Booker Edgerson Celebrates 85th Birthday

That’s what Booker Edgerson did 60 years ago, when the Buffalo Bills won their first back-to-back American Football League championships.

Today, Booker turns 85. Where has the time gone? Fugit irreparable tempusas Virgil says. (Not Stephan Virgil, who was briefly a Bills cornerback, but Virgil the Roman poet.)

It’s Latin for “time flies irretrievably.” We’ve shortened that, over time, to fleeting time.

How fast could Booker fly? Well, the story goes that he’s the only defender to ever catch Lance Alworth from behind. The agile flanker played for the San Diego Chargers in the AFL era, when Booker was the Bills’ cornerback. The Bills beat the Chargers in the 1964 and 1965 AFL championship games. (Alworth missed the 1964 title game with a knee injury; in the 1965 rematch, Booker held the future Hall of Famer to four receptions for 82 yards.)

Over the next six decades, Booker has become one of Buffalo’s most prominent citizens. Although he was born in Arkansas on July 5, 1939, and raised in Illinois, he is now a Buffalo citizen through and through. He has served as an administrator for Erie County’s CETA employment program, as director of equity and diversity at Erie Community College, and as a leader of the Buffalo Bills Alumni Foundation, which has raised more than $2.7 million for local causes.

Booker was an eight-year veteran when O.J. Simpson arrived in Buffalo in 1969. The passage of time is the theme of “O.J.: Education of a Rich Rookie,” written in Simpson’s voice by sportswriter Pete Axthelm. The book details the disagreements between the Bills’ veterans and rookies during the 1969 season.

“I had considered Booker, who was 30, to be a member of the Bills’ old guard, and I didn’t expect to become too close to him,” Simpson says in the book. “Yet as the season went on, we spent more and more time together, and I realized that when Booker was 60, he would still be an open-minded young man.”

The two men remained friends over time. Booker had planned a trip to see his former teammate in Las Vegas in May, but Simpson died in April at age 76 of prostate cancer — a disease Booker beat twice, 17 years apart. (He founded Cure the Blue, a local prostate cancer awareness group that raises money for research.)

Booker was so fond of keeping track of time that he often wore a watch during games and practices. He had picked up the habit at Western Illinois University, where two-hour practices sometimes stretched into two and a half hours. Booker would point to his watch at the two-hour mark and say, “It’s time to finish.” Did we mention the coach was Lou Saban?

Booker continued to wear his watch on the field with Saban’s Bills. That’s now against NFL rules, as Odell Beckham Jr. found out when he wore a watch in his first game with the Cleveland Browns in 2019. It was an RM 11-03 McLaren Automatic Flyback Chronograph, worth more than $350,000.

“I wore a Timex,” Booker says. “I think it cost me $35.”

He didn’t always check his Timex during nights out, though. Closing time? Sometimes he partied past closing time.

“At first his casual, almost indifferent attitude toward football put me off,” Simpson’s book on Booker recounts, “but I later realized that he simply regarded the game as what he thought it should be: great fun.”

Booker thinks it’s unfair to call him “disinterested,” but he doesn’t dispute the idea that he often sought pleasure. On a road trip to Kansas City, he bought a half-dozen bottles of liquor the night before the game because he planned to stay the next day to visit his cousins.

Booker was in the hotel lobby around 8 p.m. Saturday night when he saw Bills owner Ralph Wilson looking upset at the front desk. Booker approached to ask what was wrong. It turned out that Kansas City’s blue laws at the time prohibited the purchase of alcohol by the bottle on Sundays — a ban that had begun at 6 p.m. the day before, according to Booker. Wilson said he had invited Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt and others to his suite for drinks, and now had nothing to offer them.

“What kind of whiskey do you want?” Booker asked. Wilson said he preferred vodka. Booker went up to his room and brought back an unopened bottle. Wilson insisted on paying for it. Booker wouldn’t hear of it. And they laughed about it for years.

“At one point I was talking to Booker about the future,” Simpson recounts in his book. “He told me that the pace of his life would probably shorten his career. ‘But I’d rather play a few less years and enjoy it,’ he said, ‘than stay until I’m 36 and live like a monk.'”

Booker actually retired at age 31. The Bills had traded him to Denver, where he played several games for the Broncos in 1970 before a knee injury ended his football career, something a monastic life couldn’t have prevented.

He could have gone anywhere after that. He came back to Buffalo and never left us.

Or, as the familiar saying goes: time flies when you’re having fun.

And who had more fun here than Booker Tyrone Edgerson?