Voice of the Bills, John Murphy, who suffered a stroke last season, opens up in new book

John Murphy, the voice of the Buffalo Bills, was slurring his words. He had trouble holding a napkin. And his face felt funny.

Those were the first signs of a stroke he suffered last New Year’s Eve, and it still keeps him from the broadcast booth as a new season beckons.

Bills fans can’t hear Murphy call games just now, but they can hear from him — in his new book. It comes out on Sept. 12, one day after the Bills open at the New York Jets.

“If These Walls Could Talk: Stories from the Buffalo Bills Sideline, Locker Room, and Press Box” is a marvelous compendium of Bills lore. Murphy is an insider’s insider, and he tells lots of stories you don’t know about players you do. We’ll get to a few of those tales. First, though, we offer what Murphy tells of his own story, which poignantly wraps into Damar Hamlin’s.

The Christmas blizzard in Buffalo bollixed the holiday plans of John Murphy and Mary Travers Murphy, as it did to so many other Western New York families. John and Mary didn’t get to celebrate Christmas with their sons, and their sons' families, until New Year’s Eve.

“We had a full house, and after the party commenced, I was feeling kind of strange,” Murphy writes. “Yes, I’d imbibed a few beers, but I hadn’t overdone it by any means. I started slurring my words a bit, which wasn’t like me at all, but I thought nothing of it. I was also having difficulty holding on to a napkin. Oddly, it kept falling out of my hands.

“As the night went on, I continued having occasional problems articulating and holding onto things, and my face started feeling funny on my right side. Mary and others were concerned. They wanted me to go to the hospital, but I stubbornly kept telling them I was fine.”

This was Saturday night. The next day, Murphy was supposed to be on the Bills’ flight to Cincinnati for the Monday night game against the Bengals.

“This was clearly the most anticipated regular-season game in more than a quarter-century, and I was fired up, just like the players, coaches, and fans,” Murphy writes. “And the more I studied the game, the more I liked Buffalo’s chances.”

When Murphy awoke on Sunday — New Year’s Day — he felt worse than he had the night before. He called his producer and said that he couldn’t make the flight and would drive himself to Cincinnati on Monday, in plenty of time for the broadcast of that night’s game. But as Sunday wore on, Murphy felt even worse. At around 4 p.m., he finally stopped being pigheaded — his word — and allowed Mary to drive him to the Gates Vascular Institute at Buffalo General Medical Center.

“The instant I showed up, the nurses picked up on the warning signs,” Murphy writes. “They could see I had suffered a stroke and sprang into action. The first thing they did was get my blood pressure under control because there was concern it could ignite another stroke. A lot of what happened that day remains hazy, kind of a blur. I was having trouble speaking and had some paralysis on my right side.”

Seeing Damar Hamlin collapse

He was in intensive care for about 36 hours. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to watch the Bills-Bengals game on Monday night; he was depressed at not being there. But his sons, Mark and Jack, urged their father to watch. They thought it would be good for him.

Then, with about six minutes left in the first quarter, Hamlin collapsed with cardiac arrest after making a tackle.

“It was very emotional watching that unfold, and it was probably even tougher for me than others because it struck close to home given what I was going through,” Murphy writes. “As I watched the first responders attend to him, I couldn’t help but cry. It was too much for me to handle. I eventually decided I couldn’t watch it anymore. Like everyone else, I went to sleep that night wondering if Hamlin was going to make it.

“Miraculously, he did, and it’s been wonderful to see him recover the way he has and to see so many people around the world rally around him. Although his situation is different from mine, I have taken inspiration from it. Miracles happen. He’s living proof.”

This is recounted in Chapter 18, “Believing in Miracles.” Murphy tells of all the good wishes he got from near and far, including a handwritten note from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. He tells of the physical therapists and speech pathologists who are helping him mend. And he tells of Bud Carpenter, the former Bills athletic trainer, who lives not far from Murphy in Orchard Park, where the Bills play.

“Unbeknownst to me, he suffered a stroke, too, not long after he retired from the Bills in 2018,” Murphy writes. “After hearing my news, Bud reached out and visited me. During his 33 years working with NFL players, he developed a deep understanding of the psychological challenges one faces during rehabilitation from injury or illness. These challenges can be as daunting as the physical and mental hurdles. And having experienced a stroke himself, he could relate to me on a level others couldn’t.”

Murphy tells how Carpenter always had a 24-hour rule for injured players. He allowed them to vent and feel sorry for themselves for one full day. Then he told them that they had to move on in order to move forward. And now he told Murphy the same.

“It made perfect sense intellectually, but emotionally it’s not easy,” Murphy writes. “One of the most frustrating and depressing things about stroke rehab is that progress can be incredibly slow. There are days when you feel like you are running in place or going backward. Things you took for granted no longer come naturally and easily to you.”

Born to be the Voice of the Bills

Chris Brown has worked as the Bills’ play-by-play voice since Murphy’s stroke. Brown will start the season in that role, though the Bills have left the door open should Murphy be ready to return next season, or even at some later point this season.

Murphy and his co-author, Scott Pitoniak, began work on this book about a year before his stroke. “If These Walls Could Talk” is a series of books about pro sports teams written by longtime insiders of each team. Pitoniak asked Murphy to be the main author of the Bills edition — and it was an inspired choice. The book gives a clear-eyed view of all the major names in Bills history. And some of the stories Murphy tells are hilarious. (We’re talking the time in 1982 when linebacker Jim Haslett hung up on all the callers on Murphy’s radio show with f-bombs bursting in air — though not on air, thankfully.)

The book was 90 percent completed by the time Murphy suffered the stroke. The authors’ hope was that the Bills would win last season’s Super Bowl. What could be a happier happy ending than that? “Of course, that didn’t happen,” Pitoniak says.

He calls himself the sherpa who guided Murphy up the mountain. They met once or twice a week for five months to produce the book. (Eric Wood, who serves as color commentator on the Bills broadcasts, wrote the foreword. Marv Levy, pater familias of the franchise, wrote the afterword.)

“It was a true labor of love,” Pitoniak says. “We have parallel careers. Murph started as color commentator on Bills games in 1984. I began covering the team in 1985” for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

The throughline of the book is how John Murphy was born to be the Voice of the Bills. (Murphy says in the introduction that Van Miller, the team’s original play-by-play man, will always be the Voice of the Bills to him.)

“I told him, ‘John, you are Buffalo through and through,’ " Pitoniak says. "'You get it. You understand what it is to be a Bills fan because you were born one.' "

The opening lines of Chapter 2 tell how being born in Lockport, 25 miles northeast of Buffalo, helped Murph immeasurably as a Bills broadcaster: “I learned at an early age what makes us tick, what we’re all about. So when I’m announcing games, I definitely know who I’m speaking to because I’m one of them and have been all my life. … I hail from a large Irish Catholic family. I like to kid that my parents, Matt and Lucille, were pros at procreation. They had nine kids in all. I was in the middle of the litter.”

The first Bills game Murph ever saw in person was the AFL championship game, Chiefs at Bills, on Jan. 1, 1967, for the right to play in Super Bowl I. “This was like Christmas morning, Easter Sunday, the Fourth of July and several other holidays all rolled into one,” he writes.

Kansas City won that day, 31-7. “As we walked out, I was crestfallen like everyone else. But I also couldn’t wait to experience another Bills football game at War Memorial. Despite the disappointing, lopsided outcome, that day cemented my love for the team and my desire to keep coming back for more. I was hooked. For life.”

The Bills didn’t get to that first Super Bowl. By the time they got to four consecutive ones, in the 1990s, Murphy was Van Miller’s color guy. He succeeded Miller in 2003. And now Bills fans everywhere long for the day when Murphy can get back to the broadcast booth.

He writes in the book’s intro that his dream is to be able to say over the airwaves some day: “The Buffalo Bills are Super Bowl champions!” He comes back to that at the end of the chapter about his stroke, where he says he uses that dream as a carrot he dangles in front of himself, motivation to work ever harder on his recovery.

“Maybe I’ll be fortunate enough to return to the booth and say those words; maybe I won’t,” Murph writes. “Maybe the Bills will finally hoist the Lombardi Trophy; maybe they won’t. But this much is certain: we’re going to keep trying because that’s what Buffalonians do.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: John Murphy, Voice of Bills recovering from a stroke, opens up in book