Eight Hours in a Buffalo
Wild Wings in Dallas
Dallas, Texas
September 5, 2024
Distance Traveled: 2,478 round-trip miles for Mike;
1,872 round-trip miles for Joe.
Ask an American to name the most patriotic, stars-and-stripes, bald-eagle, We-the-People, red-white-and-blue, In-God-We-Trust, star-spangled-banner, land-of-the-free-home-of-the-brave, from-sea-to-shining-sea place in this whole gol'-danged United States of America. They might wax on about the stateliness of the Statue of Liberty. The majesty of the Grand Canyon. The history of the Liberty Bell. The deep sense of connection that comes with walking the Freedom Trail. They'd all be wrong.
The most American place in all the land is the Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas, Texas.
Now, you may ask the question that has stumped historians for centuries: Which Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas? There are five of them if you include the one inside the airport, which obviously you do. Then there are another six in Fort Worth, plus one in Irving, and one in Arlington, and one in Richardson, and one in Garland, and also one in Grapevine. There are, in all, 135 Buffalo Wild Wings in Texas, more than in any other state, more even than in Ohio, where the whole thing started when two guys drove around after an ice-skating competition but to their horror couldn't find a single restaurant that served wings.
Which takes us back to the essential question: Which of Dallas's Buffalo Wild Wings is the most patriotic, the most quintessentially American?
The answer: Any of them. All of them. They are all the most patriotic and the most quintessentially American.
We are sitting in a booth at any and all of them right now. This is the Buffalo Wild Wings that Google Maps assured us was closest to our hotel (roughly 1.2 miles closer than the next closest one). It's an hour before kickoff of the 2024 NFL football season. We are surrounded by thirty-five televisions, a couple of hundred beers, a thousand chicken wings (covered in one of twenty-six "signature sauces and dry rubs"), and ten million calories. The expansive BWW menu features brisket, tacos, brisket tacos, beer, batter, beer-battered onion rings, pickles, fries, fried pickles, nachos, hot chicken, Southern chicken, classic chicken, and, if you scour the menu intensely enough, two non-fried items that actually grow out of the ground -the celery and carrot sticks that come with the wings (upon request).
When we order the celery and carrots as our main entrée the waiter seems unsure if he's allowed to do that. He will have to ask a manager.
People apparently do not voluntarily order carrots at BWW.
To our left, a father sits with his two young sons. All three of them wear Chicago Bears jerseys and the resigned facial expressions of people who know that this Sunday (like most Sundays) probably won't go great. At the edge of the bar, a fan in a Bengals Joe Burrow jersey gnaws on a wing with a thick sauce.
Mike
I think it's Nashville Hot Sauce.
Joe
No way. It's Jammin' Jalapeño.
Either way, Fake Joe Burrow seems unfazed by the sauce's hotness or copiousness. He is eating eagerly and quickly and (dare we say) nervously? The game is starting soon. The season is starting soon.
There are other jerseys in the place, lots of them, and they match the jerseys we see on the screens. We might be the only two people in the place not wearing jerseys. A young couple sports New Orleans Saints jerseys; a woman sits alone at the bar in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey; two guys wear Houston Texans jerseys. The Dallas Cowboys will not play for another three and a half hours, but already there are a number of Cowboys fans in here. Funny, though, the jersey that dominates the landscape isn't a Texas team. We may be 1,373 miles away from the center of Buffalo, New York-and by "center of Buffalo," we mean the Anchor Bar, where the buffalo wing was invented-but there are, by far, more Buffalo Bills jerseys here than any other.
Maybe all Buffalo Wild Wings patrons have a special connection to the motherland.
Mike
One by one, the thirty-five televisions flash to that camera angle of the kicker slowly walking back behind the tee and raising his hand. The players on the coverage teams stop jumping in the air and shifting their weight and settle into ready position. The Wild Wingers around us wipe their hands on napkins, lean forward, clap and whoop. Because finally, after months of training camps and predraft analysis and draft analysis and post-draft analysis, and talking heads reporting on how the rookies look in minicamp, and meaningless exhibition games that the NFL insists we call "preseason games" because that lets them charge full ticket prices for these meaningless exhibition games, the boring part is over.
Everyone in this restaurant and the America that surrounds us feels, down deep, that their team might win the Super Bowl this year. Or they might go 2-15-but it's actually fine because then they'll get a high draft pick and choose the quarterback who will turn the franchise around! We might be about to watch a dramatic last-second victory, or we might be about to watch our team's best receiver tear an ACL, or both. Everyone in this restaurant and the America that surrounds us overflows with hope and fear and excitement and dread.
Our worldwide journey into the heart of fanhood begins.
Joe
Mike and I are husbands and fathers and writers and all that stuff, sure, but really, more generally and more specifically, we are fans. That's what defines us.
We are the sorts of fans who wear the same clothes when our team is on a winning streak and will stay frozen in the same position on the couch when our team is in the midst of a furious comeback-not because we think we can make a difference (that's ridiculous) but because we know we can make a difference.
We are the sorts of fans who can tell you at any given time which baseball player whose last name begins with Q has hit the most home runs and the average weight of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins offensive line and who was attempting to guard Michael Jordan when he hit that famous last-second shot against Cleveland in the playoffs.
We are the sorts of fans who will talk endlessly-and I do mean endlessly-about how much we'd like to hug Mookie Betts because he's awesome and we love the way he plays baseball and we're sure he'd be the best hugger.
In other words: We're lunatics.
Specifically: Mike is a Boston sports lunatic, which means that no matter how many championships his teams win-and Boston teams have won twelve thousand championships in the last twenty-five years -Mike will never stop believing that the worst is about to happen. Even as a never-ending duck boat parade ambles down Boylston Street, he feels entirely certain that tomorrow the ball will go through Bill Buckner's legs, the Patriots will get stomped by the Bears, and Larry Bird will throw out his back paving his driveway, causing the Celtics to go fallow for decades. Mike lives in a permanent state of terror.
Mike
Joe has been a Cleveland sports fan all his life, which means, in essence, that he has never been happy. He was born in Cleveland on a cold winter day one week before Super Bowl I, and though LIX Super Bowls have been played in Joe's life, there is no Roman numeral for how many his Cleveland Browns have played in. Joe's baseball team has one more name change in his lifetime-from the inappropriate "Indians" to the still weird-seeming "Guardians"-than it has World Series titles. Joe, too, lives in a permanent state of terror.
Joe
We believe there are billions of terror-filled fans around the world who are just like us. They may be cricket fans or team handball fans or hurling fans, but deep down, where it matters, they are just like us. Hopeful. Scared. And a little bit bonkers.
Mike
I came up with the idea to go around the world and find those fans, to find that connection, to try to get to the heart of the joy and madness that is fandom. I asked Joe to write the book with me, because going on a journey like this together is way more fun than doing it alone. My wife calls it the midlife-crisis book.
Joe
My wife calls it the excuse-to-just-do-stuff book.
Mike
They're both right.
Mike
In the giddy moments after signing with a publisher, we get together to figure out how to start. It's a blank canvas! We can go anywhere in the world! We want to kick it off with a splashy event, one that will perfectly capture what we want to say about fandom and also demonstrate to readers just how far we are willing to go.
Joe
We talk about going to Nepal for cricket. We talk about going to Auckland for rugby. Someone tells us about the ferocity of Argentina's Superclásico, the match between River Plate and Boca Juniors. We consider going to Japan for sumo wrestling or Jamaica for the apparently incredible high school track and field meet.
And these all sound great.
But then we find out about the Midnight Sun Baseball Game.
Mike
On the summer solstice, the sun does not fully set in Fairbanks, Alaska. So every year, for more than a hundred years, they have played a midnight baseball game with no lights.
"It's the perfect place to start the book!" Joe shouts.
"We have to go!" I shout back.
"Why are we shouting?" we both shout.
We spring into action. Going to Fairbanks, Alaska, is a bit like going to the moon but with more layovers. Who cares?! We will go anywhere to learn about the mania of fandom. We buy airline tickets and make hotel reservations and send out a couple dozen emails to various Alaska people who might be able to help us. We are so excited and so ready to get going and so certain that we are geniuses for starting off this book at a midnight baseball game in Fairbanks.
A week before we leave, something starts bugging me. I call Joe.
Mike: Question for you.
Joe: Shoot.
Mike: Why are we going to Fairbanks, Alaska?
Joe (thinking): No idea.
Mike: Like, this is a book about fans. What does the Midnight Sun game have to do with fans? Are we going to see fans there?
Joe: I mean, not really, no. We don't even know who's playing.
Mike: Right. So why are we traveling thousands of miles for an exhibition baseball game when we don't even know who's playing, and no matter who is playing, it doesn't seem like those teams have many, you know, fans? How does this even fit in a fan book?
Joe (no longer thinking): No idea.
We go to Dallas instead.
Joe
According to some very legitimate-looking websites, there are only three countries on earth that have a sport all their own, a sport that is their national pastime but doesn't matter much anywhere else.
In Mongolia, that sport is Mongolian wrestling. The goal of Mongolian wrestling is to make your opponent touch the ground with a body part other than their feet. Apparently, any body part will do. The sport thrills them in Ulaanbaatar but hasn't caught on anywhere else yet.
Ireland's number one sport is Gaelic football . . . or it's hurling. The websites say both. We've also heard that those are two different sports.
The third country, of course, is the United States. And the sport is American football.
How tight is football's hold on America? How about this: In 2023, ninety-six of the hundred top-rated shows were football games (ninety-three pro, three college). Ninety-six! The other four were the State of the Union address, the Academy Awards, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and a random episode of Next Level Chef. Well, it wasn't totally random: It was the Next Level Chef that followed the Super Bowl, which means it wasn't so much "highly rated" as it was "the thing that was on while everyone drunkenly forgot to turn off their TVs."
Football is big everywhere in America-big in Alabama, big in Green Bay, big in Ohio, big in Florida, big in Arizona, big in Pittsburgh, big in Boise. But everything's bigger in Texas, and everything's more deep-fried at Buffalo Wild Wings, so here we are at the nexus.
Mike
This Buffalo Wild Wings, like all the others, is a towering monument to America and the game of football. There's a Henry Ford Model T vibe in here; the waitstaff seats people and brings them food and beer with alarming efficiency.
The walls are festooned with televisions. It's like a Best Buy showroom. Your favorite team is somewhere in your general line of sight, maybe angled just off to your left or right, but if your neck starts to cramp up (when it starts to cramp up), you can rotate in any direction and pick up the same game playing on a different TV at a different angle. Football is everywhere. It's no less present than oxygen. And for the folks who sit here, moms and dads and kids and ambling platoons of bros and young couples, it's no less important than oxygen either.
Joe
The day kicks off with Mike's New England Patriots facing the Cincinnati Bengals. Mike is in an interesting place as a Patriots fan. There was a time, back when I first knew him, when he cared about the Patriots every bit as much as he cared about every other Boston-area team. When his Patriots went through the admittedly stupid Deflategate scandal-when everybody lost their minds about the possibility that Tom Brady might have ordered someone to let a little air out of the ball so he could grip it better -Mike was so enraged, he wanted to quit his television work so he could spend all his time ranting about the incompetence and absurdity of it all.
But years of dizzying success plus a growing uneasiness about football in general plus the era of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick ending has left him oddly ambivalent. He never really talks about the Patriots these days. I watch him to see how passionately he's rooting for the Patriots today, and something very funny becomes apparent.
He's not rooting for the Patriots to win. He really isn't. He doesn't seem to care if they win or lose. He kind of likes the Bengals.
But he is still rooting for the Patriots to ruin the Bengals' day. He can't help himself.
Copyright © 2026 by Michael Schur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
