History
The Buffalo Bills played the first thirteen years of their existence at Buffalo War Memorial Stadium in downtown Buffalo. While suitable for American Football League play, the "Rockpile" (as the stadium came to be nicknamed), was both in disrepair and deemed undersized for a National Football League team with a capacity of under 47,000. The league mandate instituted after the NFL-AFL merger dictated a minimum of 50,000 seats.
Rich Stadium opened in 1973. The construction of the stadium and its location were the source of years of litigation, which ended with a financial settlement for a developer who had planned to erect an all-weather stadium in Lancaster, New York. However, plans changed because it was not wanted to be close to Lancaster High School. The stadium ended up being built by a man named Frank Schoenle, and his construction company. In 1972, Rich Products signed a 25-year, $1.5 million deal, by which the venue would be called "Rich Stadium"; this is one of the earliest examples of the sale of naming rights in North American sports. (The name was somewhat of a compromise, after Bills owner and founder Ralph Wilson rejected the name Rich wanted to use, "Coffee Rich Park.") After the original deal expired in 1998, the stadium was renamed in honor of Wilson, after Rich balked at paying a greatly increased rights fee, which would have brought the price up to par with other NFL stadiums.
The first playoff game at the stadium was a 17–10 Bills victory over the Houston Oilers on January 1, 1989. The Bills won every ensuing playoff game at the stadium until they were defeated by the Jacksonville Jaguars on December 28, 1996.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Wilson Stadium
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)