The streak had one really close call. Joanie Podkowinski DeKoker doesn’t remember exactly what year it was, only that it was a day or two before a game and she was feeling lousy and her good friend, Captain Buffalo, had a suggestion as they sat together at the Big Tree Inn in Orchard Park:
“Arrive late, stay in a heated car, bring a thermos of tea, slide into the stadium to see just a few plays, then head into a warm bed and get healthier.”
DeKoker listened. In a way just a little similar to how Buffalo’s Josh Allen took a single snap in the win against the Jets last week to keep alive his streak of consecutive starts as quarterback, DeKoker made it inside for kickoff at that long-ago Bills game at Highmark Stadium. She was ready to leave after a few plays to head home and to rest up in Camillus, but if you know her, this will not surprise you:
Once she was there, she stayed.
Sunday, when DeKoker takes her seat in Jacksonsville’s EverBank Stadium for the Bills-Jaguars playoff showdown, it will mark her 259th consecutive Bills game as a spectator, both home and away, including playoffs.
“Joanie is just like the sun rising,” wrote Captain Buffalo in a long text message, describing their friendship – and the way she always shows up. The captain is a schoolteacher from somewhere beyond Albany who paints his face in Bills colors, wears shades above a horned bison hat and does not casually reveal his true identity, though you will find him in the heart of the hubbub before most Buffalo games.
“Each Bills game, you know she will be there cheering (for) her team,” the captain wrote. “If she isn’t, something has gone terribly wrong.”
Every autumn, for Buffalo home games, DeKoker — a retired pharmacist who lives in Camillus — makes the roughly 155-mile drive to tailgate in Hammer’s Lot in Orchard Park, a privately operated lot near the stadium, before going inside for kickoff. She is within the absolute core of Bills loyalists who now attract international attention, a status elevated even more by the way she travels to every away game.
DeKoker is also a close friend of “Pinto Ron” — real name Ken Johnson — the Rochester guy whose own consecutive game streak is well beyond 500. He is a tailgating legend, his nickname based on the ancient Ford Pinto at the heart of his famous pre-game celebration, where he is renowned for his whole-body spectacle of receiving mustard and ketchup showers — though he is now a little choosier about, well, the when and why of how they happen.
In an unforgettable way, DeKoker was also close to the late Ezra Castro. He was known internationally as “Pancho Billa,” a Texas guy in a Lucha Libre-inspired Bills outfit whose devotion to the team made him a beloved figure, even before he was elevated into a Western New York icon by his soul and grace when he was ill with the cancer that took his life.
“I loved him,” said Joanie, who continues to raise money for the college funds for Gino and Lourdes, the two children of Castro and his longtime companion, Roni Borjon.
It was Castro who began calling DeKoker “Mama J” — understanding that while she had no kids at home, the way she treated Castro, Borjon and their children went beyond being simply supportive and felt far more intensely caring and maternal, a point that Captain Buffalo makes as well.
In short: The relentlessly joyous DeKoker, her home base in greater Syracuse, is at the absolute high-profile nerve center of the tightknit international community of Bills fans. When a Patriots loyalist named Justo traveled from New England to Orchard Park before last month’s Eagles game, on a specific mission — he had thought for a long time about collecting the autographs of Buffalo tailgating legends, on a Bills cap — DeKoker’s was among the signatures he wanted most.
She was around long before anyone coined the phrase “Bills Mafia,” though now she is certainly a major symbolic figure. During her 1960s childhood, her Buffalo-raised dad, Steve Podkowinski, the son of Polish immigrants, would take her to games at the old War Memorial Stadium — “The Rockpile” — on Buffalo’s Jefferson Avenue.
Her folks, in Cheektowaga, immersed their three children in Buffalo culture — including routine shopping trips to the landmark Broadway Market. The family left for Camillus when DeKoker was 13 and NiMo transferred her dad to Syracuse, the company headquarters — she remembers, exactly, that the move occurred on July 15, 1970 — but her loyalty to the Bills only amplified.
DeKoker attended a preseason game with her father in the year the old Rich Stadium — now called Highmark — opened in 1973. Fifty-two years later, she was in that same structure last Sunday with her sister and fellow season ticket holder, Susan Podd of Camillus, for the regular season finale against the Jets — probably the last time football will be played be in that stadium, since a new one is almost finished, across the street.
Throughout the Jets game, the emotion gradually built up for DeKoker, who knew thousands around her were feeling the same aching wistfulness. The stadium was about her folks, about childhood, about the things you someday leave and the things you never give up.
“At the end of the game,” DeKoker said, “when they played ‘What a Wonderful World,’ I started crying.”
Her sister Susan is a devout Bills fan in her own right. She and DeKoker already have their season tickets lined up for when the new stadium opens in late summer.
Yet Susan, with admiration, said her sister takes team loyalty to a celestial level. The streak is the ultimate statement. DeKoker — who wears Bills-themed clothing at home, basically every day — has a specific Bills outfit that she prefers to wear to games, topped off by her emblematic red Bills cowboy hat, almost entirely covered in pins related to the team.
“I just feel destined,” DeKoker said, “to be part of it.”
Susan also knows the story of how Joanie slipped and fell on the ice on a Saturday night in 2019. DeKoker painfully banged up her arm, attended a game against New England the next day…
And found out, when she went to the doctor’s afterward, the arm was broken.
“She is definitely the biggest fan the Bills have,” Susan said — and she means it when she says it.
DeKoker has watched with appreciation as passion for the team in Central New York gradually climbed into a regional embrace. Greater Syracuse, she said, was New York Giants country when her family arrived, 55 years ago. She remembers her dad fighting through static in search of Bills games, on the radio.
The Super Bowl years of the 1990s were the start of a dramatic CNY shift toward the Bills orbit. Beginning in the late 2010s, Josh Allen and company accelerated that process in a big way, though DeKoker has a theory on the deeper reasons for that allegiance.
“When I was little,” DeKoker said, “football created great unity between the Bills and the city of Buffalo.” As she grew up, she began to understand how her parents saw their own experience as intertwined with the team, a shared perspective that meshed with the soulful bedrock of an underdog civic identity.
The story of greater Buffalo — an industrial city that went through difficult times, tried reflexive remedies that didn’t work and is finally reemerging as a 21st century community far more aware of its own innate strength and beauty — is a tale similar to the saga of countless Upstate cities and villages.
Somehow the sprawling Bills fan base throughout the region and the country ties together that shared theme, which DeKoker describes in this way:
“The Bills are Buffalo, and Buffalo is us.”
However you feel those words, she is at the absolute heart of it.
DeKoker is no fan of cold weather, which — considering she has been on hand for some of the snowiest games the National Football League has ever seen — might seem surprising. But a big part of her Upstate journey is that she left for a warmer spot, than came back for something that mattered more.
After high school at West Genesee, DeKoker attended pharmacy school at the University at Buffalo. She moved to California at 23, eager for year-round warmth. While she was there, she worked as a pharmacist and met her husband-to-be, David DeKoker. She also began attending almost every game the Bills played on the West Coast, and she traveled to all four Buffalo Super Bowl defeats in the 1990s.
That Buffalo fidelity achieved an even higher space more than 20 years ago, when DeKoker returned to Camillus to help care for her ailing mom, a role she followed with devotion until Jean Podkowinski’s death in 2019. DeKoker’s husband supported that decision but stayed in California, and the couple now live what DeKoker calls a “bicoastal life.”
Back in Camillus, she and Susan bought their side-by-side Bills season tickets. DeKoker also began traveling to many road games, where she soon became friends with “Pinto Ron,” whose own streak of consecutive Bills games will reach 522 in Jacksonville. He was the guy, noting that she was almost always around, who suggested:
Why don’t you just come whenever and wherever the Bills play?
More than 250 straight Bills game later, here she is.
“Joanie’s a real personality,” said Pinto Ron, which — going by everyone surrounding him — is saying something. He’s spiritual leader of a Hammer’s Lot world in which grilling food sizzles on his old Pinto, while pilgrims drink shots from the finger holes of a bowling ball and the roaming crowd includes bison-inspired legions in wildly costumed variations of body paint, masks, fur and horns.
DeKoker has crossed paths with many players from the team, familiar with her as “the lady in the red hat.” Like the rest of the Bills galaxy, she has an almost parental love for Josh Allen, whom she has met a couple of times. That includes the unforgettable night when Ezra Castro, in treatment for cancer, addressed the team and invited her to be there.
Allen’s response to Castro, the quarterback’s I-fully-see-you-in-this-moment warmth, cemented DeKoker’s feeling that Allen is — above all else — a kind and empathetic human being.
She never takes for granted the Bills success of the last nine years. She vividly remembers the grim years of the team’s long playoff drought, the annual ritual of cheering for a squad whose seasons would usually flicker with brief hope and then abruptly turn to ash, and how it felt like “we were always going to be that way.”
Now, DeKoker — though she does not ever want to get in front of herself — quietly dreams this game in Jacksonville might be the first step toward the great communal goal:
Finally, for the Bills, a Super Bowl championship.
She wants it in memory of her folks, and she wants it for Castro and Borjon and for their kids. She wants it for her sister and for all her relatives and for the friends in Bills regalia she greets each week at Hammer’s Lot or on the road, these people whose sheer devotion created its own kind of national celebrity, though “Mama J” sees the whole phenomenon they represent far more simply:
“I call them family now,” she said by phone, on the way to Jacksonville.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
Sean Kirst: Straight from Camillus, ‘Mama J’ earns her place among greatest Bills fans of them all
Joanie Podkowinski DeKoker will mark her 259th straight Bills game in Jacksonville — while sharing the playoff dream every Bills fan knows so well.
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