Sam Anderson is a New York Times Magazine staff writer and the author of Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding... Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis.

The Buffalo Bills were the best. This was in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993—for four whole years, they crushed the other football teams. Total domination. The Bills didn’t lose a single playoff game at home for six seasons. Even on their very worst days, when their star quarterback was injured and they fell behind 35–3, the Buffalo Bills found a way to come back and win. They had stars all over the field—quarterback, running back, wide receiver, defense—and they tormented opponents with an innovative quick-strike, no-huddle offense that produced highlight after highlight after highlight: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

The Bills not only won, they changed the time signature of football; they made the notoriously slow game flow. Defenses could hardly get set before the Bills were scoring all over them. It was one of the great charmed runs in the history of American sports, and the best part was that it was all happening in snow-buried, Rust Belt, shitty old Buffalo—a paragon of uncool, edge-of-the-map, glamourless American suffering, where the old industrial jobs had long ago dried up and which tourists had absolutely zero reason ever to visit. Buffalo’s winter wind was so strong that it tipped the stadium’s goalposts to one side; fans came to games dressed for polar expeditions.


Before this, for decades, the Bills had been terrible. Back in the early 1970s, things got so bleak that the owner had very nearly moved the team to Seattle—Seattle, of all the distant goddamn places—but the fans had risen up and the Bills had stayed in Buffalo, and now, as they flat-out embarrassed all of the traditional big-city powers (New York, Dallas, Los Angeles), the team had become a source of indescribable spiritual joy and civic pride to the long-suffering people of the city. The star players populated national TV ads. Buffalo, if only in this one single way, was glamorous. It seemed not like a question of if the Bills would win the Super Bowl, only of how many times.

Sam Anderson's Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its Chaotic Founding... its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis, from which this article is excerpted. | Penguin Random House

Their first chance came in the winter of 1991. The Bills stormed through the playoffs, beating their archrivals—the decadent, tropical Miami Dolphins—after which the home fans rushed the field and tore down the goalposts. Then the Bills destroyed the L.A. Raiders 51–3 and entered the Super Bowl as heavy favorites. Their opponents were the New York Giants, media darlings of the megalopolis to the south, which meant that this was an opportunity to work out some major civic anxiety in front of the whole world.

And it actually was the whole world: This was the first Super Bowl in history to be broadcast globally. It took place in January 1991, right near the peak of the Persian Gulf War, and was therefore an extremely American affair. Whitney Houston sang the national anthem with such glorious patriotic vigor that the recording went on to become a charting pop single; as her last note died away, four F-16s ripped over the stadium in tight formation. The halftime show was emceed by Mickey Mouse, dressed in stars and stripes, and featured perhaps the most American sentence ever amplified through a stadium: “And now, to honor our armed forces’ children, Coca-Cola proudly presents the New Kids on the Block.” It was a vortex of Americana, and somehow Buffalo was at the center of it.

Unfortunately, agonizingly, the Bills lost. The Giants bullied Buffalo’s famous offense, ate up the clock and, as time expired, the Bills’ kicker tragically missed a field goal, just wide right. (“He can fire the shot heard ’round the world now,” the game announcer said just before the miss.) It was the narrowest loss in Super Bowl history: a single point. Grown men wept. The citizens of Buffalo would have to wait one more year for glory.

The following year, the Bills overcame some injuries to win 13 games and reach the Super Bowl again. This time, they played the Washington Redskins—America’s team. It was a clash of the two best offenses in the NFL, but, inexplicably, for the second year in a row, the Bills’ offense didn’t show up. Their superstar quarterback threw four interceptions, their superstar running back ran for only 13 yards, and Buffalo lost by 13 points—their second consecutive Super Bowl failure. It was, for a force as powerful as the Bills, a crushingly bad run of luck. The people of Buffalo were left waiting, exasperated, once again.

Great teams, however, are built to persevere, and the Bills were clearly a great team. In 1992, the road was a little harder—everyone seemed to get injured, and the team had to pull off the most improbable comeback in football history—but still they clawed their way into the Super Bowl. Things were beginning to take on the weight of destiny. Even the backup quarterback was playing like a star. Only one other team in NFL history had reached three Super Bowls in a row, the great Miami Dolphins of the 1970s, and they had won two of those. It seemed inconceivable that any team could lose three in a row. It made no sense: to be dominant enough to get there back-to-back-to-back but not dominant enough to win even once.

Every individual game, of course, has to be taken on its own merits, and yet given the weight of narrative probability, this game seemed basically impossible to lose. Things had reached a level of likelihood that bordered on the absolute. This had to be the Bills’ year.

Given all of this, it is easy to imagine how a 24-year-old Buffalonian, a young man who felt like his life was falling apart, whose ties to the social contract had been severed, who had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and seriously considered suicide, who was almost certainly suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, who—although he was a decorated veteran of the recent Gulf War—was now working as a poorly paid security guard on the graveyard shift at the Buffalo Zoo, with side gigs as a rent-a-cop at local pro wrestling matches and monster truck rallies, who was therefore so short on money that he didn’t even have phone service, who spent his free time nursing conspiracy theories about the U.S. government and writing ominous letters to the editor of his local paper—it is easy to imagine how this young man might have been lured into making a bad decision: into betting all of the very little money he had, and then some, on a victory for the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII.

The young man was Timothy McVeigh. He was a Buffalo Bills superfan. McVeigh grew up in a rural town called Lockport, just on the edge of Buffalo—the fringe of the American fringe—and Bills football was a sort of religion for him. He was a bright but scrawny kid (“Noodle McVeigh,” bullies called him) raised mostly by his father, who worked at a radiator factory. During McVeigh’s adolescence, his mother took his sisters and moved to Florida. But McVeigh chose to stay behind, with his dad, with the Bills. Before he left for Iraq, he had actually been there in the stadium, in Buffalo, to watch the Bills’ first run to the Super Bowl; he was part of the jubilant Buffalonian mob that rushed the field to tear down the goalposts after the game with the Dolphins.

Immediately afterward, McVeigh went off to the Gulf, where he established himself as a rising star of a soldier—an acer of all the tests, an unbelievably accurate shot, a meticulous cleaner of guns and uniforms and of the Bradley armored vehicle in which he was the gunner. In 1991, when the Bills were losing their first Super Bowl, McVeigh was busy overseas, preparing to take part in Operation Desert Storm. He would be at the crest of that overwhelming military wave: tanks from horizon to horizon, rolling forward to stamp out the terrible despot holding the world’s oilfields hostage.

Like many young soldiers, McVeigh shipped out as an idealist and came home a cynic. The mighty Iraqi army he had trained so hard to fight turned out to be nothing more than a sparse, disorganized, underequipped handful of soldiers straggling across the desert, begging to be allowed to surrender. McVeigh saw abandoned corpses being eaten by dogs. He listened to the U.S. military lie about murdering civilians. And he became, himself, a killer. In the midst of all the chaos of smoke and sand, to the amazement of everyone around him, McVeigh took out an Iraqi soldier in a bunker with a miraculous shot from something like a mile away. He watched, through his scope, the man’s head and body burst. McVeigh hated all of this. He did not feel like a hero. The war, for all intents and purposes, was over in less than a week, and McVeigh was awarded five medals.

Now it was two years later, 1993, and Timothy McVeigh was back home in Buffalo, and his life—his exceptional mind, his rising military career—had gone to shit. After Iraq, McVeigh went to try out for the Special Forces but, broken by the war, performed poorly and dropped out. At age twenty-four, he was a washed-up war hero with nothing going for him, no community or connections, no meaningful way forward. So McVeigh called his bookie and wagered $1,000 on the Super Bowl. There was simply no way the Bills were going to lose again, not for a third consecutive time. That would be a world in which nothing made sense, in which an entire community had been unjustly worked up into a fever of false hope. Now was his chance, McVeigh figured, to make everything instantly a little bit better.

He settled in to watch the game.

The national anthem at this Super Bowl was performed by Garth Brooks, perhaps the world’s most famous Oklahoman; he grew up in Yukon, right on the edge of Oklahoma City. This fact probably didn’t mean much, at the time, to McVeigh, who had never even been to Oklahoma and was hopped up with anxiety for kickoff.

The beginning of the game would have pleased him. The Bills stifled the Cowboys’ opening drive, blocked their subsequent punt, and scored a quick touchdown. They stuffed the Cowboys’ second possession, too. Finally, everything in a Super Bowl was going Buffalo’s way. McVeigh had always been a dramatic TV watcher, yelling and cursing and throwing objects at the screen when things went wrong, and at this point he must practically have been doing backflips.

Then, suddenly, everything fell apart. The Bills made a careless throw. The Cowboys intercepted it, returned it 13 yards, and scored moments later. The Bills fumbled. The Cowboys recovered and scored again. The Bills’ star quarterback threw an interception in the end zone and then, to make things worse, reinjured his balky knee. At halftime, despite the Bills’ wonderful start, the Cowboys led 28–10. They had scored a pair of touchdowns only 15 seconds apart, and then a second pair of touchdowns 18 seconds apart—a new speed record in Super Bowl history.

At halftime, Timothy McVeigh had to sit there and wait, pondering his increasingly long odds, while Michael Jackson sang “We Are the World” with 3,500 hundred children.

The second half was, if anything, worse: more interceptions, more fumbles, and—another Super Bowl first—21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter. The Bills lost 52–17. It was not only their third consecutive Super Bowl loss, it was, by far, the worst of them all. It was at this point in his life that Timothy McVeigh gave up on any kind of a normal future. He paid off his gambling debt with a cash advance from a credit card—a debt he fully intended never to repay. The future was no longer relevant to him, no longer something to be planned for. McVeigh left New York state, his only real home, a few days later. From that moment on, he would live unmoored from any particular place in America, adrift in a nomadic life of gun shows and spiraling extremism.

Just four weeks after that disastrous Super Bowl loss, McVeigh found and latched onto the cause that would define the rest of his life. A group of citizens in Waco, Texas—a religious cult called the Branch Davidians—had refused to surrender its weapons to the federal government. A standoff ensued, and McVeigh became obsessed. He read and watched everything he could, then loaded his car with anti-government pamphlets and bumper stickers (“When guns are outlawed, I will become an outlaw”) and drove down to see the action firsthand.

He sold his paraphernalia to other militants and gave interviews to the news media in support of the persecuted. When, some weeks later, the Waco situation went terribly wrong—the FBI set fire to the compound, killing almost everyone inside—McVeigh watched the news footage and wept. That injustice became the core of his case against the United States government. Revenge became his life’s mission.

I am not saying that Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City in 1995 because the Buffalo Bills lost four Super Bowls in a row. (They made it back in 1994 and—incredibly—lost that one too, cementing their reputation as the greatest losers in NFL history.) Such a claim would be absurd. Human motives are incalculably complex. But that Buffalo heartbreak was one of the many shadows that fell across McVeigh’s life between his unstable childhood and his perpetration of mass murder in Oklahoma City.

The almost unbelievable failure of the Bills, and the civic pain it caused, amplified his native pain. After McVeigh returned from the Gulf War, his Bills fandom was one of the few positive social networks he was able to plug back into, one of the most powerful, stable, visceral communities to which he unquestionably belonged. Its failure was devastating, to him and to everyone else in the area. To this day, even well-adjusted Buffalonians walk around imagining alternate lives in which their team actually won four Super Bowls in a row, becoming arguably the greatest team in NFL history, putting the city on the map in a way it otherwise never could have dreamed of.

Or at least won one Super Bowl, securing a happy little foothold in history. Instead, that 1990s Bills team is remembered as a tragic joke. It’s easy to pretend that sports doesn’t matter in real life, but for many millions of people, it does. It matters profoundly, every day.

After Super Bowl XXVII, Timothy McVeigh went looking for somewhere else to be, something else to do—something bigger, more meaningful, more real. Reality had failed him, in so many ways, so he went off to pursue his own fantasy of justice, very far from Buffalo.

Adapted from BOOM TOWN: THE FANTASTICAL SAGA OF OKLAHOMA CITY, ITS CHAOTIC FOUNDING... ITS PURLOINED BASKETBALL TEAM, AND THE DREAM OF BECOMING A WORLD-CLASS METROPOLIS Copyright © 2018 by Sam Anderson. Published by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.