SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
national championship as the
quarterback at Louisiana State
University.
“Coming from southeast Ohio,
it’s a very impoverished area,” the
then-23-year-old Burrow said,
tearing up. “The poverty rate is
almost two times the national
average, and there’s so many peo-
ple there that don’t have a lot.
“I’m up here for all those kids
in Athens and in Athens County
that go home to not a lot of food
on the table, hungry after school,”
he said. Nearly half-a-million dol-
lars poured in to the local food
bank after his speech.
Now the Joe Burrow Hunger
Relief Fund at the nonprofit
Foundation for Appalachian
Ohio has surpassed $1.5 million,
with fans donating nearly
$100,000 in the days since the
Bengals clinched their Super
Bowl berth. Fans often donate in
multiples of nine — Burrow’s
jersey number, the foundation
said.
People say they like Burrow
because he’s humble and tough,
with just the right amount of
swagger. He managed to over-
come a serious knee injury in a
late-season game against the
Washington Football Team in
2020 to take his team to a 10-
record this season, surviving a
playoff game against the Tennes-
see Titans during which he was
sacked nine times. Asked by re-
porters Monday which of his
many nicknames he prefers —
“Joe Brrr” is one, also “Joe Cool”
— he said simply, “Just call me
Joe.”
At a Monday night pep rally at
Paul Brown Stadium before the
team left for Los Angeles, fans
draped themselves in fuzzy tiger-
stripe blankets, braved a wind
chill of 25 degrees and chanted
“Who dey? Who dey? Who dey
think gonna beat dem Bengals?”
(Answer: “Nobody!”) The noise
level in the stadium rose to a dull
roar when the team entered
through a cloud of fake smoke.
Burrow got the loudest cheer,
along with the chant for “MVP,
MVP,” which is what they hoped
he would be named. (He was
named “Comeback Player of the
Year” on Thursday.)
“Burrow was looking fragile,
broken, but he came back from
injury and now we’re in the Super
Bowl,” said fan Brittany Scruggs,
22, a personal trainer and Cincin-
nati resident. “It’s definitely the
year of the tiger.”him a few years back.
He endeared himself to his
home state during his speech the
night he won the Heisman trophy
in 2019 en route to winning therow led his high school team to
the state playoffs and was such a
great performer in high school
that his legend endures — they
named the football stadium forBurrow, 25, the son of a football
coach and a high school principal
who grew up a little more than
two hours away in Athens County,
in the Appalachian foothills. Bur-leave, and if we do, we don’t go far.
So it’s a prideful thing. There was
a great pride in not giving up.”
Now Cincinnati has set its
hopes for Sunday and beyond onworst times — deserves its first
Super Bowl win, the thinking
goes.
The contrast between the
teams couldn’t be more striking.
The itinerant Rams play before
celebrities like Jay-Z and Kend-
rick Lamar while their moneyed
fans sip at the champagne bar in
the new SoFi stadium.
Bengals fans, who have been
cheering for their hometown
team since 1968, guzzle beer and
eat Cincinnati chili while singing
along to Guns N’ Roses’s “Wel-
come to the Jungle,” their de facto
anthem.
“It’s the gritty underdogs going
out to L.A. to take these pretty
boys out,” said Grant, who runs a
bar, art gallery and barbershop in
town. He’s been wearing his
“Ohio Against the World” jacket
all week. “Bengals fans have been
Bengals fans forever. The Rams
just got there two days ago.” (Ac-
tually the team returned to L.A. in
2016, but you see his point.)
“Now the whole country is
rooting for us,” said Jen Hen-
schen, 46, a nurse who attended a
pep rally for the team last week.
Jim Moehring, 54, owner of the
Holy Grail sports bar downtown,
said this January was the first in a
decade that he hadn’t had to lay
off any of his kitchen staff, with
business up 200 percent during
the Bengals’ playoff run. He once
feared he might have to close
down, he said, even though the
bar is just yards from home plate
of the city’s other cathedral of
sport, the Cincinnati Reds’ sta-
dium.
Moehring was at the Bengals’
playoff game against the Raiders
and said he wept as the clock hit
zero. Mostly, he was missing his
best friend and business partner,
Tom Heitker, who died of cancer
in 2017. He, Heitker and two
other high school buddies had
season tickets to Bengals games
for years even though “every-
body would make fun of us,”
Moehring recalled. They held
onto the seats, and a rotating
cast of friends takes Heitker’s
seat in his honor.
Grant said he has been moved
watching those like his dad who
have supported the team from the
beginning finally being able to
feel the winning energy.
“This town is deeply rooted in
family and tradition,” Grant said.
“There’s a saying: ‘Cincinnati is
not a city, it’s a town.’ People who
grow up in Cincinnati rarely
P HOTOS BY RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POSTCLOCKWISE, FROM TOP: Bengals fan Trice Davie celebrates before entering Paul Brown Stadium for Monday’s pep rally. A
throng of fans at the rally awaits the team’s introduction. Garey Faulkner shows his fandom ahead of Monday’s rally.7942 Wisconsin Ave.,
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