By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist
LOS ANGELES — The day after the Cincinnati Bengals won the AFC Championship, I watched three women at the Kansas City airport order Budweisers (not Bud Lights, Bud Heavies) at 10 in the morning.
Each of them wore leggings that had the brown, faux-rubber football material screen-printed onto the thighs with white laces running down the sides of their legs. Their Ugg-like boots featured bedazzled Bengals logos on the ankles. Bengals patches were embroidered onto their puffy down jackets, and they all sported Cincinnati jerseys underneath. One of them wore a tiger-print scarf.
Another appeared to be on a Zoom call for her job. She stood up, holding her phone selfie-style and began to dance the “Ickey Shuffle.” If you’re not familiar, that’s the on-field celebration that former Bengals player Ickey Woods made famous the last time the Bengals had Super Bowl hope — in 1988.
This woman said to the other people on the Zoom, “Don’t come to happy hour tonight unless you’ve got a deal and an adult beverage.” Her friends laughed. A man in Bengals gear who didn’t seem to know the partying women at the gate came over to them.
“I just got two tickets! To the Super Bowl!” he yelled. The women were jealous, so I hope they found a way out here.
There is a smattering of Bengals fans in Los Angeles this week, but it’s hard to tell how many made the trek because this city is so spread out. Unlike in Cincinnati, there isn’t one central gathering location, and there is more than one football team to choose from.
I’ve seen a few fans in Bengals jerseys at various hotels, and people in Bengals hats milled around the fan-centric NFL Experience exhibits in downtown L.A. But the place certainly isn’t overrun with them.
This makes sense. Tickets to the Super Bowl are never cheap. But when you account for the fact that L.A. is always an expensive place to visit, the big game is difficult to access for the majority of Cincinnati fans who’d like to watch the Super Bowl in person.
Many of them, such as Julie Hagerstrand, who was born and raised in Cincinnati but now lives in New Jersey, entered all the Super Bowl ticket contests they could find. Unlike their team this postseason, they just couldn’t win.
“Instead, I’ll be watching from my couch in N.J.,” Hagerstrand said. “But more likely pacing around my living room. [I’ll watch] with my boyfriend, dog and cat, just like I have for all the other playoff games, wearing the exact same outfit, naturally. I know I’ll be an absolute wreck during the game, but I can’t wait.”
Hagerstrand’s Twitter profile picture shows a little baby wearing a Bengals sweater — that’s her. It’s a photo from 1989, when Hagerstrand was 1 year old, and the Bengals had just lost Super Bowl XXIII in the final minute to Joe Montana’s 49ers. On the back of the physical copy of the picture, Hagerstrand’s mother wrote, “Waaaaah, Bengals lost!”
“This pretty much sums up most of my lifetime as a Bengals fan, so this postseason has felt a little surreal,” Hagerstrand said.
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Many Bengals fans feel this way, too. Eric S. (he declined to give his last name) grew up in Ohio but lives in North Carolina now, and he fell in love with the team as a kid. No one besides Eric’s dad would watch games with him, and over time, his father started to love the team as much as his son.
Last year, Eric’s father died of cancer.
“He was only 68,” Eric said. “A month prior to that, we had moved out of Ohio. Now I’m enjoying this Bengals run out of nowhere from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with my 18-month-old son. Things really have come full circle, but it’s so freaking ironic that the Bengals waited to make a run like this until after we moved and after Dad passed.”
There’s something incredibly moving about the stories of fans who have loved a team for so long with very little to show for it. I teared up hearing about Hagerstrand’s and Eric’s experiences because they’re both tragic yet funny, sweet but heartbreaking. They’re the stories of true believers, of people who stuck with a team through the 2-14 seasons, the failed coaches and the quarterbacks who might’ve been saviors but turned out to be just another dashed hope.
Bengals fans sent their team off to Super Bowl LVI with a rally at Paul Brown Stadium earlier this week. (Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)
To put it in perspective: Since the Rams moved back to L.A. in 2016, this current iteration of the franchise has made it to the Super Bowl twice and enjoyed five straight winning seasons.
Before 2022, the last time the Bengals won a playoff game was 1991.
The most romantic kind of fandom is the kind that doesn’t love you back, the kind that breaks your heart season after season, but that somehow, at the start of the first game, has you thinking this could be the year. You never give up. You just get used to knowing that it’s never actually going to be the year.
And then, somehow, it suddenly is.
“The Bengals’ run out of nowhere” is the best way I’ve heard this season described. I’ve written extensively about the confidence of Cincinnati’s players and the absolute certainty inside that locker room that a Super Bowl appearance was possible.
But fans weren’t in those private rooms to see that assuredness. All they saw were the wins eked out on a field goal and the hits quarterback Joe Burrow took over and over on the road to glory. It’s astonishing to many of them that the road has been paved with wins — Sean Walls, who has been in the military for 13 years, was stationed in Saudi Arabia when the Bengals drafted Burrow.
“I had faith that he was the guy to get them here, just didn’t expect it so soon,” he said.
So, of course, fans want to be in Los Angeles. If the Bengals win, it would be the first Super Bowl championship in team history. What’s better than witnessing history in person?
Well, for a lot of fans, it turns out that the answer is watching it at home.
A loyal contingent of Bengals fans made their way to Kansas City to watch Cincinnati win the AFC Championship. (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Die-hard Bengals fan Payton North thought seriously about shelling out for Super Bowl tickets, even though he knew he couldn’t afford them. But he ultimately decided that if his family and friends, with whom he has watched every game for years, weren’t going, then he wasn’t going either.
“We’ve had a rough go in my 25 years of life,” he said. “And I honestly wouldn’t want to spend the Super Bowl with anyone else other than the people I’ve watched every single game with throughout the years.”
Bengals fan Dan O’Connor said something similar.
“I will be sitting on the same couch that I’ve watched hours of Red Zone and failed playoff games and the same couch I have jumped out of with joy this year,” he said. “Just gonna keep it the same that we have been doing.”
Fans’ superstitions run the gamut. Samantha Williams has made a different Bengals’ themed dessert for each game; for the Super Bowl, she’s baking chocolate chip cookies and decorating them with Bengals’ colors.
Jess Hollister, a nursing student in Minnesota, is doing the same thing by doing something different. She hasn’t watched more than one game in the same place or with the same people this whole playoff run, so she’s seeking out a new group and a new venue for the Super Bowl, convinced it has made a difference.
Some people, like Hagerstrand, are wearing the same outfits — and it’s not just fans. Burrow told reporters that he always wears one sock inside out. He said he isn’t superstitious; he has just always done it that way.
Which, if you ask me, sounds a little ‘stitious.
I wrote about Rams fans the other day. I wrote about how the team doesn’t quite have a hold in L.A. yet, but new star players are bringing more fans in, and children in L.A. today will grow up to become the backbone of the fan base.
Bengals fans are the exact opposite. They have taken as many hits for this team emotionally as Burrow has physically. Many people want to see the Rams’ star players who are on the older end of the spectrum — Matthew Stafford, Von Miller, Aaron Donald, Andrew Whitworth, Odell Beckham Jr. and more — win a ring for their legacies. If the Rams win Super Bowl LVI, it will be joyous for the fans. But the trophy will be more emotionally significant for the players than for a long-suffering fan base. Because there simply isn’t one.
If the Bengals win the Super Bowl, of course it will mean the world to the players. But Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Joe Mixon, Sam Hubbard, Vonn Bell are all under the age of 28. They can hope to repeat this run and win multiple championships, especially with the influx of interest from free agents (like Rob Gronkowski!?) who want to play with such a dynamic squad.
But for fans, a championship would be the culmination of three decades of baseless hope. Especially for those with deep emotional ties to this team and to people who didn’t live long enough to see this magic.
If the Bengals secure the Lombardi, it will be one of the most emotional days of many fans’ lives, whether they’re in the stands at SoFi or on the couch where they’ve witnessed so many disappointments.
No matter what, it will be a “Bud Heavy at 10 a.m. Ickey Shuffle” kind of day in Cincinnati.
Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of “The People’s Sports Podcast” for FOX Sports. She’s honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.
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NFL – Rams vs. Bengals – 2/13/2022
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