Fred worked for the pro football team that called Buffalo, New York, home. This was the perfect job for Fred, although, to be honest, Fred wasn’t much of a football fan. He didn’t know the difference between a quarterback and a tight end, he didn’t know about field goals, first downs and roughing the kicker. Oh, no. Fred didn’t know a single thing about football, never knew that one should punt when in doubt, and couldn’t care less about what may happen on any given Sunday.

Instead, Fred loved money.

You see, Fred was the paymaster for the team. Every Friday you could find Fred pushing that wheelbarrow full of cash through the locker room, giving all the football players what they had earned from the previous game. He loved the feel of the crisp, one-thousand dollar bills he gave to the quarterback, and he simply adored the scent of all the greenbacks he personally gave to the center, the tight ends and the tackles. Yes, Fred loved his job.

But handing out millions of dollars in cash to professional athletes was only one of two great joys for Fred, for Fred also loved concerts. Fred always saw Shania Twain whenever she rolled through town, and he always sat in the front row for Fleetwood Mac, Mannheim Steamroller and Cher. Yes, dishing out oodles and oodles of money to gigantic, sweaty men, and seeing a good show, like Aerosmith or George Strait, made Fred a happy boy.

Then came the day when the team’s owner called Fred into his office. “I’m sorry, Fred,” said the owner. “But we’re going to have to cut your salary. Inflation, you know. We have to give the players more money, else they won’t win anymore football games. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, now, would we?”

Fred was devastated. Sure, he still got to push the wheelbarrow full of cash through the locker room every Friday. And since all the players got raises totaling millions of dollars, one would think that Fred would be overjoyed, for he got to hand out more money to the players than ever before. Unfortunately, Fred felt as low as an opening act without a sound check, for Fred’s cut in salary kept him from buying any concert tickets. No Barenaked Ladies, no David Bowie, no Bryan Adams. Fred was a very sad boy.

Then one day while Fred was filling the wheelbarrow with cash to hand out to the players, he had an inspiration. “Nobody will notice if I take a couple of thousand-dollar bills and buy tickets for Simon & Garfunkel and Bette Midler,” Fred said to himself. “After all, they’re football players,” he reasoned. “It’s not like they can count.”

So every Friday when Fred handed out the money to the players, he pocketed a few grand for himself, and bought tickets for Jewel, Phish and Duran Duran. And sure enough, the players never noticed that they were being shorted out of thousands of dollars each and every week, for Fred was right. They couldn’t count.

But their sports agents could. And when the agents realized that their professional football-playing clients in Buffalo didn’t have enough money to pay the agents’ commissions, it didn’t take long for them to figure out the score.

Oh, Fred was scared! The sports agents chased him through the locker room, across the gridiron and into the clandestine factory where the team manufactured its secret, hi-octane sports drink that fueled Buffalo’s professional football players. And they almost caught him. That is, they would have caught him if Fred hadn’t fallen into the vat along with the animal hides, the scrap metal and the raw meat that made up the ingredients for the team’s energy beverage. Fred was doomed!

Let this be a lesson to you. Never steal from professional football players, no matter which band is coming to town, for one must use one’s own money to buy tickets for Dierks Bentley or Ben Harper. Or you might suffer the same fate as the boy who used to hand out the big bucks to the players, and be chopped, diced, minced, blended and liquefied before being poured into thousands of bottles to be distributed to the thirsty football team from Buffalo, New York.

And that, boys and girls, is the story of the Bills’ pureed dough-boy.