THE HISTORY OF THE BUCS UK - 1997 ONWARDS 1997 was my intended final year of running the Bucs UK. I had already told Phil Jones of my intentions to step down and plans were in hand for the following year. But the resulting end of my marriage and the first big club trip to Tampa led to a total change of heart and the beginning of the glory days of the Buccaneers were about the begin. The new colours of pewter and red had been launched with great delight in April and there was a renewed optimism around the Bay area. Construction of the new stadium had begun next to the existing Tampa Stadium and great things were finally expected of the team. When Phil Jones, Gary Hughes, Kev Wheatley and myself arrived in Tampa, the Bucs were 3-0. We were invited to One Buc Place to meet Bryan and Joel Glazer and there began a great relationship between the Bucs UK and the new front office. We were given upgraded seats for the game and on-field passes for beforehand. Thanks to this, we got talking to Gary Imlach and led to me introducing Channel 4's coverage of the win over the Miami Dolphins. A great night was capped by a tremendous time with the guys from The Tampa Tribune which ended with us hosing down the walls of the rival St.Petersburg Times, a stunt still talked about fondly to this day. It is only a scandalous rumour that the four of us then went into The Mons Venus until around 4 in the morning! The following week, Gary and I joined Neil & Julie Ferguson in watching the Bucs go to 5-0 with a win over the Arizona Cardinals and we ended up on the front page of the following morning's Tampa Tribune. One of my proudest moments of that trip came when Trent Dilfer came over to introduce himself to us at One Buc Place and the likes of Graeme Reid were left with their jaws hanging in disbelief. 1997 saw the Bucs featured pretty frequently on Channel 4 and even on the German DSF channel too. We ended up in the playoffs for the first time since 1982 and the likes of Rob Shaw, Simon Butt and myself piled into a West London pub to watch the games against Detroit and Green Bay live. Simon and I did a great impression of 50 Buc fans in a bar from the inside of my car for Tampa radio and the club membership continued to grow. The new stadium Phil and I had promised the Glazers that we would be back for the first game in the new stadium, and there we were on September 20, 1998. Mike Newquist, the Bucs' new ticket director, did us proud with a block of seats in the very front row behind the Bucs' bench and all the great aerial pictures of that first game against the Bears show us sitting proudly in the best seats in the house. I extended my stay with Bill Thompson to the best part of three weeks and also got to see the win over the Giants the following week. 1999 gave the Bucs UK a chance to repay some of the great hospitality when Nick Pugliese came over to the UK during the off-season. We had a small club get-together in London and then Phil took him to Old Trafford to see Manchester United clinch the Premier League title against Tottenham. That night we all went out for a meal and Tony Smith met Phil's sister-in-law Kath. Two years later, they got married. The power of the Bucs UK! Phil now had the ticket arrangements under control with Mike and the Bucs UK were able to secure tickets for home games at a now-totally-soldout Raymond James Stadium. The magazine passed 150 issues and the membership went into three figures for the first time. In 2000, Bill & Linda Thompson came to the UK on a vacation and Phil and I both put them up for a week as we were able to say thankyou for their great friendship and hospitality over the years. Sky feature the Bucs UK During 2000, I was contacted by Sky's new producer of their NFL show, Karl Baumann. He wanted to do a piece about a UK fan club and naturally the Bucs UK were the prime choice. The five minute piece aired during the Bucs' playoff loss to the Eagles, a game also memorable to me as it was the day that my daughter Tanith came home from the special care unit where she had been since being born a month earlier. It is true that had she been a boy, she would have been named Trent after my favourite Bucs player! From that initial Sky piece, came my first appearance as a TV presenter as the Bucs ended their 2001 season with another loss to the Eagles. This brought some great publicity to the club at a time when we were making the biggest change in the organisation's history. For after 197 issues of There's Always Next Year, it was time to give up the magazine and switch to a website. I was totally fed up with the printing, collating, enveloping and stamping of some 150 copies of each magazine and no matter how good I made it look on my PC, it never came out as good when it was photocopied. Launching the website The first Bucs UK website was the creation of Clive Williams in January 2001. It had some basic details on the club, details of merchandise etc. I had been able to send Clive various documents and files which he converted to web format and posted on the site. It was a good start for the club on the internet but there was more to come. In November 2001, I bought myself a beginners' guide to HTML programming, the basics of web design. I quickly realised what I could achieve in this field and launched an initial fantasy league site four weeks later. The ideas for BUCPOWER.COM soon took hold and the site went live on January 5, 2002 to rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Publicity followed in the American press and the news of our site quickly spread. The initial months of the site were spent with getting the site up to speed. I wanted to build a screen for every game in Buc history and for every player in Buc history. No site, including the Buccaneers' own one could get anywhere near this detail and by the end of June, we had pretty much completed the base of the whole site. The membership cost of the Bucs UK had shrunk overnight as there were no more printing costs, and the overwhelming reaction of club members was that this was the way forward. When Phil Jones made his annual vacation to Tampa in August, he was invited to meet Malcolm Glazer at half-time of the Miami pre-season game. News of the site had gone around One Buc Place quickly, but they had not realised it was myself behind the whole project. I had changed my name during 2000 prior to Tanith being born, and hence they had thought that this was a different person running things from the UK. Phil and I were invited back over in October 2002 to meet with the front office and I was able to return with reams of information on the early years of the franchise to complete my historical research of all things Buccaneer. Two further appearances on Sky as the Bucs marched towards the post-season helped to continue to promote the club, and further features in The Tampa Tribune and The St.Petersburg Times led to nearly 40,000 hits on the site in a single month alone. I guess my reward for the work was a ticket for the Super Bowl in San Diego and I was able to watch from one of the best seats in the house, as the 20-year odyssey of patient support came to a magnificent climax as the Buccaneers became World Champions. The club celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2004 with special merchandise and the success of BUCPOWER.COM continued to grow with record hit totals coming almost every month. The site smashed the half-million hit barrier in 2004 and continued onward towards the magical million mark at an ever-increasing rate, eventually hitting the seven-figure mark just before Christmas 2005. All our game tickets for the 2005 season were upgraded by the Buccaneers to club level seating as a means of a thankyou for the loyal support, and I began a regular appearance on the Ron Diaz & Ian Beckles Show on 620 Sports Animal which gave the club and website added publicity across the Bay area. And the future? So where does the Bucs UK go from here? Our support with the Buccaneers is better than ever with my next trip having the promise of a chance to hold the Vince Lombardi Trophy with the Glazers. We have done a lot of work on the historical data on the Bucs' own site and have great ideas for continuing to improve this site still further too. One could say that the only way is downhill from here, but we have come too far over too many years to rest on our laurels now.