20-Year Wait: Redskins' fan now has season tickets

CHARLOTTE

In 1989, when he was 9 years old, Norris Adams had a feverish love for the Washington Redskins.

At a Redskins home game he attended that season, he persuaded his parents to put him on the NFL team's waiting list to buy season tickets.

Twenty years later, Adams is a 29-year-old lawyer in Charlotte. He recently received a burgundy envelope with the word "CONGRATULATIONS" in golden type.

Adams had finally made it to the top of the Redskins' list. According to the team, more than 200,000 people are in line behind him.

Fortunately -- or perhaps unfortunately, if you are his wife -- the Redskins fever that struck Norris Adams as a child never cooled. He's the one person in his law office who doesn't cheer for the Carolina Panthers. He has a "Redskins room" in his house. He went by himself to Canton, Ohio, in 2008 to witness the induction of former Redskins Art Monk and Darrell Green into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

"And I cried like a baby," Adams said.

Adams once even owned a replica Redskins jersey of Heath Shuler, the disappointing Redskins quarterback who became a U.S. congressman from North Carolina.

"Yes, I was the guy who bought one," Adams said.

So the fact that Charlotte is 400 miles from Washington wasn't going to pose a problem. That the Redskins guarantee Adams' seats would be among the worst seats at 92,000-seat FedEx Field didn't matter. (At least the seats will cost only around $50 per ticket).

And the fact that Adams or anyone else could immediately buy season tickets from the Carolina Panthers -- the Panthers have 1,800 of those for sale in the upper deck, as long as you plunk down $3,000 a seat to purchase the permanent-seat license first -- couldn't entice Adams, either. He bleeds burgundy.

Julie Adams, his wife, said with a weary laugh, "As Norris has tried to explain it to me, this season ticket opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and it's going to change our lives forever."

At 6-foot-4 and 280 pounds with a dirty-blond goatee, Adams looks like a reserve defensive tackle himself. But he's usually no match for his wife, he said, and it took him awhile to wear her down. He had to promise her that every time they traveled to Washington, she got to pick where they stayed and everything else they did besides the game. He tried to convince her that Redskins seats were a bargain since they didn't require a seat license like Panthers' season tickets do.

On March 31, 2009, at 10:39 p.m., she finally gave him the go-ahead to put down a deposit on the tickets.

"He's a good litigator," said Julie Adams, who would know since she's also a lawyer.

Although the Adamses' season-ticket tale is extreme, it may sound familiar. There are still thousands of Redskins fans in the Carolinas and have been for generations. UNC Chapel Hill star Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice used to draw trainloads from the Carolinas to watch him play for the Redskins back in the early 1950s.

Always popular in the Carolinas, the Redskins -- who played their first game in Washington in 1937 -- used to dominate the Carolinas' NFL market.

"All my buddies are Panther fans," Adams said. "I get a lot of ‘Well, I was a Redskin fan until the Panthers moved here.' But I never changed." The Panthers began play in 1995.

Under head coach and current Charlotte resident Joe Gibbs, the Redskins won three Super Bowls following the 1982, '87 and '91 seasons. That's when the team's season-ticket waiting list exploded.

Karl Swanson, a Redskins spokesman said: "During those Super Bowl years, the list just kept getting bigger. And there was hardly any turnover. All of our home games have been sold out since 1966. Every year, 97-98 percent of the season ticket-holders renew their tickets."

The Panthers have a 95-96 percent renewal rate, a team spokesman said, but no season-ticket waiting list.

In 1987, Sports Illustrated published a story that said at the rate Redskin fans were currently moving up the waiting list, a new prospective buyer would have to wait 353 years -- yes, 353 -- to get to the head of the line. Swanson noted that Redskin fans frequently signed up their newborn babies then, hoping their children would live long enough to get to the front.

"And then," Adams said, "came the 1990s. And the 2000s."

Two factors combined to make the wait a bit more realistic. The Redskins have been a mediocre team for most of the past two decades, which has caused some of their more casual fans to drop off the bandwagon.

More significantly, in 1997, the team moved from RFK Stadium to what is now called FedEx Field, increasing the number of people who could go to a Redskins game from 56,000 at RFK to around 92,000 now.

Adams was never told how close he was to getting near the top of the waiting list, but he never forgot he was on it.

And he never lost his passion for the Redskins -- even though he is no fan of current Redskins owner Daniel Snyder -- while growing up mostly in Virginia Beach, Va., and Jacksonville, N.C. Adams went to Campbell for college and then to Wake Forest for law school. He usually managed to find a way to attend at least a couple of Redskins games per season.

But season tickets? That seemed like an impossible dream -- until the burgundy envelope arrived.

Adams hadn't even kept the Redskins apprised of his address or contact information, and he has no idea how they found him. He's just glad they did.