The Washington franchise announced on Monday that it will officially retire the team’s name and logo. But, in recent years, obviously, change is happening and we’re seeing a historic moment. “Back then, I just didn’t really believe anything like that was possible.
“It just seemed in the early 1990s that, even though awareness was improving, we were still so far into the margins that it didn’t feel like any meaningful change would happen at the professional sports level,” he adds. The Bills lose not just because they lost the Super Bowl, but they lost to a team with a racist name.
I remember watching that game with when I was 12 years old. “And, you know, it kind of felt like adding insult to injury in some ways. “The Bills ultimately lost,” says Rice, 41. When Buffalo and Washington faced off in the 1992 Super Bowl, those feelings were even more pronounced. Seeing the word offended Rice and made him uncomfortable. Whenever Rice checked the sports pages to read about their team, he’d encounter the R-word, which was the name of the league’s Washington organization. Rice’s father fostered a love of sports in his son and the two were avid fans of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. It followed him through the early part of his life and even penetrated his childhood hobby. That one word was not easy to move on from, though. It was just sort of ‘absorb it and digest it and try to move on.’” “I don’t think there was as much drive to fight something like that. “Back then, there just wasn’t the awareness or the incentive to fight back because it would have seemed like a huge monolithic structure to come up against,” says Rice, an Anishinaabe-Canadian author and former broadcaster who hails from the Wasauksing First Nation.
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