From Bills Boosters to Browns Backers, Fans Flock Together

If you’re not a Cleveland Browns fan, you might want to steer clear of the Pier 52 sports bar in Hermosa Beach when that football team is on the tube. Unless, that is, you’d like to join in the head-butting that sometimes is the celebration of choice after a Browns touchdown. Or unless you’d like to join Larry Zill, the guy with the “N2BRWNS” license plate around his neck, in ceremonial pounding on the bar when a key play is under way. Or unless you’d like to see the “Bleacher Creature,” another native Clevelander, scrunch up his face to demonstrate how he got his nickname.

Or unless you’d like to meet Bob (Rumble) Helman, the fellow who founded the Southern California Browns Backers Assn., which now claims 2,000 members. Helman is an expert at a certain knuckles-to-the-skull greeting--a professional “noogie giver,” in other words.

“What it all comes down to is tradition,” Helman says. “In L.A., people don’t understand what football means in Cleveland.”

And so on game days, those who do understand gather with their own kind at Pier 52, and barmaids Sasha Collins and Basia Maczka-- yep, that’s Sasha and Basia-- sell drinks as fast as they can pour them as Rumble and 75 of his buddies soak in pumpkin orange and brown memories, wipe potato chip crumbs off their Dockers, flap high fives and noogie away to their hearts’ content . . .

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If the Clevelanders have Pier 52, their rivals on this particular afternoon--the Dallas Cowboys folks--have Mr. Pockets, a sports bar located just a few first downs up the coast in Manhattan Beach. The Dallas Cowboys being the Dallas Cowboys, this fraternity includes more than hometowners, embracing fans from Georgia to Montana. But for these few hours, at least, even those not born with Southern drawls seem to take on the classic twang of Dallas native Curt Junker, who clutches his beer, tugs at his Cowboys hat and exclaims how “that’s got to be the biggest chin strap I’ve ever seen,” as the bar’s giant screen shows a close-up of quarterback Troy Aikman.

Drawls are out, though, at Bobby McGee’s on 1st Street in Burbank. That’s headquarters for the Buffalo Bills fans.

Ask the sports bar regulars and they’ll tell you who rules the roost elsewhere on game days: The Green Bay Packers people at Besties in Hermosa Beach; the New England Patriots crowd at the Poop Deck in Hermosa, and the Miami Dolphins nuts at the appropriately named Endless Summer in Marina del Rey.

The list goes on, this scattering of drinking palaces and hole-in-the-wall joints that have been anointed, for one reason or the other, as reunion centrals for clusters of displaced fans who may have gone to high school together, or on prom dates together, or may simply share, across all the miles, a childhood affiliation for the old hometown team: the Stove Piper in Northridge for Pittsburgh Steelers tough guys, for instance, or the Pineapple Hill in Sherman Oaks, across the San Fernando Valley, for Chicago Bears die-hards.

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In the parking lot outside Bobby McGee’s, tattered nerf footballs are flung through the air by grown men in red, white and blue Bills jerseys and leather jackets, each pass carrying the fantasy of a game-winning play.

Inside the bar, 150 rowdy fans are chomping down on--what else?--Buffalo chicken wings.

Before the Bills boosters took over here, they hung out at a bar called Scotland Yard in Canoga Park. Then Keith Norris, who hails from Niagara Falls and is president of the Bills Backers Club, rallied the dues-paying ($10 per year) fans and moved them to Burbank. The old joint was too small, he explains, and there was another problem, as well: “I didn’t want to get stuck in a place where there were fans of other teams.”

These days, Buffalo fans visiting L.A. often hear about the crowd at Bobby McGee’s and make a point of stopping by on game day, Norris says.

Three women--Joy Ammann, Maria Richardson and Susannah Jeffers, all from upstate New York--have become good friends after meeting for Bills games here. Indeed, side benefits have evolved from their football friendship.

“I do my laundry at Maria’s house every weekend,” Ammann said. “Because of her, I have clean underwear.”

Jeffers drives an hour on game days from Hermosa Beach to hang out with her chums.

If you listen hard enough during commercials here, you can hear DJ and Bills fan C. Scott McCausland play “God Bless the Bills,” as sung by Snorton Norton and the Moving Circus Band. And if you’re really tipsy, “The Leader of the Sack,” a song about Bills defensive end Bruce Smith, might start to sound like a classic.