Random Access

There are football fans and then there was Fred Dorrington.
Fred lived and died every Sunday with his Buffalo Bills.
A former season ticket holder, Dorrington rode through the good teams and the bad, suffering the indignity of four straight Super Bowl losses and just kept on cheering, as every true fan must.
He was still cheering from his hospital bed in the Trillium Health Centre this season, even though two strokes and a tracheotomy rendered that support silent for the first time.
At least the Bills won for him on the last Sunday of his life.
Dorrington, 65, died last night and the people who work at The Mississauga News, and people in the real estate business in this town who knew him and respected him, are in mourning today.
Fred and I were part of an exclusive little club at The News — former employees of The Mississauga Times who moved over here when Torstar closed the wrong paper in 1981 after the two suburban GTA chains merged. Our club was four strong yesterday. Today we are three.
I’m told Fred was a true professional at his job in the real estate section upstairs. If he attacked that with the same passion he brought to cheering his football team, it’s no wonder.
Ninety per cent of the conversations we ever had were held in the parking lot, quick exchanges of vital information about the (mis)fortunes of his Bills and my Browns, conversations filled with misplaced hope in the future.
Fred started the weekly NFL pool at the paper — which still brings a little relief from the long grind — and was a founding member of the Timbers Football League, a fantasy league to which several of us are deeply addicted.
Fred and another former sales rep here, Gerry Telford, a Miami Dolphins fan were partners the first year in that pool. Later Fred got his own team called The Chicken Wings in honour of you-know-who.
That inaugural year, Dorrington and Telford’s joint team was called the Billyfish. Billy for the Bills and Fish for the mammals of Miami.
When informed of Fred’s death today, Telford had a fitting suggestion for the fantasy logo of the long-forgotten Billyfish: “The logo is something like a Dolphin riding a Buffalo with a mustache, wearing a tweed jacket and tie, beer in one hand and a Go Bills flag in the other.”
I’m taking Buffalo and the field goal on the road against the Jets this week Fred, and your team better be good for it.