Football fan’s quest helps him to savor his fading sight

His visit to Buffalo on Saturday, strangely enough, began with a vision.

Patrick Yarber had been a sports junkie since his childhood without ever playing in an official game. His career was limited to pickup football and road hockey with his friends, athletic accomplishments that literally and figuratively came to a close in the 1970s on his dead-end street in Dearborn Heights, Mich.

Sports for him drowned in the family gene pool, a great injustice for a football lover who grew to 6-foot-6 and 280 pounds. His mother passed along retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that ultimately stole his peripheral vision. His father handed down macular degeneration, which over the years took away much of his central vision.

Yarber these days is left with little in between other than diminished sight and a heightened passion for sports. Hes 53 years old, a single man with a single mission since his disability forced him into premature retirement from a collection agency. His fiercest opponent is time, a race between his eyes and the clock. It gets worse every day, he said.

Yarber has 20 percent vision, but to view him as a legally blind man is failing to see the big picture. Hes determined to maximize every game while he can, which is what led him to Section 104, Row P, Seat 24 in UB Stadium, an hour before kickoff.

Buffalo beat Stony Brook, 26-23, in five overtimes in an unsightly demonstration of football to be sure. The numbers on the scoreboard and quality of play mattered little to Yarber, who was more concerned with No. 121, or the total number of venues he has visited in the Football Bowl Subdivision out of 125 schools.

He arrived after packing his walking cane and binoculars for a solo trip to remember. He booked a room for two nights at the Red Roof Inn, keeping with low-budget crash pads that allow him to continue crisscrossing the country in a quest to hit every Division I-A stadium. Hes going to the Bills-Panthers game today.

Every morning I wake up and look to my right in my bedroom, and I can see the sun coming through the blinds, I close my fist and raise it in the air, he said. Im so thankful for the vision that I have. I know there are people who have it worse than me. Im very blessed to have had vision for 53 years.

Yarber has kept stubs from every game, hundreds over the past 35 years. He records a synopsis of each contest and a travel log that includes 1,137 flights.

Its not just college football that draws his attention. He has attended games in 60 NHL venues more than 800 games in all as a longtime Predators season-ticket holder despite rarely seeing the puck. In fact, one of his prized possessions is a typed letter on Sabres letterhead from late, great play-by-play man Ted Darling, who invited Yarber into the press box during a game in 1988.

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Football fan’s quest helps him to savor his fading sight