Superfans
Page 1
Copyright © 2018 by George Dohrmann
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780553394214
Ebook ISBN 9780553394221
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover photograph: © Edwin Tse, styling by Adaliz Tabar
v5.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1: Fan Zero
Chapter 2: Putting with PhDs
Chapter 3: What Exactly Are We Rooting For?
Chapter 4: Nature v. Nurture
Chapter 5: Members Only
Chapter 6: How to Stand Out (But Still Fit In)
Chapter 7: There’s No Place Like Home
Chapter 8: The Power of Connection
Chapter 9: Is There Such a Thing as “The Female Fan”?
Chapter 10: Delusions of Influence
Chapter 11: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Fan Scorned
Chapter 12: Breaking Away
Chapter 13: Sunday Worship
Chapter 14: Salvation Army
Chapter 15: Nevets
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
By George Dohrmann
About the Author
The idea for this book evolved over many years, but if there was a moment the seed was planted it came during my first job as a professional journalist in the summer of 1995. I was working on the copy desk of the Los Angeles Times—my title was night desk assistant—and I was tasked with doing whatever the actual copy editors didn’t want to do. Mostly, I answered the phones. Calls poured in from fans of the Dodgers and the Angels and of the Lakers and the Clippers (those poor souls), USC and UCLA supporters, devotees of the Kings of the National Hockey League, and others. This was before chat rooms and message boards, eons before Twitter and Facebook. People needed an outlet for their thoughts about their favorite teams, for their gripes about a rival, so they called the Times between three p.m. and midnight, asked for the sports desk, and got me.
My job, as explained by my bosses, was to shut up and listen. These were readers who were calling, subscribers, and the Times wanted to keep them reading and subscribing. So I listened to people grumble about the Dodgers’ bullpen, about the Lakers’ sorry defense, about how USC football got more favorable coverage than UCLA’s team, about how columnists at the Times were biased against the Angels, and more. Day after day, hour after hour, I listened to whatever these sports fans wanted to say. Sometimes, I couldn’t stay silent and debated with them about whether Magic Johnson was superior to Larry Bird, offered my two cents on which of John Wooden’s UCLA teams was the best or who should be USC’s starting quarterback. Occasionally, they’d get angry at something I said. They’d yell. I’d yell. It was great fun for the veterans working on the copy desk when the lowly desk assistant lost his cool.
I held that job for nearly two years, and during that time I probably talked to more sports fans than anyone at the Times. I learned how passionate they were, the depths of their devotion. I experienced how their love for a team and its players shifted, how firm and tenuous it could be all at once. I listened as people conveyed a relationship with a team, with its players and coaches and owner, that was, in their minds, intimate and special.
Familiarity doesn’t always breed clarity. As I listened and listened to these fans, I never fully understood their behavior. I didn’t know how they had become such diehards, or what fandom brought to their lives. I didn’t know why they would call a stranger to debate some unanswerable question, why they would lock on to notions about their team or a rival that were clearly untrue. I recognized some of their behavior as my own—I too was an intense fan of some teams (including the San Francisco Giants, leading to many heated debates with the devoted Dodgers fans on the copy desk)—so my blindness to the root causes of their thinking and conduct was also ignorance about myself.
In the more than two decades since my stint answering phones in Los Angeles, sports fans and sports fandom has undergone a sea change. Fans are interconnected over social media and other digital outlets, their thoughts shareable with thousands of others in an instant. No longer anonymous, fans (and fan groups) are now powerful voices, famous (and infamous) as tweeters (e.g. @fauxPelini, a Nebraska fan with 472,000 followers), as posters on popular message boards, and as callers in to radio shows (such as those hosted by Paul Finebaum and Jim Rome). The importance of having allegiance to a sports team has been reinforced and heightened, to the point that it comes up on first dates and during job interviews and in almost any setting when we are asked to define ourselves. For many people, a fan group has usurped church membership or another community organization as the primary binding agent in their lives.
We are now clearly a nation of people in intense relationships with our favorite sports teams, and yet there remains little to no cognition of how we became so obsessed and how life-altering that obsession can be. Like the lowly desk assistant answering the phone at the Los Angeles Times, we hear and hear from fans every day, but we don’t really know them, don’t truly understand why they behave as they do.
Superfans is a first step in trying to change that.
You will be taken on a journey to the extremes of fandom, yes, but this book is not a vehicle to lampoon people who have made rooting for a sports team the central focus of their lives. On social media and on websites big and small, these hyper-committed devotees are often reduced to freaks behind the glass. We laugh or shake our heads at how they dress themselves and their children. We mock what they say and write. Over and over we play the YouTube clips of their meltdowns and fights. I have no interest in further indulging that voyeurism. My aim is to shatter the glass and get to know the people behind it, to better understand them and their fandom in all its neon-Mohawked, shirtless-on-the-frozen-tundra glory.
In the pages that follow, you will be introduced to a Milwaukee Brewers supporter and his banana costume. You will meet the Indianapolis Colts superfan who honors that team by sticking garbage to his body. You will get to know a general in the (Minnesota) Viking World Order and meet the crew that operates the Chicago Bears Fanbulance. You will encounter Kentucky fans whose devotion to that university’s basketball team is literally needled into their skin, a San Diego State diehard who changed the way fans across the country behave, and a young child whose hatred for New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady made him famous.
You will meet two women in Atlanta who believe they know what makes women love sports teams, and a pastor in Dallas coping with a clash of faiths among his football-loving flock. You will meet a mascot who suffered the greatest loss imaginable and the fans who serenaded him back from the edge. Finally, you will get to know the person whom I, after three years of meeting fanatics across the country, consider to be the perfect fan.
You will also be introduced to a small band of sports-loving academics who have pioneered and legitimized the study of fandom. Have you ever wondered why you became a fan in the first place? What you get out of connecting with (or berating) other fans? How big of a fan you are relative to others? Whether your husband’s or boyfriend’s behavior on game days is abnormal? Have you ever pondered when it was that you crossed the line from casual sports observer to obsessive? Wanted to know what makes male and female fans different? A man named Dan Wann and the other researchers you will meet have
devoted the prime of their professional lives to answering these questions and others.
Not everyone is as devoted to their favorite team as the Superfans I spotlight. In fact, hardly anyone is, and that probably includes you. But no matter the level of your commitment to your team, the stories in the pages that follow will offer an opportunity to evaluate your own fandom and the choices you’ve made. By spotlighting a few fans, I hope to illuminate the many.
“The goal was one TV.”
It was the mid-1990s, and Steven Lenhart was hoping to watch a weekend soccer game with some friends at a bar in Portland, Oregon. It may have been a Champions League game or a World Cup qualifier; he doesn’t recall. What he does remember is the frustration he felt as the managers of bar after bar informed him that they would not turn even a single television from college football or an NFL game to a soccer match: “They were all like, ‘Sorry, there just aren’t enough of you.’ ”
Soccer junkies throughout the United States at that time could empathize. Venues to watch games were few and far between, and often it felt as if the latest edition of Soccer America, that broadsheet bible, was the only way for American followers of the sport to stay informed. Yet even among soccer aficionados, Lenhart graded out as a fanatic. How many Portland footie fans drove more than nine hours, to San Jose, California, in 1996 just to be there for the inaugural Major League Soccer game between the San Jose Clash and DC United? How many then repeated the journey a few months later for a playoff game because, well, “that was also, like, history”? How many traveled over halfway across the country, to Columbus, Ohio, a few years later just to be present for one of the first games in the new Crew Stadium, because that, too, felt like a seminal moment? Soccer was not the central preoccupation in Lenhart’s life. It was his life. His jobs—filling kegs at a local brewery, roasting beans at Kobos Coffee Company—were the preoccupations.
Imagine, then, how he felt being told again and again that the sport he loved more than anything else was so insignificant that in a bar with twenty televisions it wasn’t worth time on a single screen.
Lenhart kept pestering bar owners until, finally, he found a sympathetic Greek immigrant named Angelo Markantonatos, who operated the A&L Sports Pub, an underlit place on the city’s east side best known as a gathering spot for Pittsburgh Steelers fans. Markantonatos told Lenhart that if he brought enough people so that his group outnumbered the people sitting near a TV who wanted to watch football, he would switch that TV to soccer.
Lenhart managed to find ten—eight friends plus him and his brother—and that was enough for Angelo to switch one screen in the darkest spot in the bar to their preferred match. “Here we are, over in our little corner with our one little TV, and it felt like the biggest victory ever,” Lenhart says. From that success, Lenhart took the lesson that while Portland’s bar owners might not love soccer, they do like money. “We just had to increase our numbers,” he says.
If you were in the same bar or coffeehouse as Lenhart around that time and showed even the slightest signal that you liked soccer, he’d approach you. If you passed him in the street and were wearing an Adidas warm-up jacket, he would invite you to watch a game at A&L or another such place. Eventually, he gave his small band of soccer-watchers a name, the Cascade Rangers, and he had business cards printed that included an email address. Anyone who emailed him was added to a list and received notices whenever the group was gathering to watch a match. In addition to his recruiting efforts at bars and cafes and on the streets, Lenhart became the unofficial moderator of a soccer message board on the website of The Oregonian, where he would post topics to debate. On that board, his username was Nevets—Steven spelled backward. That was the name Lenhart had given himself in the early 1990s when he began performing at a poetry open-mic night at Café Lena in southeast Portland. He was around twenty-three at the time and working in the darkroom at a photography studio. In the coffeehouses and breweries around Portland where he would come to work (infrequently) and drink (frequently) over the years, he was known only as Nevets. “There used to be this thing that I’ve worked at every cool place in Portland,” he says.
Nevets in his happy place.
Lenhart had thick brown hair and sideburns and a nose like Santa Claus, prominent and rounded at the tip. His gray-blue eyes were obscured by wire-rim glasses that seemed a little small for his face. He favored worn brown cords and loose, long-sleeve shirts layered over one another. His only flourish was a wool flat cap. A friend called his look “quintessential 1990s Portland.”
Between the email list and the message board, Lenhart was more connected to soccer fans than almost any other person in the Rose City. The group of ten people in the corner of the A&L Sports Pub eventually grew to twenty and then forty and then sixty. After a few years, Lenhart could fill a bar by sending out a single email. He had the contact information for hundreds of people in Portland who supported soccer.
It was an impressive feat considering he compiled that information during a decade-long stretch when Portland was without a soccer team. From 1975 to 1982, the city had a franchise in the North American Soccer League, the Portland Timbers. Some of Lenhart’s most vivid boyhood memories are going to NASL games with his brother and father, who worked as a regional director for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. His mom was a homemaker and occasional substitute teacher at local elementary schools, and Lenhart describes them as a close, loving family. “We were Baptists, sort of,” he says. “One of those things where you go to church until high school is over and then stop. I don’t know what that says about me. Nothing, I think.”
Lenhart was playing club soccer during the Timbers’ NASL era, and his boyhood idols were the stars of those teams; Clyde Best and Mick Poole were two favorites. He also admired the small but rowdy group of fans who supported the Timbers back then, though most seemed to care more about the party than the soccer. Beer was served, literally, in buckets.
In 1985, with the NASL shuttered, a new local team, FC Portland, emerged in a league that would become known as the Western Soccer Alliance. FC Portland had a distinct local flavor. It featured current and former University of Portland players, including goalkeeper Kasey Keller, a future US men’s national team star, whom Lenhart had played against growing up. Fan support for those teams was a fraction of what it was in the star-studded NASL, but Lenhart’s enthusiasm was consistent. He was crestfallen when, in 1990, FC Portland folded after losing a reported $500,000 in its final two seasons.
Portland had been without a professional soccer team for years when Lenhart began sending out his emails and filling the bars. There was no grand plan behind his efforts, no vision for what his coalition would become. He just wanted to watch a game and drink a few beers with others who loved soccer. Then, in 2001, a new iteration of the Timbers emerged, and executives for the franchise quickly learned that the key to building a fan base for their team was some guy everyone called Nevets.
Jim Taylor caught the soccer bug in 1997 at a World Cup qualifier in Portland between the US men’s national team and Costa Rica. He sat in a section of US supporters known as Sam’s Army, “and the people were cheering and chanting and it was fantastic.” He was working in community and corporate relations for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers at that time, a very good job in a hard-to-crack industry. In 1998, Taylor left that position to take an eighteen-month post as venue director in Portland for the 1999 Women’s World Cup.
While in the job, he created Soccer City 2000, a campaign to bring a Major League Soccer team to Portland. He teamed up with Marshall Glickman, one of the founders of the Trail Blazers and the team’s president from 1987 to 1994. Glickman wanted to own a minor-league baseball team in the city, to have it play in what was then called Civic Stadium. Taylor convinced him to tack on a soccer franchise to that plan, and they created the company Portland Family Entertainment.
An MLS franchise proved to be too pricey a target, so the group settled for a team in the lower-rung A-League. Tay
lor’s vision was to create a strong minor-league franchise and prove to MLS that Portland was a viable city for expansion. But the others within Portland Family Entertainment were focused on baseball. The Portland Beavers of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League were considered the bellwether; the soccer team was filler, a team to occupy the stadium when the Beavers were idle. The entire soccer staff consisted of Taylor, a head coach, and one other employee.
Before the first season, Taylor contacted Russ Campbell, head of the Rose City Brigade, the Sam’s Army chapter in the area, to create a Timbers supporters group. They arranged a barbecue at Campbell’s house in Beaverton, and about ten people considered to be influential members of the soccer community were invited. Nevets was one of them.
Campbell tried to take the lead, and he proposed that the established rules and procedures of the Rose City Brigade be applied. Lenhart immediately objected. “I was like, ‘Wait. Wait. Wait. You don’t even know what this is yet, and you are trying to tell people what to do?’ ” he recalls. Campbell eventually backed away to stay focused on Sam’s Army, and Lenhart became the unofficial ringleader of a small band of fans.
“There were maybe eight of us at first,” says Jeremy Wright, a fan better known as Finnegan (the name of his dog). Wright had been one of the people Lenhart recruited to watch games with him. (“This creepy guy in a newspaper-boy cap came up to me at the bar and handed me a business card.”) He was joined by Lendog (Jim Lenhart, Nevets’s brother), Aussie Mike (who was not from Australia), Drum Man (Kurt Schubothe, an older fan from the NASL days), English Rick (he was English), Ricky the Postman (an actual postman), and Roberto (Bob Kellett, a local journalist).