Falls Bills backers hold tight to key piece from famous goalpost game

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Sunday’s final regular season game at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park has many Buffalo Bills fans reminiscing about the best of times — and occasionally the worst of times — they’ve experienced while visiting the team’s home stadium over the past 52 years.

One of the most memorable games for fans old enough to remember happened on Sept. 7, 1980, when the Bills — after years of trying — finally took down the rival Miami Dolphins at what was then known as Rich Stadium.

The game lives on in Bills lore, in part because of what it meant for the franchise.

The Bills emerged from the decade of the 1970s and finally beat the Dolphins 17-7, snapping a decade-long, 20-game losing streak against the Fins.

After the game, jubilant Bills fans stormed the field.

Some of those fans, including a contingent from Niagara Falls, walked out of the stadium that day with a unique piece of history — pieces of the goal posts that were torn down in celebration, not of a division or conference title or even a Super Bowl but, rather a 1-0 start to the season.

After the game, the Bills’ overjoyed owner Ralph Wilson, was so happy about the outcome that he agreed to pick up the tab for the fans who forcibly removed the key pieces of stadium equipment.

“It’s the biggest win the club’s ever had,” Wilson said. “Bigger than the AFL Championships. I’ll be happy to buy new goal posts.”

So where did those goal posts end up?

One piece remains in good hands thanks to a group of diehard fans from the Falls.

City police officer Paul Kudela has a section, roughly 15 feet long, of one of the goal posts in a safe storage space in the city.

With Sunday’s game against the New York Jets, the final home Bills game at Highmark before the team moves across the street to its new stadium next year, Kudela has done a lot of thinking about his family’s love of all things Buffalo football and the special goalpost piece they’ve now had in their possession for 45 years.

He described the team’s pending departure from Highmark Stadium as “bittersweet.”

“I know they need the new stadium, but that old stadium has a lot of good memories,” Kudela said.

Kudela’s late father, Rich, and his late uncle, Chris — who were both Niagara Falls firefighters — were sitting with a group of friends in the upper section of Rich Stadium in September 1980 when the Bills finally beat Miami to end their 10-year Dolphins losing streak.

Former Falls resident and a close friend of the Kudelas, Frank Immordino, has fond memories of the aftermath of that game. He was part of a contingent of about 20 fans, including Rich and Chris Kudela, who were part of a larger group collectively known as The World Wide Bills Backers and Social Club.

Immordino and company watched from above as the goal posts came down. For whatever reason, when the game was over, fans on the field passed one long piece over the stadium wall, prompting fans in the lower bowl to keep passing it up from one row to the next.

Eventually, the section found its way to the upper deck and into the hands of Immordino and his crew of fans from the Falls.

“When the Bills finally won, the goal post came down and somehow it came to the upper level where we were,” he recalled. “Somehow we got it and we hung on to it.”

“It just came up to us,” he added. “I can’t believe it came up to the second level. It was coming right towards us and everyone said, ‘Grab on.’ So we grabbed on and just walked it out of the stadium. I’m surprised we got it.”

In September 2011, after the Bills ended a similar misery-inducing 15-game losing streak to the New England Patriots, Chris Kudela did an interview with the newspaper where he recalled the day fans got swept up in the mayhem of the 1980 game against Miami.

Chris, who passed away in 2014, also remembered, as Immordino did, how later that night they paraded around the Falls, bar-hopping while celebrating the Bills’ victory with their piece of the goalpost in tow.

“The night we brought it back, we took it to every bar on Niagara Street,” Chris Kudela recalled. “Every bar we hit, we’d march in with this goal post and the place would go crazy. Needless to say, we had a long night.”

For several years, the goal post was a fixture inside the old Dugout bar on Niagara Street. It was removed after the bar closed and was later split into two sections, with the bar’s owner taking one piece and Kudela’s bunch keeping the other. The half currently in the Kudela family’s possession is signed by many of the fans who had a hand in “acquiring” it.

“It’s just become our symbol,” Chris Kudela said in his 2011 interview. “It’s become our group symbol now.”

The section of upright has made many public appearances, often at local bars or during pre-game outings at the stadium, over the years. The unique piece was driven to the stadium strapped to the ladder rack on top of the truck Paul Kudela’s dad drove as part of his garage door installation business.

Paul Kudela said many more names have been added to the signatures over the years, mostly from fans who were able to sign it while getting a up-close look when the unique piece was brought out of storage for pre-game appearances.

“It is really cool that it has all of the autographs on it for all the people who have attended the games over the years,” Paul said.

Paul Kudela admits the goal post is not as active as it was in earlier years, a situation he said has had to do with some members of the original Bills backers group, including his father and his uncle, passing away. Others, he noted, have moved away, making it more difficult and costly for them to attend games in person.

Immordino and fellow members of the World Wide Bills Backers and Social Club have seen a lot of games in Orchard Park over the decades and have attended some big postseason games, including Super Bowl losses at Tampa Stadium in Tampa Bay and at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. At one time, he said, the backers bunch, thanks to arrangements made by Falls native Roy LaGreca Jr., had more than 75 members who were season ticket holders.

Immordino said many of the original Bills backers are now like him, in their 70s and living outside New York state. Now a Florida resident, he noted that many of the original club members still travel from Michigan, California and other parts of the country to make sure they see at least one game at the stadium in Orchard Park each year.

They hold out hope, as do all Bills fans, that this year could finally be the year the Bills win it all.

“Our numbers are thinning, but the core people are still with us,” he said.

Neither the Kudelas nor any of the Bills Backers club members have ever been formally contacted by the Bills organization about the possibility of putting the piece on display at the new stadium or another location with ties to the team.

While he’s not looking to part with it, Paul said he would be open to the idea, provided an arrangement could be made that he thought his father, his uncle and their fellow Bills backers could accept.

Immordino agreed.

“In a perfect world, to me, all of the guys in that original crew would get a piece of that original goalpost,” Paul said.

For Paul, the piece will always be a reminder of all the good times his dad, his uncle, members of their family and their friends have had while following the Buffalo Bills through a lot of ups and downs for what’s been decades now.

“Pretty much every Bills game, I think about my dad,” Paul said. “I’d love to see my dad’s reaction to Josh Allen and his success. My dad lived through Jim Kelly and the four Super Bowls. I’d love to see his reaction to this current Bills team and what he would think about them.”

There’s another Kudela already on the road to joining Bills Mafia and, maybe someday, inheriting the job of caretaker of one of the most memorable pieces of Buffalo football memorabilia of all time.

Paul’s 8-year-old son, Ryan, and a group of his friends attended their first in-person Bills game at Highmark Stadium earlier this season.

Paul said he made sure he did what his dad did when he attended his first game by finding the rowdiest group of professional Bills game tailgaters he could, so his son and his friends could get their first real taste of a true Buffalo football experience. He said the best part for him was watching his son engage in a time-honored Bills game tradition — a game of catch in the stadium parking lot.

“We’d find older guys and they’d toss us the football when we would go to games and now my son was there with his buddies and these college kids were passing the ball to them and it was great. Bills football is just like genetic around here. It brought back great memories,” he said.

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