This is Super Bowl week, so naturally Jim Ritcher’s thoughts drift to the four he played in for the Buffalo Bills.
“I have nothing but fond memories,” he says. “I wish we would have won one of them, but it’s a great honor and privilege to have played in four of them. I look back with fond memories of all my years with the Bills.”
Ritcher and his wife, Harriet, throw a big party each Super Sunday for as many as 50 guests at their home in Raleigh, N.C.. They met at North Carolina State, when she was a cheerleader and he was the Outland Trophy winner as college football’s best offensive lineman.
Their Super Bowl parties typically feature theme foods from the competing cities and the host city — so this time maybe Cuban food from Miami, barbecue from Kansas City, and seafood from San Francisco.
Will Ritcher regale family and friends with stories from his four Super Bowls in the 1990s?
“I try not to,” he says.
This is typical of a modest man who is one of just five offensive linemen on the Bills Wall of Fame. Ritcher doesn’t dwell much on his days as an All-Pro. You might even say he doesn’t have his head in the clouds — except that in a literal sense he actually does.
Ritcher is a pilot for American Airlines. In 14 seasons with the Bills, he blocked for runners from Joe Cribbs to Thurman Thomas. But Ritcher left the ground game behind long ago. These days he is all about the air.
“It’s something I love to do,” he says, “and something I wanted to do since I was little.”
His affinity for flight goes back to boyhood, when his father would take him from their home in suburban Cleveland to air shows in Dayton, where the Wright brothers got the airline industry off the ground.
“My first trip in an airplane was when I got recruited to play at NC State,” Ritcher says. “I always dreamed what it would feel like to come off the earth and fly.”
He didn't go up in a small plane until Bills quarterback Joe Ferguson took him from Buffalo Airpark (now Buffalo Airfield) when they were teammates. Fergy let Ritcher have a turn in the pilot’s seat — and he was hooked.
“That’s when it hit me,” Ritcher says. “Now I had the means to take flying lessons.”
Harriet got him those lessons for Christmas. He took his first class in January 1986, and when he retired, 10 years later, he started his second career. He’s 61 now and plans to fly for American until mandatory retirement age, 65.
He’s off this week but often flies from Charlotte to Frankfurt, Germany, on Tuesdays with a stay in the quaint city of Mainz, on the Rhine River, on Wednesdays. Then it’s a return trip to Charlotte on Thursdays.
Ritcher likes flying a midweek schedule because he always wants to be home Monday evenings (for Bible study, where he is a group leader) and Saturday mornings (when he meets with other facilitators, a term he prefers to group leaders). He worships on Sundays at Christ Baptist Church in Raleigh.
Sept. 11, 2001, was a day for prayer. Ritcher had flown from Los Angeles or San Francisco (he can’t remember which) to New York on Sept. 10. He was supposed to get home to North Carolina that afternoon, but thunderstorms delayed his flight until 11 p.m. He distinctly remembers taking off from LaGuardia as a passenger that night and looking out the window at the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
“They were all lit up and just beautiful,” Ritcher says, “and it really hit me and I said (to a seatmate), ‘That’s the prettiest I’ve ever seen it.’ ”
The next morning his mother called and woke him with news of the terrorist attacks.
Ritcher has three sons, all of whom were born in Buffalo. John played tight end at NC State and is a national scout for the Houston Texans. Harrison played fullback at NC State and is a regional scout for the Washington NFL team. And Nick played left tackle at Richmond and is a warehouse manager who would also like to get into football scouting.
Given his son John’s employ, for whom did Ritcher root when the Bills and Texans met in the playoffs? “I watched it at my son’s house,” he says. “Let’s just say I rooted quietly.”
Ritcher once owned a private plane and hopes to have another someday.
“Every time I talk about getting another airplane, my wife turns on the garbage disposal,” he says. “And when it’s grinding she says, ‘That’s the sound of our money going down the drain.’ ”
Ritcher left the Bills after the fourth Super Bowl and played the last two of his 16 NFL seasons with the Atlanta Falcons.
“I love the Buffalo fans,” he says. “Not to put anything on Atlanta, but to go from Buffalo — not anywhere near the size of Atlanta — where they filled up an 80,000-seat stadium Sunday after Sunday, and go to Atlanta, where we had a 67,000-seat stadium and we’d draw 42,000, it just wasn’t the same.”
Ritcher’s first game in the NFL, in 1980, came on the day the Bills beat the Dolphins for the first time in 20 games and Buffalo fans tore down the goalposts. His last game came in a wild-card playoff in Green Bay when his Falcons lost to the Packers.
“I remember pulling into the parking lot that day and seeing all the tailgating and fans in their colors in the freezing cold,” Ritcher says, “and it just reminded me so much of Buffalo.”
Story topics: Bills alumni/ Jim Ritcher
![[BN] The Buffalo News](https://web.archive.org/web/20200129224910im_/https://s3.amazonaws.com/email-campaign/tbn/%5BBN%5D-white.png)
Share this article