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Kathleen McGroder was 10, in 1949, when the original Buffalo Bills were left out in the cold as the NFL absorbed three other teams from the All-America Football Conference. "It was a dark day," she recalls. "We were all crushed. And my father told me, 'Don't worry. We'll get another team.' " Patrick J. McGroder Jr. made sure of it. That's why his name is on the Bills Wall of Fame. He worked tirelessly through the 1950s to get another pro football team for his beloved hometown. And when at last the modern Bills became charter members of the American Football League, in 1960, Ralph C. Wilson Jr. brought McGroder Jr. into the front office as his right-hand man. "Pat was a real behind-the-scenes guy," says Joe Horrigan, a senior adviser to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "He got things done and never took a bow." McGroder did get to take a bow once, 40 years ago, when his name went up on the wall at Rich Stadium. Kathleen was there that day. Her father died a few months later. And she hasn't been back since. "I couldn't bear to go back," she says. Come Sunday, she and more than two dozen other members of the McGroder clan will be back at Highmark Stadium, as it's now known. They're coming from Phoenix and New York City and Chicago and Durham, N.C., to see the old place one last time – and to see the name of their patriarch on the wall alongside so many of the other all-time greats of Bills' history. "It's going to be a sentimental journey," says Kathleen McGroder Butler. She's an actor, still working at 86, and the middle child of Pat and Loretta McGroder. "I love being back in Buffalo," says their eldest child, Carol McGroder MacLeod, 89, a former actor. "We are back to celebrate the Bills," says the youngest, Pat McGroder III, 80. And, of course, to celebrate their Bills' family legacy. The Wall of Famer's offspring are coming with their offspring, and their offspring's offspring, upping the ante to 26 direct descendants and allied collaterals. They'll sit in a box at the stadium and watch the Bills play the New Orleans Saints while knowing their pater familias was something of a secular saint in Buffalo sports history. "My father was a big, old Irishman – 6-3, 230 pounds – and he played football at Hutch Tech," Pat III says. "He loved the game, and he loved Buffalo." McGroder grew up the son of a West Side grocer, made a fortune as a local liquor distributor, and then got into Democratic politics hereabouts. In the years after the original Bills dissolved, he befriended NFL owners – notably George Halas of the Chicago Bears and Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers – and staged neutral-site NFL games at Civic Stadium, not yet known as War Memorial. Then, as Lamar Hunt was putting together cities for the yet-to-be-born AFL, he approached McGroder about his owning a team here. McGroder said no thanks as he believed his spadework had put Buffalo in line for an NFL expansion team. When those teams went instead to Dallas and Minneapolis, Wilson emerged as the prospective owner of the AFL team here. McGroder welcomed him and, as the city's parks commissioner, worked out the stadium deal that opened the door for the reborn Bills. But Wilson was a son of Detroit. He needed someone he could trust who knew the lay of the land here. So McGroder, a son of Buffalo, joined the Bills as a vice president – effectively Wilson's No. 2 – and insisted on working for $1 a year. "My dad ran the Bills as an extension of Buffalo," Pat III says. "He ran it as if the citizens of Buffalo owned it." When Pat III graduated from Notre Dame, he wanted to come work for the Bills. His father had other ideas. "He said, 'If you come back to Buffalo, you'll be thought of only as my son,' " Pat III says. "He said I should go west and make my own name. And it's the best advice he ever gave me." Pat III graduated from the College of Law at the University of Arizona and set up practice in Phoenix. He followed his father's example by getting to know the movers and shakers around town, among them John MacLeod, coach of the NBA's Phoenix Suns. When the Suns took a trip to New York to play the Knicks, Pat III suggested that MacLeod look up his sister Carol, a stage and television actor there. "When my brother called and told me about this coach," Carol says, "I pictured some guy in a sweatshirt with a whistle around his neck." He was, instead, a sharp dresser with a mellow demeanor. As the Los Angeles Times once put it: "MacLeod dresses like Pat Riley and coaches like Perry Como." The coach and the actor hit it off. Months later, they married. "When I told my agent," Carol says, "he said, 'What is this – arty-farty and the jock? That will never work.' " They were married almost 48 years, until MacLeod's death, at 81, in 2019. Matt MacLeod, their son, is the one who came up with the idea of having this McGroder family reunion in Buffalo. He loves the Bills. His father coached basketball all over, but he left many of those jobs unhappily, as is a coach's lot. "When dad got fired in different places, I lost my affinity for those teams," Matt says. "But not the Bills. My grandfather worked for them for 25 years, and there's no emotional baggage." They're all big Bills fans from afar. When Kathleen takes runs along the East River, near her Manhattan apartment, she wears one of her Bills jerseys, Dion Dawkins or Ed Oliver. "I love Josh Allen," she says, "but games are won" by linemen in the trenches. Ann Butler, Kathleen's daughter, was a teenager when her grandfather's name went up on the wall. She thinks he'd be pleased at the notion of a family reunion at the same stadium all these years later. "We're a family that gets along," Ann says. "We have a good time together. He would love that." The photo that accompanies this story is of Pat McGroder at his Wall of Fame induction holding up Pat III's daughter Caroline, Lion King style. She was 6 months old at the time. "I have it framed on my dresser, and I see it every morning when I wake up," she says. "My grandpa built his life from scratch, and his core values have been passed down to all of us." Caroline McGroder lives up to those values as a human-rights attorney in Phoenix. Her sister, Lizzy, the rare family member who couldn't make it this weekend, is an actor like her great aunts, as well as a model and comedian in Hollywood. All of which brings us back to Kathleen Butler. She recently wrapped up work on "Rest & Relaxation," an upcoming drama set in the Catskills. In perhaps her best-known role, she played the grown Kit Keller in 1992's "A League of Their Own." Which, come to think of it, would make a good title for a movie about the McGroders – except they actually have two leagues of their own. John MacLeod is the winningest coach in Suns' history, and he has his name on their Ring of Honor. Yes, this means Carol's husband and her father are both honored, by name, by big-league teams in different sports. "I'm the only one you'll ever know who can say that," she says. Horrigan, the Hall of Fame adviser, thinks she may be right. "It's a small club, for sure," he says. Horrigan's father was a Bills exec alongside Pat McGroder back in the day. When Jack Horrigan died at age 47 in 1973, McGroder stepped in to handle all of the arrangements. "No one asked him to do it, he just did it," Joe Horrigan says. "It lifted a burden for us. That's the kind of guy he was." When McGroder died, in 1986 at 81, Buffalo News columnist Larry Felser wrote a heartfelt tribute. The headline: "Unforgettable Pat McGroder: a Buffalo legend." The column spells out how McGroder had known most everyone in and around Buffalo – "bootleggers and bookies, pols and industrialists" – and it notes that he "treated the guys who mowed the lawn around Rich Stadium the same as he treated All-Pros." And now his descendants will descend on that stadium for a last hurrah. They'll gather in a box at the old barn and raise a glass to the man whose name is on the wall – and whose DNA they all share. Bills fans everywhere ought to toast Pat McGroder, too. His DNA is found in the founding of their team.
