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About 90 minutes before kickoff at every single Bills home game, in the middle of Highmark Stadium’s parking lot, Kenny “Pinto Ron” Johnson prepares to get doused with ketchup and mustard. It’s the messiest part of a pregame tailgating ritual that involves Pizza Pete’s flatbreads cooked in a filing cabinet, meats grilled atop various metal objects on the hood of his Ford Pinto (hence his nickname), and shots of 100-proof Polish cherry liqueur served from a bowling ball.
“It’s like a tourist stop right now,” the 68-year-old Johnson tells Front Office Sports. “Everyone’s kind of got to see it.”
About 400 miles southeast, Marianne Sladzinski, 83, wakes up “psyched” on game day. She puts on her Eagles jersey and heads to Lincoln Financial Field with a few key items: rally towels, her green wig, and printouts of both teams’ rosters. When the 35-year season-ticket holder arrives at the M lot, she starts putting together the tailgate she has helped host for more than 40 years. It’s a collaborative effort with other longtime Birds fans and friends who build specialized menus each Sunday based on the opponent.
These NFL superfans are a niche breed of diehards who treat their fandom like a religion—and their team’s stadium as their place of worship.
Every game day between August and February, their elaborate tailgates, unique pregame traditions, and dedicated attendance have earned them widespread recognition and parking-lot popularity. At a time when sports betting is rampant, team loyalties are waning, and the television experience has never been better, this small subset of passionate fans has remained pious to football’s purity. They can always be found firing up the grills, braving the elements, and welcoming fellow tailgaters into the traditions they’ve helped keep alive.
“It seems to be baked into our culture that no matter what your team does, they’re your team, and you’ve got to keep supporting them,” Johnson says. “And you don’t waver.”
Superfandom like this takes time to perfect. Ask Johnson, the Rochester native who just attended his 517th consecutive Bills game. The impossible streak started during the 1994 season, when he committed himself to going to every game on the schedule—the rite of passage every Buffalo fan must take, he jokes.
He didn’t intend on continuing the streak the following year, but a father-son road trip to Denver to start the 1995 season, coupled with subsequent relatively close road games in New York and New England, quickly turned into something he couldn’t stop. “Twenty-five led to 30, and 30 led to 40,” he says. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘If I do 50 games, that’s a point of no return.’ And apparently it was.”
His tailgate similarly grew into a colossal event. It began with his brother and friends in the mid-1980s, a crew that always engaged in “silly things” until the gatherings took on a life of their own. Case in point: The condiment shower, which started with Johnson holding out a burger while his brother attempted to shoot ketchup onto the patty five feet away.
“The idea was to get the perfect amount on the burger and nothing on me,” he says. “And within a couple games, that slowly turned into a heightened distance where somebody would try to shoot the ketchup as high as they could.” Today, the retired software engineer wears special shirts for the splatter, which he washes off with a hot-water spigot before changing into his Bills gear. “Everything I do today started out small with an innocent shenanigan of some sort.”
Sladzinski isn’t douse-yourself-in-ketchup wild, but her mania shows up in other ways. An Eagles fan since 1975 after moving to Philadelphia, the non-denominational ordained minister became a year-round loyalist and information-seeker about a decade ago. That meant attending any and all kinds of Eagles-themed events, going to the NFL Draft (which she’s done twice), and keeping tabs on every player throughout the offseason.
“I watch Good Morning Football and I record it every day, all year,” she says. “When the season ends, then I start looking at when free agency starts, when the draft is. And I watch college football, so I start scouting players.” When rookies attend team events like the Eagles Autism Challenge, she makes sure to introduce herself to every one. “I don’t have any children. I don’t have any biological family nearby,” she says. “So the Eagles are my family.”
Tailgating is not a prerequisite for superfandom, but it’s the easiest step in establishing an identity and community—and pain tolerance when the weather turns cold. That’s how Pat Lemucchi, 62, has become one of the most popular fans around Levi’s Stadium, now the third venue he’s made his weekly home since his father started attending games at Kezar Stadium more than 70 years ago.
One of the longest-tenured 49ers season-ticket holders, he pulls his car into the tailgate line around 6:30 a.m., just behind his “partner-in-tailgate,” to make sure they get their spot in the stadium’s VIP section. As entertainment director, he’s responsible for setting up the party’s AV equipment, which includes a TV tuned to NFL games and a DJ booth, along with a bar and grill to serve all the usuals.
He estimates up to 50 people will attend his pregame tailgates, which his crew opens up to opposing fans and any passersby. “You have your blood family, and then you have this family. And this has been growing,” he says.
Lemucchi went to his first game as a 5-year-old, but the obsession didn’t start until the Niners’ 1982 Super Bowl victory during his senior year in high school. The last home game he missed was 1991, when he was on his honeymoon.
“I’ve had two kids born while at games,” he says, citing his pager and cellphone for keeping him informed. “It is something that is just a passion for us all.”
Out of the 500-plus games he’s attended, his favorite is a 2012 playoff victory against the Saints, a back-and-forth affair that ended with a Vernon Davis touchdown. At the time, he was sitting beside another fan whose father had similarly kept season tickets in the family. As the stadium erupted, “we found ourselves looking at each other, crying, pointing up to the sky to our fathers,” Lemucchi says, “because we wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for our two fathers.”
The NFL stadium experience has earned a poor reputation in recent years. The critics tend to fixate on the hassles like concession prices and long lines or constant in-game promotions and sponsored interruptions. Once family-friendly communal spaces, venues can often feel unpredictable by the second half when fans—drunk or unhappy with their team or sometimes both—may be more likely to initiate fights a few rows over.
At the same time, the couch has never looked better. Legalized sports betting and daily fantasy have turned the at-home viewer into a multitasking operator, and NFL RedZone condenses game feeds into an unending, narrated stream. The stadium feels less like the center of the NFL universe and more like an inconvenience.
Long before attending games meant schmoozing inside lounges and suites or keeping an eye on other games to check parlays, these superfans—many of whom are Gen Xers and baby boomers—learned to love watching the game in front of them. And still do.
“I don’t notice the timeouts and stuff that much because you’re always sitting with somebody and you’re yakking about the plays in between,” Johnson says. “It’s more than just the three hours of the game. It’s the whole experience, meeting thousands of people.”
Lemucchi doesn’t mince words: “I don’t even leave my seat unless I can’t stand not taking a leak any longer,” he says with a laugh. “There’s no reason for me to go out in the crowd. I am there to watch football.”
Sladzinski, who trades her tailgate seat for a perch above the visiting-team tunnel come game time, attempts to destigmatize Philly’s harsher stereotypes whenever she can. “We’re adamant that if you’re going to sit in our section, you’re going to be a good fan,” she says. “You’re not going to be arrogant and nasty towards anyone.”
Even some of the more aggressive tailgate cultures, which include Buffalo fans crashing through folding tables, have become the last beacons of pure, communal fandom.
Del Reid, who established the “Bills Mafia” moniker and was named the 2023 Bills Fan of the Year, says he has raised more than $2 million for families in need and other local charities with his start-up 26 Shirts. He doesn’t equate himself to Johnson, but he feeds off the team’s supportive, charitable, and resilient culture, especially in harsh conditions.
“We live in it,” he says. “You’ve got to shovel your driveway every morning, anyway. You’re used to being outside for 20 minutes before you can go to work.”
For these fans, the question is how to keep their legacies alive. Johnson isn’t sure how many more ketchup stains he can weather—or how many road trips he can keep managing. But his son has taken up various duties, like bartending at each tailgate and helping with its organization. “I always say that a good Bills fan has to be in a constant state of denial, and we generally represent that well,” he says with a laugh.
Lemucchi is facing a similar future crossroads, especially because his two children don’t intend to move to San Jose. He still has hope, mostly so he can extend the family’s season-ticket streak to 100 years. “That’s 27 more years,” he says. “I don’t know how many I’ve got left in me. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. You can find a way.”
