Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  “Sometimes I do wonder: What am I breeding here?”

  In 1996, Dan Wann and two other psychologists published a study in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills entitled “An Exploratory Examination of the Factors Influencing the Origination, Continuation, and Cessation of Identification with Sports Teams.” It provided some important answers as to why people choose to follow a team.

  They asked ninety-one college undergraduate students to complete a five-page questionnaire, for which they were asked to name their favorite sports team and then respond to questions about their support of that team. Wann and his coauthors offered no hypothesis, no guess for what answers would come. Previous papers “had yet to specify the variables playing the greatest roles in identification with a particular team.” The goal of the study was to “fill this void.”

  The results didn’t just fill the void, they flooded it. In response to the question about why people followed their favorite team, forty-eight different reasons were given. A vast majority of participants, 93 percent, gave multiple reasons for why they supported that team; the average was 6.2 reasons per person. The motivation behind a person’s fandom is complicated, the results showed, rarely driven by one factor. The color of a uniform, the team’s style of play, free or cheap tickets, a fondness for a single player, and sheer boredom were mentioned, as were more predictable responses such as a team’s winning tradition and proximity to a respondent’s home. Why a college-aged person might follow a team was, in short, a question with many answers.

  Within that study, Wann and Co. asked another question, which drew a more focused response: What person or entity (such as a school) had the greatest single influence over you becoming a sports fan? It didn’t matter whether the respondent was male or female, a majority (58.6 percent) said their fandom originated with a family member. Father was the most frequent response, at 34.7 percent, and while that may seem low, Wann points out that if you leave out of consideration families where no father was present or he wasn’t a sports fan, it would certainly be higher. “My guess is that if you took just two-parent families where both parents were sports fans, those saying that the father influenced their fandom the greatest would be 75 percent or higher.”

  Wann and colleagues replicated that study in Greece, Norway, England, Qatar, and Australia, and the results were largely the same. Family members, especially fathers, had the greatest influence on what team people followed. That’s a fairly intuitive conclusion. (As Wann might say, “Well, duh.”) What’s far less obvious is the impact—possibly the negative impact—that such indoctrination can have on children before their cognitive systems are ready for fandom.

  Few experts know more about how children process information at a young age than does Dr. Susan Harter. Dr. Harter got her PhD in developmental psychology from Yale, and her clinical internship there focused on the diagnosis and treatment of disturbed children. She is the author of The Construction of the Self, which examines child development from early stages to adulthood. She is a professor emerita at the University of Denver, and some of her recent research has focused on the positive effects of children participating in sports.

  Harter doesn’t frequent YouTube, doesn’t search for videos of young children getting emotional over their favorite team losing. For more than fifty years she has studied child behavior and done clinical research, and there are better places to find children to observe than that digital sandbox. Still, she watched the video of Christopher and of the “I HATE the Panthers!” boy and remarked: “It is very disturbing.” She hoped that they were involved in some positive sports-participation experiences to counterbalance what she was seeing on the clips, something that didn’t “engender hate.”

  Listening to Harter talk about how young children think, it is striking how perfectly wired they are to become obsessed fans. A four- or five-year-old “has a natural tendency of the mind to see things in black and white,” Harter says. “Even bright children go through this all-or-nothing thinking stage.” She cites a colleague with a four-year-old daughter, who one day asked when they were driving: “Is this a girl street or a boy street?” Gender stereotyping is common at that age, “but the line children often focus on the most is: good or bad. They need to sort people into those two categories.” Imagine a father telling his son that the Packers are good and the Bears, their rival, are bad. That sorting is exactly what a child wants, and so they embrace it wholeheartedly, even when a parent might not mean it so literally. Children also tend to view what they are doing, what Harter calls their “mapping structure,” to be “laden with virtuosity.” That means there is no need for a parent to emphasize the importance of rooting for a team; children will do it themselves.

  Children around the same age as Christopher was when he appeared in that video have almost no ability to sort through emotions and separate true feelings from manufactured ones. It is clear to an adult that Pat doesn’t really hate Tom Brady, as he says in the clip, but Christopher doesn’t know that. Likewise, Pat isn’t really suggesting that his son punch Tom Brady. But, again, Christopher cannot make that distinction at five years old. If a child around that age is raised in, say, a home of Duke fans and it is stressed that anyone who likes rival North Carolina is a bad person, it is possible the child will literally view anyone who supports North Carolina as evil. It could be his or her kindergarten teacher. It could be his or her priest. It could be a relative. They all become bad people in that child’s eyes.

  In her book, Harter writes about how a child may be “pervasively sad over the death of a loved one, totally unable to acknowledge the positive emotions that were undoubtedly also felt for the individual.” Parallel that with a loss in the Super Bowl or World Series by a child’s favorite team. An adult might eventually get over the loss, able to look back on the entire season and appreciate the team’s successes before that final loss. A young child experiences just the anguish, minus all perspective. That November 2011 game when Tom Brady led his team over Christopher’s Eagles wasn’t a playoff game or the Super Bowl. It was Week 12 of the regular season, in a year when the Eagles struggled and were all but eliminated from playoff contention by that time. The loss meant very little. But Christopher was incapable of using that fact to manage his emotions. For young children, every loss by their favorite teams has the potential to be, or at least feel, immensely meaningful.

  The narrative of a child’s life is “scaffolded by the parents, who reinforce aspects of experience that they feel are important to codify and remember,” Harter writes. Scaffolded is the perfect word, as parents like Pat Lindemann build child-fans, even if they aren’t completely aware they are doing it. Pat didn’t give much thought to how his sons would receive his obsession with the Packers, and he didn’t make a conscious choice to indoctrinate them. Never did he demand they follow his favorite team. Yes, he had his infant boys in Packers onesies, but that was more like a lark than a concerted effort to stamp the team onto their psyches. But when your house has a Packers “shrine,” when you have season tickets, when you schedule your Sundays around watching football, and when you curl up in a ball on the bed after your team loses a big game, it doesn’t matter whether you intended to turn your kids into Packers fans or not. It will just happen. Sure, there was a chance one of the Lindemann children would be more like their mother, a less ardent fan, but the chances were slim: very young children will typically attempt to mirror the behavior of the parents who match their gender.

  Contrary to what some parents think, children do not possess an innate predilection toward following a certain sport or team. Christopher might indeed enjoy studying football statistics—his “little football Rain Man” behavior—but that suggests something deep inside him was drawn to football. That simply does not exist, Harter says. When a child is born, he or she isn’t meant to be a sports fan; it just seems that way because they so quickly glom on to a team, and so wholeheartedly rise and fall with that team’s successes and failures.

  Psychologist
s who focus on consumer behavior use the Psychological Continuum Model (PCM) to chart the behavior of fans. That tool has four stages: Awareness, Attraction, Attachment, and Allegiance. The movement from one stage to the next is mostly marked by a change in verb. For example, Christopher Lindemann’s PCM stages would be:

  Awareness: I know about the Eagles.

  Attraction: I like the Eagles.

  Attachment: I am an Eagles fan.

  Allegiance: I live for the Eagles.

  Christopher likely moved through those stages, but at such a rapid pace that it would be difficult to call them markers with any significance. He went from learning there was an NFL team with a bird mascot to melting down after an Eagles loss in less than a year. For an adult experimenting with supporting, say, an English Premier League soccer team for the first time, that model might be spot-on as the adult’s attachment builds over time, perhaps taking several seasons. A young child’s black-and-white worldview doesn’t allow for that kind of gradual buildup. Introduce them to a team or sport, and in no time they’ll be melting down in front of the television as Tom Brady beats their beloved Eagles.

  Harter, Wann, and others have long studied the effects of children’s participation in sports, and the positives are numerous: confidence, discipline, relationship-building, perspective, and so on. Sports fandom, however, can offset much of that good. “If you make the world black and white for them, they are going to make the world black and white for themselves,” Harter says. Imagine a young boy who throws a tantrum every time he strikes out in Little League. His parents can try to teach that child that striking out isn’t a horrible event, but that lesson is a lot harder for the child to embrace if other aspects of sports have been presented to them in black-and-white terms.

  As a resident of Denver, Harter has seen behavior by Broncos fans young and old that left her shaking her head. “It gets so extreme that rabid fans can’t respect the talents of other players. You have to respect, say, Andrew Luck’s talent, and acknowledge that he is not a bad guy. He is just wearing a different color uniform and participating in a competitive enterprise where there is a winner and a loser.” But at a very young age, many children learn via sports fandom the opposite of respect. “We are not born learning to hate,” Harter says. “That has to be taught. Teaching a child that the team is bad or the opposing quarterback is a bad guy is a very nasty way to raise a child. The message should be that you can have collective pride in your team without collective disdain for the other team.”

  Erik Erikson, a renowned developmental psychologist, pioneered the concept of identity foreclosure. This is when someone commits to an identity—typically that of a relative—before exploring his or her options. This would seem to be particularly prevalent in young sports fans, as a substantial chunk of who they will be going forward gets decided for them before they are capable of knowing what has happened.

  With Michael Hopson, the Colts Superfan, the opposite occurred. He did not become a devout follower of the Colts until well into adulthood. It is not coincidental that when he took the SSIS, his lowest score was in response to the question, “How important is it to you that your favorite team wins?” By waiting to commit to an identity as a sports fan, Hopson developed a perspective that a young person like Christopher Lindemann lacks. Sure, Hopson wants the Colts to win, but he also knows that the benefits of fandom, like the social engagement he experiences on Sundays, exist in victory or defeat. His self-worth is not hanging on wins and losses.

  In an ideal world, children would participate in sports but not become fans of teams until they are older. With the advent of adolescence, around the age of twelve or thirteen, children “develop cognitive skills that allow them to truly take the perspective of others, rather than merely absorbing the opinions of significant others,” Harter says. “Their world broadens, and they come to appreciate the fact that others may have very different views on matters of importance.” An adolescent child could, for example, see his or her father assume the fetal position after a devastating loss and understand it is not normative behavior that should be modeled. At that age, they are also capable of considering the joy they have in other parts of their life and use those emotions to offset the deflation they might feel after seeing their team lose.

  But what are the chances, given what we know about the role that parents, and particularly the father, play in indoctrinating kids into fandom, that a highly identified fan like Pat Lindemann could hide or pause his obsession until his children reach a more optimal age?

  “Is there a number less than zero?” Wann asks.

  That doesn’t mean every fan indoctrinated at a young age will forever lack perspective. Steven Lenhart became a soccer fan early in his life, and there was a time, during the early Timbers years, when he would melt down after a tough loss. But he doesn’t anymore. His relationship with the Timbers, the benefits he gets from being in that fan group, transcends wins and losses. It is very possible that Christopher Lindemann will also get there, that as an adult he will see Tom Brady (the ageless tormentor that he is) defeat his Eagles and it won’t impact him so deeply. But in the meantime, if parents like Pat and Laura want to offset some of the negatives that can accompany early-childhood fandom, they will have to scaffold their children’s lives with other experiences.

  “The church is important,” Pat says. “My kids are in CCD, Catholic teaching, and for us we stress this is a house of love. We also make sure they know that fans of other teams are good people. They are not the enemy. We don’t hate them. Their cousins are Bears fans, and they love their cousins and know that it’s okay that people like different teams. The boys are fans, but we work hard to make sure we are raising passionate fans, not maniacal fans.”

  After that devastating playoff loss to Seattle in 2015, Pat eventually managed to get back up off the bed and compose himself, “and we all talked about how this wasn’t the end of the world.” What they did next was probably most important. “We turned off the television and went outside with the football and we played catch.”

  It is Week 11 of the 2015 NFL season, and in Lot 37 on the northeast side of TCF Bank Stadium in downtown Minneapolis, amid the parked cars and barbecues, amid the folding tables covered in food and the shade tents and the tall poles flying purple Minnesota Vikings flags, a special ceremony is under way.

  Approximately a hundred and fifty fans, many holding plastic cups or beer cans, almost all wearing Vikings gear, have gathered in a circle around seven people who are standing in a straight line. These seven fans are all dressed for the occasion. Three women are dressed in full-length faux-fur white coats and sport fur-lined white Vikings helmets with black horns. A fourth woman is wearing a black and purple number 52 Vikings jersey and a ski hat with purple Valkyrie wings attached to the sides. The men are equally decked out, wearing custom jerseys and helmets and camouflage pants. None of the seven look out of place among the crowd—if anything, the people surrounding them are even more elaborately dressed—but the seven stand out because of the line they’ve formed and because of what stands at the front of it: A wooden kneeler.

  It may have once resided in a Catholic church, perhaps inside a confessional, but now it stands proudly in the parking lot of a football stadium. It is a simple oak kneeler with a wide base for your knees and another plank at the top where one might put folded hands. Just below that is a shelf where a Bible or hymnal might go. The base, the spot for kneeling, has been modified slightly: it is covered in a purple Vikings towel. Additionally, the top plank is adorned with various Vikings patches that are glued to the surface. Many of the patches contain the letters VWO.

  Standing beside the kneeler is Syd Davy, a muscular and heavily tattooed fifty-seven-year-old hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Randy Moss, Minnesota’s star wide receiver, would jump into the crowd after touchdowns, and Davy would catch him. Davy became so visible he couldn’t walk down the streets of Minneapolis without being recognized, and he
became so synonymous with the team that his picture has appeared on game tickets. On this day, Davy is wearing his full ensemble. His eyebrows and handlebar mustache have been dyed bright yellow, the Vikings secondary color. Two long braids (also yellow) emerge from underneath his horned Viking helmet (which is painted gold) and run down his face (which is painted purple), over some chain mail (like ancient knights wore during battle) and a sleeveless purple Vikings T-shirt. The braids stop just short of a giant gold championship belt (like the ones professional wrestlers wear) that wraps Davy’s waist.

  In a booming voice, Davy calls out a name, and the first person in the line, a thirtyish woman from Iowa named Rhonda, the one wearing the number 52 jersey, steps forward. Davy takes her hand as though he’s about to propose marriage and then declares loudly, “Do you swear to be a Minnesota Vikings fan for the rest of your life?” Some candidates say “Yes” or “I do” but many shout “Skol!,” a Norse exclamation. The woman answers, “I swear.” Then Davy asks, “Are you going to honor the Minnesota Vikings for the rest of your life?” And finally, “Do you swear to serve the VWO with integrity and respect?” After the woman responds in the affirmative to the final question, Davy shouts: “I hereby knight you Lady Pete, Valkyrie division, Viking World Order!” And as Davy kisses the top of her hand, the crowd roars its approval.

  The three women in full-length faux-fur white coats are inducted next and then the first of three men. The women stand before Davy; the men kneel before him, placing their knees on the purple towel. Then Davy, like Zeus shouting from above, asks them to affirm their commitment to the team and to the Viking World Order. As they answer, he raises a sword with a blade nearly four feet long and with small white horns as a guard, and he touches the men on each shoulder. The first man, from Georgia, is given the name Sir Airborne and assigned to the Army division. Then comes Sir Bonez, from Wisconsin (assigned to the Air Force), and finally Sir Crusher, a Minnesotan (placed in Special Ops).