Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Early on, as the various branches were being formed, a member of the group remained a major when his peers became generals, getting stars. (Members are given actual rank insignia, which Garza purchases at a military supply website.) This was punishment, Garza says, because the member was skipping VWO events. The generals also excluded him from group pictures and taunted him. “Man, these are looking mighty shiny,” they’d tell him. Later, during a heart-to-heart with Garza in the weight room in his basement, the major told Garza how deeply this hurt, to be excluded from the core group.

  The major remained at that rank until early 2009. At a playoff game that January between the Vikings and the Philadelphia Eagles, some fans were “talking crap” to Garza’s wife, and the major who had been passed over jumped in and fought three guys. He ended up with a nasty bump on the back of his head, but he got his stars. He is now one of the division “commanders.”

  A few members of the VWO have been demoted (one for getting into a senseless spat with a Packers fan at a bar), but no one has been expelled. One guy left “over girl issues, kind of a love triangle sort of thing. He covered over his tattoo, but that is not required,” Garza clarifies. “There is no blood-in and blood-out policy.”

  The use of military designations and insignia has ruffled some feathers. “Some people think it is disrespectful at first, but when they hear how we do it they realize we are very respectful,” Garza says. The group has an unwritten policy that a member can only wear a pin or ribbon they earned while serving in the military. So, if a member shows up with a Purple Heart on his game-day jersey that he didn’t earn in the service, he has to remove it. “I spend a lot of time on little disputes like that,” Garza says.

  The actual time he spends rooting for the Vikings is restricted to a few hours on Sunday. Sure, he reads about the team in the days between games, but not obsessively. Meanwhile, he estimates he spends about six hours a day working on VWO matters “and probably another four hours just in my head thinking about the VWO.” The Vikings are important to Garza, obviously, but the VWO is essential. It can be hard to draw a distinction between the two (What is the VWO without the Vikings?), but for Garza there is the team and the group, and the group is the central preoccupation of his life.

  “Like I said, I just got derailed in the tunnel of make-believe. But I’m not looking to get out. I’m happy in here.”

  In his seminal book, The Social Conquest of Earth, renowned Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson makes a convincing case that becoming a member of a group is inherent to the human condition. “To form groups, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups—these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence of culture,” Wilson writes. The instincts that bind people together are “the biological product of group selection….People must have a tribe. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world.”

  Think back to before Garza met Davy, back when he was a freelance tailgater and then went through his “retirement phase,” when he questioned what he was getting out of being a devoted Vikings fan. Garza’s struggles to define his purpose began when he left the military, an organized group, and didn’t abate until he met Davy and the VWO took shape. He wasn’t fulfilled until he found another group like the military, another tribe, to which he could belong.

  The origin story of the VWO may be unique, but the instincts that drew the members together are not. One way or another, Garza and the rest of the VWO were going to find a group because, as Wilson writes, grouping is an unavoidable propensity. People used to group together for survival, to fight wars, but now they turn “increasingly to its moral equivalent in team sports,” Wilson writes. The military is just one of many traditional groups to which fewer and fewer Americans belong. Membership in religious organizations is on the decline, with some research finding that less than 20 percent of the US population regularly attends church. Service clubs like Lions, Rotary, and Kiwanis have also shrunk in size over the past few decades. The need or tendency to group hasn’t vanished, but the groups themselves have changed. Fan tribes—formal ones like the VWO and countless others, online and off, that are much more loosely organized—have filled some of that void.

  Wilson’s expertise is in biology; he examined fandom through that lens. It takes a psychologist, though, to explain the allure of the truly unique aspect of the VWO: its military-like structure. (“Oh, that is a good one,” Dan Wann says.) One explanation can be found in the work of Michael Hogg, a social psychologist at Claremont Graduate University. In 2000, he conceived uncertainty-identity theory, asserting that “feelings of uncertainty…motivate people to identify with social groups and to choose new groups with, or configure existing groups to have, certain properties that best reduce, control, or protect from feelings of uncertainty.” One of the VWO’s “properties” is its well-defined hierarchy. A member knows exactly where he or she stands within the group and is even ranked in relation to others. This guides members on how to act, relieving them of the burden of deciding on their own. As Hogg writes, “The world is an uncertain place, it always has been, and these uncertainties can make it very difficult to predict or plan our lives and to feel sure about the type of people we are.” Even for a lowly private in the VWO, there is great comfort in the certainty of knowing your place in the group and the cues the group provides on how to behave.

  To be clear, fans are not sheep. Even as they satisfy the natural desire to group, even if they welcome structure and certainty, people want to be seen as individuals. That is why we have face painters and shirtless dudes in the stands on a subzero day. It is why people create custom jerseys and get elaborate tattoos and try to one-up each other at tailgaters, striving to have the most decked-out vehicle or elaborate setup. The behavior of the members of the VWO illustrates this, but a better exemplification can be found by taking the trolley to a different neighborhood of make-believe, one about 350 miles east of the Twin Cities, in Milwaukee.

  It is time to meet the Rally Banana.

  What the hell is this!? What does she think she is doing?!

  That flashed in Teddy Kervin’s mind when he saw her, this young woman, maybe twenty years old, dressed in a banana costume and cheering on the Brewers at Miller Park in Milwaukee. It was the 2013 season, and Kervin was twenty-four years old and working as an engineer at a local software company. Most important, at the moment he saw the young woman, a section or two over from where he always sat in the left-field stands, Kervin was also wearing a yellow banana costume.

  She is ripping me off! How can she do this?

  Kervin had to confront her. Had to. But that did not come easy for him. He is a gentle giant, six-foot-two and (at his heaviest) 330 pounds of Wisconsin whiteness. Kervin grew up in Mequon, outside Milwaukee, and his parents owned a sports bar, a big Packers spot (his parents still have a package of tickets), and you’d think a bar owner’s son, especially one with his size, would be tough. But Kervin is friendly, goofy, more likely to give you a hug than challenge you on anything.

  But this woman. This second banana. He had to do something.

  Kervin steeled himself and marched over to where she sat. “What are you doing?” one banana said to the other. The young woman smiled. “I am going with this whole banana-suit thing now, too,” she replied. Her words were loaded with sincere enthusiasm, like Kervin should be happy she was copying him. Her response disarmed him. This was a confrontation without a plan, and it showed. Kervin just stood there, silent. Later, he would wish he had said, “What, you couldn’t be a grape or something else?” But in the moment he just looked at her, at a loss for words. Then he turned and went back to his seat.

  Teddy Kervin rallies.

  He told his friends, “I don’t have the copyright on dressing up like a banana,” and, “I’m not the first person to wear something stupid to a Brewers game.” But make no mistake: Kervin
was concerned. Would people associate him with her, think they were a team? Would people believe she was the first banana and he was the copycat? Worst of all, would this create a domino effect, more and more bananas filling the stands until he was just one of the…bunch?

  To understand Kervin’s reaction, it is important to know how he got there, standing in Miller Park in a banana costume.

  Way back in May 2012, Kervin was a senior at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, seven months from graduating with a degree in computer science. He frequently went to Brewers games during college, especially after turning twenty-one. He and his friends would tailgate before the game, get sufficiently lubricated, and then head in for more beers and some baseball.

  On May 21, 2012, the San Francisco Giants were in town and Kervin was tailgating. One of Kervin’s buddies, Brian Kucharski, had this banana costume in his trunk for some unrecalled reason (college being college, after all), and he said to Kervin, “Hey, you should put this on.” It was clear the banana suit would not fit Kervin. But he pulled and shimmied and friends helped and the yellow fabric stretched and stretched. The banana suit was sleeveless, so Kervin’s green T-shirt was visible at the arms, and the suit wasn’t nearly long enough, more like a banana half-shirt. The only part that fit was the hood, with its black tip at the top.

  He looked ridiculous. And yet he decided to wear it into the game. Why?

  It was the alcohol, of course, but also, “I am just kind of an eccentric guy,” Kervin says. He once joined a competitive karaoke team, and his go-to song was “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO. He performed that song wearing nothing but a Speedo and “with a sock stuffed down, you know, there.” Compared to that, a skintight banana half-shirt was a burka.

  Kervin entered the stadium, took his seat in left field, and tried to be courteous to his neighbors. He took the hood off during game action and stood only between innings. However, what he did between innings created the kind of searing imagery that, once witnessed even for just a moment, can never be unseen. He stood and danced to whatever music was playing in the stadium and then occasionally raised the front of the banana shirt to show the full breadth of his jiggling belly. He announced to those around him that he was the Rally Banana.

  At some point in the game, a marvelous bit of serendipity occurred. Fox Sports Wisconsin had technical difficulties and lost its ability to go to a commercial. What could the station show during the airtime between innings? The fan-cam, of course. A cameraman spotted Kervin dancing in his banana suit, and the production manager decided this was good television. The network never regained its ability to show commercials during that game, which meant that inning after inning, minute after minute, the camera returned to Kervin, and viewers all across the state were treated to his dancing and jiggling and yelling. The game even went into extra innings, providing bonus banana time.

  Then Kervin went national.

  In San Francisco, the Comcast station that broadcast Giants games came out of a commercial in the twelfth inning and showed Kervin dancing to the 1991 song “Gonna Make You Sweat” by C+C Music Factory, with its catchy screaming chorus of “Everybody dance now.” Kervin was doing little more than pumping his arms as Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper said nonchalantly, “Well, this is the Brewers version of Dancing with the Stars.” Then, Kervin lifted the front flap of his banana shirt, revealing his huge gut and man boobs the size of oranges. As if that wasn’t enough, he then grabbed the sides of his stomach and began shaking it while yelling “BELLY!”

  “Whoa, big fella!” Kuiper said.

  “Whoa!” broadcast partner Mike Krukow echoed.

  The two broadcasters began laughing and were so thrown off by the visual that they momentarily forgot what inning it was. “Give me a minute here. Just give me a minute,” said Krukow, unable to suppress his laughter.

  “Aaahhhh, it is going to be Lopez pitching here,” began Kuiper, and then he succumbed to giggles again.

  “We were doing pretty good here until just moments ago,” Krukow said, followed by more chuckles.

  Krukow and Kuiper finally caught the viewers up on who the new pitcher was, and they set the matchup with the batter. Then Krukow added: “I just asked the guys in the truck if they would do the slow motion of that and I got a resounding ‘NOOOOOOOOO!’ ”

  The next day, Kervin would learn that he was now semi-famous locally, and he also got calls from people who had seen him on the San Francisco broadcast. He liked the attention, and he decided to keep wearing the banana suit to games. “A random drunken decision turned into, This is what I am going to do for every game,” he says. The only change he made was to write “I am a Rally Banana” on the front of the suit.

  Kervin is now twenty-seven, still a software engineer, and he is married. Yet he still wears a banana suit to 80 percent of the games he attends, including many with his wife, Ashley, whom he met in college before he became the Rally Banana. (Kervin wore the suit once to see the Brewers play the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field a few years ago with Ashley. “One guy tried to fight me the whole game,” he says. “I probably won’t do that again.”) Kervin is self-mocking, and he smiles and laughs so often when he talks that he comes across as much younger than he is. Still, you could argue that he is now too old to be the Rally Banana, a guy with a wife and a dog, who owns a house, who has been promoted up the chain at the company where he works. There was even a natural end point for it: a few years ago the suit began to fall apart. He could have retired it right then. Instead, he went to a local costume shop and paid $29.99 for a replica.

  “I’m not even thinking about retirement,” he says. “I could take it off and go to games, and people would forget and move on and maybe remember that guy who used to go to games in a banana suit. But I would miss it.”

  Which brings us back to that young woman, the other banana, and the impact her arrival had on Kervin. When she appeared at Miller Park, Kervin had been the Rally Banana for about a year. He was a Brewers fan, part of that large group, but within the group he stood out. He had achieved what social psychologists refer to as optimal distinctiveness, a term coined in 1991 by Dr. Marilynn Brewer, then a psychology professor at UCLA. Brewer is a legend among social psychologists; she has won almost every possible award one could receive. Her theory of optimal distinctiveness is one of the three or four most important developments in the study of social identity.

  Individuals have something like a balancing point, Brewer found, between fitting in and standing out. They want both optimal distinctiveness and optimal assimilation. In her paper, “The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time,” Brewer illustrates this balancing act with a chart:

  Before the other banana showed up, Kervin was at the intersection of those two solid lines, having achieved the optimal level of assimilation with other Brewers fans and the perfect level of differentiation from those same fans. “He had found this magic ingredient, the banana suit, that was a kind of tool, whether he knew it or not, to satisfy his psychological need to be distinct,” says Dr. Cynthia Pickett, a social psychology professor at the University of California at Davis. She studied under Brewer and is director of UC Davis’s Self and Social Identity Lab. “But while he had differentiated himself, he was still included in the larger group [of Brewers fans]. He was accepted as this sort of superfan, and that acceptance contributed to a sense of belonging he also needs.”

  Kervin is clearly someone who needs a higher level of distinctiveness than most. There is a large difference between, say, a guy who wears a custom Brewers jersey to games and one who wears a banana suit and shakes his belly for the cameras. Remember, too, the competitive karaoke team Kervin joined, another group. Kervin’s act was more brazen than the others for a reason. His satisfaction is best when he is really standing out from the crowd while also still being accepted by its members. His alarmed response when he saw the other banana was because his ability to satisfy his need for distinctiveness was threatened, and people might v
iew him (and he might view himself) as just another fan.

  So what is a banana to do when faced with such a dilemma?

  Before answering that, it is best to meet another person who found his optimal distinctiveness threatened, the fan genius who created a paragon of football tailgating known as the Fanbulance.

  Rich Madole made it to the top.

  It was 2007, and after seven years on the waiting list for Chicago Bears season tickets, he got word that he’d finally be getting seats in Soldier Field to watch his beloved Bears, the team he grew up rooting for in the northern suburb of Libertyville. It felt like he was taking his fandom to another level, like he was pushing into a new group, joining the diehards who tailgated rain or shine or snow on Sundays in the parking lots bunched around the stadium. Madole had attended games and tailgated with friends before—he was already an extremely identified Bears fan—but landing season tickets felt like moving to the next tier of fandom.

  Madole is fifty-two and bald with a crooked smile that he flashes often to customers at Tavern, a restaurant in Libertyville where he has tended bar for more than twenty years. He has also worked as a clerk for Jewell, the grocery-store chain. Madole is the kind of guy who always knows “a guy.” He makes connections so easily, over the bar as he mixes a drink, at tailgaters, everywhere, that if he needs something, no matter how obscure, he surely has a friend who can help him get it.

  Madole is unmarried and doesn’t have kids, and in 2007 he made the decision to direct what little savings and disposable income he had into making a splashy debut as a Bears season-ticket holder. His father had been a firefighter, and Madole had grown up in firehouses. (His father was, unsurprisingly, also the one who introduced him to the Bears.) He loved the culture and tradition of firefighting, and so it was natural for him to try to connect his affection for that world with his affection for the Bears. He had a friend (of course), Dave, who owned a local ambulance company, and for a few years he talked with him about what it would take to get ahold of a retired ambulance. When Madole realized he would land season tickets, he told Dave one night at Tavern, “I’m serious now. I need a truck.”