …
“It’s freaking awesome,” Allen told Mark Sanchez on his podcast.
And if the Bills win the Super Bowl? Allen has said he will go through not just one table but “tables, plural.”
Something about the phenomenon feels very Buffalo, which is strange because it could literally happen anywhere. After all, it’s just a table and a person determined to go through it. Maybe it could have become a thing in Chicago or Kansas City or Seattle.
I’m just not sure.
No one knows how it started. Or when. Some say a German immigrant named William Wahr is responsible. Others say a local tavern owner popularized the sandwich at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. Either way, the beef on weck has populated Buffalo menus for more than 100 years.
The ingredients are pretty simple. Thin hand-carved roast beef. Horseradish. Au jus. Served on a kaiser-like roll. And yet for all its local acclaim, the beef on weck is far, far less known nationally than Buffalo’s other culinary creation, the chicken wing. Wings are sold everywhere. Beef on wecks are still pretty much just a western New York thing.
There’s a reason for that. Cheryl Staychock owns Schwabl’s, a restaurant with roots to the 1800s that specializes in beef on weck. She says the key is the kummelweck (or kimmelweck) roll, with caraway seeds and kosher salt on top. The rolls cannot be hard. They must be light and fluffy or else they overpower the beef. They are very delicate, she says, and “very finicky.”
So the weather in Buffalo makes a big difference. If it’s too humid, Cheryl says, the kosher salt melts into the roll and the sandwich is ruined. The rolls also don’t travel well; ship them and they just won’t taste right.
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Cheryl and others swear this is true: You just can’t make a real beef on weck outside of Buffalo.
(Goran Kosanovic / Getty Images)Jordan Grills takes a sip of his beer.
“The watershed moment was Sept. 20, 2015,” he says.
Second game of the season. Bills-Patriots. Jordan and his roommate drove from Rochester to Orchard Park for the game. They tailgated in the KK lot, right behind the KK Food Mart down the street from the stadium. The Bills had upset the Colts in the season opener, and even though Jordan knew the Bills would probably lose to the Pats, he still talked trash.
Then, a little before noon, someone walked up to him and said: “We’ve got a table for you. Want to go through it?” His reputation had preceded him.
Jordan smashed his first table in college at Fredonia, a state school in western New York, back in the fall of 2011. He and his buddies had just moved off campus, their beer pong table broke, so they decided to improvise: “Let’s just move the cups and slam each other through the table.”
Dozens of tables fell over the next few years. Maybe 50, he says. Maybe more. It got to the point where he’d go to parties and people would politely ask him not to smash their table.
Jordan pulls out his phone. There he is on the bed of a pickup truck at the Pats game. He’s wearing Zubaz, sunglasses and a LeSean McCoy jersey. It’s a beautiful blue day. People circle around, their phones recording.
Before him is a clean, white table. Simple, efficient. There is only one problem: Jordan knows it won’t break.
“I felt it,” he says. “I’ve been around a few tables.”
Still, he wants to put on a good show. He swings his arms, nods, takes a deep breath. And then, as someone in the crowd says “the Bills make me wanna…”, he hits a front flip.
The table holds. Jordan bounces off and rolls on the ground as if in pain (“Good acting,” he says). The video goes viral, with what he admits was the “perfect” caption: Just like their team: try so hard but fail every time.
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The Revolution had started.
(Turns out, he wasn’t the only one smashing tables that day. Two Bills fans lifted their buddy in a Pats jersey and put him through a table. But that video wouldn’t emerge until later, after the trend had burned across social media.)
At the Bills’ next home game two weeks later, someone tags Jordan in a video: A Bills fan smashing a table, but this time with a backflip. That same day, Jason Corey, the bar owner in the East Village, notices a couple of guys at the next tailgate over jumping off a truck and smashing a table. He posts the video, and it, too, goes viral.
By the end of that season, there are whole montages dedicated almost solely to Bills fans smashing tables.
The night before the Bills play the Dolphins, I read old Buffalo newspapers in my hotel room. A couple things become apparent: Buffalonians have always been innovative, and they have always known how to have a good time.
Back in 1896, Buffalo introduced the Raines Law, which required a customer to order a meal with an alcoholic beverage. No meal, no booze. On the first Sunday, the Buffalo papers noticed an aimlessness in the city. A man walked into a soda fountain and practically begged the druggist behind the counter for a glass of whiskey. He left empty-handed and disappointed.
So the good people of Buffalo got creative.
The next Sunday, hotel dining rooms were busier than ever. It was a wet, gray Sunday. Perfect drinking weather. Under the letter of the law, as long as a person ordered a meal at a hotel, he or she was considered a guest, and as a guest, could consume vast quantitates of alcohol. “Over the thirsty citizen the sad-faced sandwich has cast its charitable mantel; the shield of the kuemmelweck is round about him,” the Buffalo Enquirer noted. “The thirsty may on a Sunday march to liquid blessedness.”
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And so it was in 1897 when a bunch of Buffalonians picnicked with a spread that sounds like the forefather to many a Sunday tailgate:
Beer.
Hop Juice.
Beer.
Ham sandwich.
Beer.
Beer.
Cigars (to smoke).
Ham sandwich.
Sausage.
Kummelweck.
Cigars (to stuff in pockets).
Beer.
Beer a la schuper.
Whisky.
Cigars.
Chewing Tobacco.
Beer.
Beer.
Beer.
Beer.
Beer.
You get the idea.
There is one longtime Bills fan who doesn’t like Jordan’s table smashing. Dislikes the videos. Dislikes that he does it. Calls it “dangerous,” “unadvised” and “absolutely crazy.”
Her name is Jodi.
“No,” she says. “Was never a fan.”
There are a couple reasons why. “I’m an X-ray tech, so I definitely know the bodily harm that could come from this, so that’s one thing,” Jodi says. “And I’m his mother.”
Jodi is not alone. The Bills have publicly called table smashing “embarrassing,” the rogue actions of a few “knuckleheads.” One popular tailgate lot has a sign that says: NO FUNNELS, DIZZY BATS, TABLE SLAMMING. VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO EJECTION — NO REFUNDS.
I talked to a bunch of Bills fans during my trip. Some loved it. Some hated it, pointing to the people who take it too far, lighting tables on fire or jumping off RVs. Most, however, just accepted it, a small piece of the whole Bills experience.
At lunch, Jordan says he feels bad for the founders of Bills Mafia. They do a lot of charity work, and the table-smashing identity can take away from that. But even they got into the act this year. The Bills Mafia Babes raised $3,000 for charity, and at the season opener, pro wrestler Tommy Dreamer put a fan through a table.
(Tom Szczerbowski / Getty Images)For years Buffalo was an easy target.
The Miami Herald called it a “drab, unpleasant place to visit” and couldn’t fathom “anyone wanting to live there.” The Atlanta Constitution said, “you don’t recommend Buffalo, you sympathize with it.” A San Francisco columnist called the city “the armpit of the east,” but he believed that to be a limiting title. “I’ve seen nothing elsewhere to indicate it has any challenge for national honors.”
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And all of that was before the city’s beloved football team went 18 years without making the playoffs.
The Zubaz and Shout date back to the glory years of Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas, but many of the team’s traditions were born in the muck of another long, lost season.
Bills Mafia began in 2010 with a tweet. Now it is a crucial part of the fan base’s identity. Same with Bills By A Billion. It caught fire as a hashtag a few years ago, and then Bud Light put it on cans.
“We invented ways to stay interested in our team,” Frank Barber says.
Barber likes that about Bills fans. There’s an authenticity to their traditions, even if there’s an element of crazy. About 12 years ago, Barber started to paint his face and shaved head blue, for no other reason than the team was bad, the weather in December was crap, and he had season tickets he intended to use. Over time he added shoulder pads and a creepy mask that gives off serious Hannibal Lecter vibes (His Twitter name, fittingly, is HannaBILL Lecter).
Despite his obvious wrestling motif and alter ego, Barber has never smashed a table. For one, he’s a middle school principal; it’s probably not the message he wants to send to his 970 students. Plus, he’s 49.
Three years ago, however, Barber and his son drove to Green Bay for a Bills game. The trip of a lifetime. Along the side of the road, they noticed tables. White folding tables, with markings on them. They took a picture of one. It had a target drawn on it, with arrows pointing toward the center and words on the side: BILLS FAN’S HERE (sic).
He felt … he’s not exactly sure. It was strange, he says. He wouldn’t personally jump through the table, but he liked it anyway, this idea that people see Bills fans as a little different, a little off, even a little crazy.
“A weird sense of pride,” he says.
The weather before the game is not ideal. It’s cold, misting and the sky is a dull gray. But it’s Halloween, and Bills fans are out early and in force.
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Zach Sheldon is my guide. He bounces from lot to lot, collecting video of Bills fans for Trainwreck Sports. Smoke rises from fires. The smell of grilled meat. The crunching and clatter of empty beer cans on gravel. As we walk around, I see folding tables everywhere. I wonder if they will make it through the day.
At 11 a.m., my first carcass: a flattened, broken table next to a group of guys dressed as pirates (and one parrot). One of the pirates, Brian, tells me what happened: A guy walked up and said he wanted to see someone smash a table. He must have been an out-of-towner. The pirate who owns the table said no. The guy pulled out a $100 bill. So the parrot smashed the table and the group collected the money.
As the game gets closer, there is a vibe in the air. It’s hard to describe, but you can feel it building, like a tide or a summer storm.
I meet “Jim.” It’s clearly not his real name, but he tells me he crushed his first table a few minutes before I arrived. I ask why. “It’s a perfect day to smash a table,” he says with a shrug.
I stumble across Jeff, who smashed a table with the help of an inflatable dolphin. “I had a dream last night,” he explains. “Josh Allen, Stefon Diggs spoke to me. They said, ‘We’re playing the Dolphins tomorrow. We had a tough loss against Tennessee. We need you to break a motherfucking table in half so we can win.’”
Two rows over, I find another table-smashing Jeff, who does not seem the least bit surprised by the coincidence. “Yeah,” he says flatly. “Jeffs like to smash tables.”
But I still haven’t seen a smash with my own eyes. I’m always a step behind, a few seconds too late. My hands are cold. My jacket is thin. Time is running out.
Then it happens. At the exact moment I turn around in the parking lot, I see a man on top of a truck bed. Because of the cars between us, I see only him, up there like the truck is his personal stage. He raises a Bud Light and chugs it. And then, in one effortless, almost gentle motion, he disappears from my view. All I hear is a roar when the table smashes beneath him.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Jayson Jenks / The Athletic; Brett Carlsen, Tom Szczerbowski, David Rosenblum / Getty Images)
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