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Last season the National Football League celebrated the 50th anniversary of the league that was once a fierce rival, the American Football League. The eight original AFL teams were allowed to wear “throwback” uniforms in selected games,honoring the early years of those franchises. Our local team, the Buffalo Bills, had one of the sweetest retro uniforms of any of the old AFL teams – in fact some fans have lobbied to have the “throwbacks” become the team’s regular uniforms. The team has produced a plethora of memorabilia over the years that have become popular with collectors, starting with early game day programs that feature the “Buffalo Bill” cartoon character. One of the team’s early logos featured a player, wearing jersey number 31, running with the ball alongside a herd of buffalo. That jersey number was not worn by any player for many years because of the logo. Of course, any Bills’ fan today worth his or her salt knows that young star safety Jairus Byrd now dons the number. Those annoying vuvuzela horns that dominated the recent World Cup soccer tournament were a huge story, but how many people remember that at one time the Bills sold similar red plastic horns to the fans at old War Memorial Stadium? Or that the horns so annoyed then coach Lou Saban that he had them banned from the stadium after only one game? How many of those horns are still around today? In the Chuck Knox era in the early 1980s, somebody in the Bills’ marketing department came up with the idea of the “Whammy Weenie”. It was some disturbing promotion for a hot dog company, if I remember right, and was green and kind of perverted looking. Fans were encouraged to shake them when the Bills did something good on the field (they had noisemaker-type beads inside). Here’s a link to read more about this infamous promotion: http://www.forgottenbuffalo.com/forgottenbflofeatures/whammyweenie.html

This was just a plain bad idea, and it’s doubtful if many of those “Whammy Weenies” survived, which makes it a great collector’s item. A great memorabilia item from the team’s glory days of the 1990s would be the “Zubaz” pants, a form of sweat pants with a strange, sort of “camouflage” design, in the team’s colors. A few pairs of these can still be spotted around even today, but they are usually as tattered looking as the old number 34 Thurman Thomas jersey that you have hanging in the closet. Yes, you wore it to the comeback game and it’s a good luck charm, so of course, you can’t possibly throw it out, right?