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True fans all the way
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer TAMPA -- James Miller has devoted $3,500 and a thousand hours of his time turning his Ford Ranger into a rolling shrine to his favorite football team. The truck has decals, lasers, a pirate ship and a little cannon that booms. The latest touch: a parrot in a 10-foot-high crow's nest. "I'll be cruising all weekend," said Miller, a 50-year-old retired bouncer from Ruskin. "My wife and I can't really afford to go to the games, so I cruise to show my support." Miller was one of hundreds of fans who braved the chill Friday at rallies for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who face the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday with a trip to the Super Bowl at stake. Among the day's stranger spectacles: a beaming Pete Botto, Tampa's fire chief, unbuckling his pants before a screaming crowd at City Hall to bare a Bucs tattoo on his upper thigh. Jackie Riles, 65, known as the "Pillow Lady," sat cheering in her wheelchair as the team buses pulled out of Raymond James Stadium. Riles estimates she has crocheted some 3,000 Bucs pillows since the 1970s, which she gives to players, cheerleaders and Bucs staff. For $20 worth of material at Wal-Mart, she said, she can make 10 of them, though sometimes it's painful work. Since an accident damaged her nerves a few years ago, a dull ache creeps up her left arm all the way to her neck. "But I don't care," said Riles, who once put off surgery because it meant missing a Bucs game. "I love my team. Do or die, I'm going to make the pillows." Like many of the fans out Friday, she loved the Bucs when they were unlovable, when they were one of the NFL's sorriest teams and people derided their orange-and-whites as "sissy colors." They remember how lonely it felt, to love a loser. They remember when Bucs tickets were so unvalued people left them on cars outside the stadium for anyone to claim. They remember when the Bucs weren't even on TV, when to watch them play you had to go to the stadium. There, paper bags often covered many of the heads in the stands.
"We were the laughingstock of the league," said Danny "Bigg Bopp" Bethel, 39, of Tampa, who stood outside City Hall in a red-and-black wig and a face painted in Bucs colors. "I took the punishment from Day One. People used to make fun of me. Now at work everyone's high-fiving me and asking if I've got another ticket." His companion, Mike "Afro Man" Dearing, wore a gigantic red wig. "Used to be, when you'd say, 'I'm going to the game,' people would say, 'What for?"' said the 32-year-old Clearwater man. "I was a fan before it was cool to be a fan." Kris Perrone, a 38-year-old hair stylist from Oldsmar, went to work Friday with her face slathered in red paint and took off early to make the stadium rally. "I've waited for this all my life," she said of the Bucs run for the Super Bowl. Years ago, she said, "People would ridicule you all the time. I hated going to work Monday morning after they lost. People said, 'How about your Bucs?' Now that they're doing good, it's, 'How about our Bucs?" At the City Hall rally, in a phone call to Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street, Tampa Mayor Dick Greco boasted of Florida's superior weather and said Sunday's game represented "two great cities." The mayors placed a friendly wager on the game's outcome. Greco is gambling a box of Florida citrus and a basket of assorted treats, from Cuban sandwiches to key lime cookies. Street is putting up cheese steaks, hoagies, peanut chews, root beer, chips and scrapple. Miller, the former bouncer with the tricked-out Ranger, said he wouldn't dare drive his truck through the streets of Philadelphia. "It wouldn't get two blocks," he said. "You'd have to have somebody literally riding shotgun." On his bald head, Miller wore red glitter-glue that spelled, "The Boneyard." He said he started decorating his truck a few years ago, starting with a cannon and two swords. "It sort of progressed and progressed and then it grew into an obsession," he said, but "I've run out of room and money." Miller is used to getting funny looks when he drives it around. And when the Bucs lose, there seems to be a nasty jeer at every stoplight. For Miller, a Bucs victory Sunday would do more than redeem decades of suffering. "It vindicates everything I've done to my truck. It'll certainly make it easier to drive it around if we make it to the Super Bowl." -- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Christopher Goffard can be reached at (813) 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com
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