Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  The next Monday, Madole visited Dave’s lot and examined three retired ambulances. He settled on one with over 400,000 miles on the odometer, at a cost of around $10,000. He drove it straight to an auto-painting shop in Wheeling, Illinois, which he had heard did some work for the Bears. When Madole told the owner what he had in mind, “this guy rolls back the sleeve of his shirt and there was a tattoo of this bear ripping through a sleeve with ‘Bear Down’ written there. He was a true Bears fan,” Madole says. The owner painted the truck Bears blue and pinstriped it in orange and charged Madole only $1,500, half the quoted price.

  The Fanbulance debuted before a Thursday night game during the 2007 season, with Madole and his brother and some friends piling in the truck and listening to music and partying on the way to Soldier Field. They then resumed the festivities in a lot south of the stadium that fans call the Red Lot because of the color of the parking passes. It has been their pregame home ever since, ten seasons and running.

  At the Fanbulance’s first game there was, to Madole’s great surprise, another ambulance turned tailgating truck in the lot. He and another fan had the same idea and executed it at around the same time. That didn’t bother Madole, at first. In a sea of tailgating vehicles, two ambulances weren’t too many, and the reaction from friends and others where he parked on game days was validating. A Fanbulance! How freakin’ cool is that? Madole hadn’t just joined the Bears tailgating group in Red Lot, he had arrived with distinction.

  Over the next few years, however, that distinctiveness began to dissipate—and Madole began to experience precisely what alarmed Kervin. More and more fans bought old ambulances and tricked them out as tailgating vehicles. Some were painted just like his; one or two even had “Fanbulance” across the hood or on the sides. Madole was irked but not outraged, and he channeled his reaction into competitiveness. Each year, he spent between $2,000 and $3,000 on a new feature for his truck. The first year it was satellite TV, so he could show the early NFL games while he and his friends tailgated before a late game. Then it was new carpeting, then a tricked-out stereo system and a PlayStation setup, then a keg and tap built into the seating area in the back, then a telescoping flagpole to help people locate his truck from afar. Madole was winning an arms race of distinction, staying ahead of those who had copied his idea, but it wasn’t easy. He watched as some of the newest ambulances arrived fully loaded. “Guys who showed up with a truck and have dropped, like, fifty thousand dollars and have everything all done, all my ideas, done from the first day.”

  One Sunday morning in a recent November, as a light snow fell and temperatures dropped into the twenties, I walked the Red Lot, observing and talking to the Bears fans tailgating before a game against the Vikings. It occurred to me that Dan Wann should send his students here, let them wander the lot and interview people. I asked several fans why they were willing to endure the frigid weather, and I got several variations of this response from one fiftyish man: “We need to show we are as tough as the players. If they can play in the cold, we can be out here tailgating and supporting them in the cold.” It wasn’t just something that sounded cool. He meant it, as did others. The Red Lot on the day of a Bears game is a fan researcher’s El Dorado.

  Looking closer at the vehicles and the tailgating setups, there were vans and trucks and converted buses. Next to them were barbecues big enough to roast an entire pig and smokers filled with racks and racks of ribs. There were fire pits and propane heaters, cornhole games, and massive televisions. Some displayed NFL pregame shows; others had an Xbox or PlayStation connected to them, and games of Madden NFL were under way. There were more flags flying than at the United Nations, and so many generators running that the constant hum was like white noise. The quaint tailgating tradition of tossing a football around was possible but perilous; in many areas there was simply too much stuff to dodge.

  There would seem to be nothing a fan couldn’t bring or do to occupy the pregame hours, but that is inaccurate. “There are dimensions the group has agreed upon that are established, and you have to work within those dimensions,” Pickett says. In other words, even tailgaters have standards, what is considered normative behavior. These standards may not be written down, may not have been officially agreed upon, but they still exist. What would happen if, say, in an effort to maintain the level of distinctiveness he craved, Madole added a stripper pole to his truck and invited a dancer to perform? “He would likely be judged as having gone too far,” Pickett says, for exhibiting what she would call “deviant behavior.” Surely, some of the (mostly) male fans in Red Lot would appreciate the show, but it could lead to Madole being ostracized, and his assimilation into the group would plunge and so would his overall well-being.

  To maintain the level of distinctiveness he seeks, Madole must work within those (unwritten) parameters. So what does he do now, with all those other ambulances in Red Lot? First, he throws the biggest parties. The amount of food, the elaborateness of the drinks he offers (he is a bartender, after all), and the sheer number of people huddled around the Fanbulance most Sundays greatly surpass the offerings around the other ambulances. People even contract with Madole to hold elaborate tailgaters for business clients. One friend, who owns a lawnmower-repair company, holds his annual employee-appreciation party at the truck. Madole also had special badges and paramedic coats (in Bears colors with patches) created for the crew of six or so who attend almost every game with him. It was not a loud projection of distinctiveness, but it made him and his closest friends feel special nonetheless. For now, he is optimally distinct.

  If you think about some fan behavior as people striving for their own balancing point between being part of the group and standing out from it, much of what fans do becomes more comprehensible. Those crazy man caves filled with memorabilia, the guys who paint their faces and chests, the women who die their hair Seahawk green, the rich guy who forks out thousands of dollars for every Lakers game to make sure he is seen courtside—it is all an effort to find a harmonious balance between being one of the fans and feeling like your own person.

  And what of Teddy Kervin’s harmony? What did he do about that second banana?

  Well, nothing. The young woman showed up for a while, but then she just stopped. Perhaps she moved away, or perhaps being a banana didn’t help her find a satisfying mix of assimilation and distinctiveness and so she found another group to join. Kervin doesn’t know, but when he realized she was gone, when enough time had passed, it was like a great weight had been lifted.

  Today, Kervin is down to 270 pounds and the suit fits better and he can dance longer and the Rally Banana is hitting its stride. “Even when I tailgate now I have the suit on,” he says. “I got the hookah, got it rolling, music going, people come up and we interact and take pictures. It is a cool, social thing. I still get so much enjoyment from it. Being the banana, all I can say is that it just makes me happy.”

  Wherever he went, Ted Peetz searched for them, for his people.

  As a college student at Kansas State in the late 1990s, he combed the halls of his dormitory, looking for others who shared his passion. He didn’t find anyone, and so the watch parties he held on Sundays in his dorm room were often parties for one. Worse, the native Kansans all around him mocked him, called him a phony. They saw him wearing a Green Bay Packers jersey, the familiar number 4 of quarterback Brett Favre, and they accused him of being a fair-weather fan, a bandwagoneer. Peetz is from Milwaukee, an authentic Packers fan since he was very young, but they still cast a wary eye at him because there were very few kids from Wisconsin going to school in Manhattan, Kansas.

  “My dad went to Kansas State, and I applied because I thought going to school in Kansas would be like getting away, seeing the world,” Peetz says. “Yeah, I know, that is silly.”

  Peetz came to embrace his status as an oddity, a Cheesehead in a land of Jayhawks, but there remained a trace of longing come Sundays, a wish that he had other Wisconsinites with whom to watch Favre and the Packers.
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  After graduating in 1999 with a degree in business administration, Peetz dreamed of making commercials for Nike. Instead, he went to work for…the San Diego Chicken.

  For fans of a certain vintage, the San Diego Chicken is as much a part of that town’s sports lore as Dan Fouts and Tony Gwynn. Created in 1974, the San Diego Chicken started as an advertising stunt for a radio show but then became far more. San Diego State journalism student Ted Giannoulas made a career out of dressing up as a chicken and making fans laugh. He became the Padres’ unofficial mascot and was so popular that he regularly appeared on the iconic Saturday morning children’s television show The Baseball Bunch alongside Johnny Bench and Tommy Lasorda. Giannoulas, as the Chicken, also toured minor-league stadiums, entertaining fans, and Peetz joined the troupe for five months in 1999. He traveled the nation in a tour bus that had once been used by Janet Jackson, often hitting six ballparks in a single week. “One night you’d be in Memphis, the next in Huntsville, Alabama, then in El Paso, and on and on,” Peetz says. “I was doing muscle and production for the show and also was in some shows. Like if they needed to throw a pie in a player’s face, I would put on a uniform and get hit with a pie.” In total, he traveled nearly eighty thousand miles with the Chicken.

  In the spring of 2000, Peetz moved to Bowling Green, Ohio, took a job with the Toledo Mud Hens minor-league baseball team, and began working toward a master’s degree in sports administration at Bowling Green State University. As the NFL season neared, he again searched for his people, for fellow Packers fans, and he eventually found some at a bar in a suburb of Toledo. It was a weird place, a traditional sports bar in the front that was surprisingly empty on football Sundays. There was a back room with tiered theater seating, where about twenty to thirty Packers fans would watch the game on a handful of screens. “It was like in elementary school where you grab a seat on the first day and that becomes your seat for the whole year,” Peetz says. Wisconsinites chain-smoked and drank whatever Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing Company product—and only Miller-based products—they preferred. Meanwhile, a few questionable characters drifted in and out. “I can’t say for sure there was bookmaking going on,” Peetz says, “but there was probably bookmaking going on.” It was a smoky house of disrepute, but it was a smoky Packers house of disrepute, and Peetz felt at home.

  Ted Peetz at his Packers home away from home.

  While at Bowling Green, Peetz taught some classes, and that suited him, so after earning his master’s degree he took a job teaching in the sports-management program at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. There was no Packers bar in that town of under nine thousand people, “but the women’s volleyball coach was from Wisconsin, and so was the [sports information director], so we’d host at each other’s houses, grilling bratwurst and the whole thing,” Peetz says.

  In 2009, after seven years in Mount Pleasant, he moved to Las Vegas to get his PhD at UNLV. He discovered the Rum Runner, a bar not far from campus. It was owned by Geno Hill, originally from Tomah, Wisconsin, who hosted nearly two hundred Packers fans on game days. “There were actually about four Packers bars in Las Vegas, but I liked his the best. When I first got there a bartender told me, ‘You don’t need to ask people here if they are from Wisconsin because everybody in here is from Wisconsin.’ ” The Rum Runner offered $25 memberships in its Packer Backer Club, which got you (among other items) a T-shirt, a pocket schedule, a koozie cooler, and, most important, a free brat and drink at every game. “And if the Packers scored, you got a refill of whatever you were drinking,” Peetz says.

  When he left Las Vegas in 2012 to teach at Belmont University in Nashville, he immediately went looking for another group of Packers fans. He found some at the Scoreboard Bar & Grill near Opryland; they called themselves the Music City Packers Backers. Another group, the Packer Backers Franklin Club, gathered at a bowling and entertainment center outside Nashville in Franklin, Tennessee, in a banquet room in the back. Peetz watched games at both places before settling in with the Music City Packers Backers. He loved how they tailgated in the parking lot of the Scoreboard Bar & Grill, cooking brats and drinking before the bar even opened.

  Peetz got his doctorate of philosophy in sports education leadership, and his expertise is in sports marketing. But while attending the Packers watch parties in Las Vegas and then Nashville, he wondered what it was about him and his fellow Wisconsinites that made them so determined to watch the Packers together, what it brought to their lives. That was percolating in his mind when, in 2013, he went to the Sport Marketing Association conference in Albuquerque and ran into Dan Wann. He told Wann about his interest in Packers fan gatherings and Wann pulled him into his orbit. “You should present something at our conference,” Wann told him. Wann later helped Peetz design a study, which would entail convincing his fellow Packers fans to fill out a two-page survey (including the SSIS) and take something called the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Peetz also began reading previous studies about why fans gather outside stadiums and arenas.

  Sports fandom is, overall, an understudied phenomenon, but why people gather to watch games has actually been heavily scrutinized, mostly by British researchers who have long wondered why people spend so much time in pubs watching soccer. But it was a study conducted closer to home that opened Peetz’s eyes. Like one of the students in Wann’s Psychology of Sports Fans course, it was as if a light came on, and all his actions, all his searching for fellow Packers fans over the years, made total sense.

  Years before Ted Peetz began to explore why he and other Packers fans felt the need to gather, Roger Aden had done the same with football fans of his alma mater, the University of Nebraska. Aden lived in Nebraska from his birth in 1962 in Scottsbluff, a Great Plains town of about fifteen thousand, until he got his PhD in speech communication from the University of Nebraska in 1989. He then took a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and was suddenly hit with that unmoored feeling that Peetz experienced. In Nebraska, Aden “felt centered.” In Wisconsin, he looked at his “internal compass and [found] its needle spinning rather than settling.” He needed something to settle him, and that something became Nebraska football.

  Aden wondered what it was about Nebraska football, about watching games with others from the state and generally following the team, that soothed him. He also wondered what it was that made Nebraska fans so dedicated, unwavering in their enthusiasm whether the football team was winning or losing. The famed Sea of Red has filled Memorial Stadium for every game dating back to 1962, a record streak that following the 2016 season stood at 354 games. In 2008, following a season when the Huskers went 5-7, their worst finish in forty-seven years, more than eighty thousand fans attended the spring game, a glorified practice.

  Aden discovered that the reason fans are devoted to their teams, even in defeat, is something that has been long studied, most famously in the 1970s by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini was a visiting psychology professor at Ohio State, and his office was in Ohio Stadium. After seeing the intense reactions of fans during and after football games, he decided that this was a group he had to analyze. The result was a paper, “Basking in Reflected Glory: Three (Football) Field Studies,” published in 1976, which is arguably the most important study ever on sports consumer behavior. From that paper and others that followed, two types of fan behavior were established. They are known by their (unfortunate) acronyms.

  BIRG stands for Basking in Reflected Glory. Simply put, it refers to someone who enjoys being connected to a winning team. This might be a fair-weather fan jumping on a team’s bandwagon as it makes a run in the playoffs. Or it could be someone who increases his or her interest in a team as it continues to win. Think of the person who never loved the New England Patriots until Tom Brady led them to his first Super Bowl win. That individual is BIRGing.

  CORF stands for Cutting Off Reflected Failure. This is the process of reducing your affiliation with a team because it is losing. A Cleveland Browns fan who stops watching the team
play because he is tired of seeing it lose is CORFing.

  BIRGing, connecting with a winner, boosts our self-esteem. CORFing, distancing oneself from a loser, protects our self-esteem.

  BIRGing and CORFing (which, by the way, sound like what someone might do after too many beers at the Rum Runner) made sense to Aden, but tying the actions of Huskers fans to self-esteem felt like too shallow of an explanation. He wasn’t searching for and gathering with Nebraska fans merely because the team was winning or because he feared being labeled a bandwagoneer. Nebraska fans, of all groups, weren’t CORFers.

  Aden also ruled out tribalism as an explanation. He had other groups to which he belonged, in which he was more invested than any that revolved around Nebraska football. It was the same for Peetz. Over the years, he was more involved in his church and the Kiwanis Club and the golf teams he coached than any Packers groups. Aden and Peetz weren’t dedicated fans merely because of strong loyalty to a social group.

  The usual explanations just didn’t fit, Aden concluded, and so like any good academic he started digging deeper. Over several years, he and a team of researchers questioned 473 Nebraska fans in thirty-three states and six foreign countries. They also did copious research on postings by Huskers fans at online gathering spots like Huskercentral.com and HuskerPedia.com. Aden believed (or wanted to believe) that Nebraska fans were different, more dedicated and kind and polite than other fans, and he doesn’t disbelieve that now. But his central findings were applicable to other fan bases and made clear that to focus solely on self-esteem, on BIRGing and CORFing, or to zero in on tribalism, is to miss a big reason why people support their teams.