Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  The majority of Huskers supporters surveyed by Aden believed three things:

  1. That the football players are “like them” and are rural Nebraskans.

  2. That Nebraska players displayed “agrarian principles,” such as a strong work ethic.

  3. That rooting for local players who displayed those principles helped fans stay connected to the state and their heritage.

  Aden’s team also asked people questions to determine the strength of their connection to the football program and their overall self-esteem, and they also had respondents complete the Agrarian Beliefs Scale, another Likert-like survey that measures a person’s expression of agrarianism. Taken in total, the results led Aden to conclude that the passion of Nebraska fans is “not primarily rooted” in whether the team is winning, nor in fans’ proximity to the school, nor even in some formal association with the university (like having been a student). What they cared most about was what the football program “stands for.”

  What exactly is that?

  Aden read a lot of Willa Cather while doing his research, and her descriptions of small-town Nebraska farmers—resilient, hardworking, humble, and kind to their neighbors—echoed what he heard from fans. For Nebraskans, both those living in the state and elsewhere, the team represented a way of life, an agrarian identity, the “ethos of the state.” In his book Huskerville: A Story of Nebraska Football, Fans, and the Power of Place, Aden compares the gatherings at Memorial Stadium or at Huskers bars around the country to traditional cornhusking parties held decades ago. At the end of the fall harvest, neighbors gathered and husked corn and ate and drank and sang and danced. These parties, Aden writes, provided “a means both for coming together and showing others what you’re made of.” Nebraskans view football gatherings, either in the stadium or at bars or at homes, similarly. It is a time to come together and showcase the traits they believe are uniquely Nebraskan.

  That is why Huskers fans are less upset when the team loses than they are when it appears the Huskers are not displaying the proper principles. In 2004, the school hired coach Bill Callahan, who previously had coached the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. He brought with him a short-passing attack known as the West Coast offense. Nebraska’s best teams over the years had featured a run-heavy attack; big, tough local boys on the offensive line paving the way for running backs. Callahan’s switch to a finesse offensive system was problematic not only because it failed to turn Nebraska into a winner (he was fired after the 2007 season) but also because it made it difficult for fans to continue believing the Huskers were, like Nebraska farmers, tough. Callahan also diminished the school’s famed walk-on program, a source of pride among fans as it had resulted in many feel-good stories of unknown farm boys ascending to the starting lineup through superior effort.

  Bo Pelini, the coach who replaced Callahan, rebuilt the walk-on program but “was kind of a jerk to people,” Aden says. “The narrative became that he isn’t a person of high character and the team is undisciplined because of that.” Mike Riley, hired in 2014, is one of the profession’s nicest guys, but he runs the pass-heavy spread offense. “So not surprisingly what you read on message boards is that he is not valuing the run enough and the players aren’t displaying the proper work ethic,” Aden says. Riley rebounded from a tough first season to lead Nebraska to a 9-4 record in year two. Still, it would likely take a national championship for fans to not find something wrong with his approach.

  Nebraskans are not alone in believing their football program represents an identity they wish to project to the world. Supporters of Alabama and Mississippi see their teams as representing traditional Southern values. Texas football fans will tell you their favorite squad exhibits traits singular to that state. The Pittsburgh Steelers are often called a “blue collar” team, representative of the hardscrabble denizens of that steel city. “The cultural identity created for the Steelers is similar to the one created for Nebraska football,” says Aden. Yet his research found that Huskers fans believed their identity to be unique. If asked, they would likely tell you the Steelers and their fans aren’t like them at all.

  Nebraskans are also not alone in their willingness to blur lines to make the football program fit the desired portrait. One individual surveyed by Aden responded: “A larger percentage of the Huskers squad is actually from Nebraska than at most schools (or at least we think so).” The qualifier—“or at least we think so”—is important. Some of the best Huskers players during the 1990s and now are not from Nebraska. That detail gets downplayed because it runs contrary to the desired narrative. Fans of Ted Peetz’s beloved Green Bay Packers do something similar. Of the sixty-nine players who were on the Packers roster, on the practice squad, or on injured reserve to start the 2015 season, only two were born in Wisconsin. But that doesn’t stop Peetz and other Packers fans from believing they represent what it means to be a Wisconsinite. Brett Favre, that Packers favorite, was born and raised in Mississippi. “We all knew that Favre wasn’t really one of us, that he would go back to Mississippi when the season was over,” Peetz says. “But we chose not to focus on that. We’d look at him and say, ‘He wears jeans. He’s got a drinking problem. He’s one of us!’ ”

  The third key finding in Aden’s initial study—that rooting for the Huskers helps Nebraskans stay connected to their state and heritage—led him to conclude that Nebraskans (and likely other football fans) have “place attachment.” That term is often used to explain the emotional bond people might have for, say, a piece of land or a city; think of the way one feels returning to one’s childhood home after a long time away. But for Nebraskans, the Huskers football team stands in for that place. When Aden streams radio broadcasts of Nebraska games and listens to them while watching a muted television, “I do that to hear familiar sounds, like the grain commercials. It is comforting. It takes me home.”

  Moreover, it takes him and his fellow fans to an idealized version of home. The number of farms and rural residents in Nebraska has been in a steep decline for over a decade. It is not the same place it once was, and yet “in the midst of this cultural upheaval, Husker football may well provide many Nebraskans with one of the few means of hanging on to an agrarian cultural identity. The performance of the fans, players, and team is a powerful method of re-enacting a valued, but threatened, sense of agrarian community,” Aden writes.

  For Ted Peetz, Aden’s work clarified why he spent all those years searching for fellow Wisconsinites with whom to watch Packers games. Sure, it was more fun to be with people who also supported his favorite team, but what he really wanted was to feel, even if only for a few hours, like he was back home, among people who shared his values and rituals. “Every Sunday, even if the Packers lose, I still walk away feeling pretty good,” Peetz says.

  With the study he and Wann devised, Peetz hoped to “put another needle on the haystack of information” about fans by measuring the happiness of Packers supporters who watched games together at bars both during the season and in the offseason. He surveyed 183 people over two seasons at watch parties, then followed up with them in the off-season and asked them to complete an electronic survey. Wann and others have shown that sports fans, in general, are happier than non–sports fans. Peetz hoped to take it a step further and determine if that happiness was seasonal. Did it peak during the season and then dip when the games stopped? Or did closely following a team and being part of a group create a happiness that lasted year-round?

  The results were clear: the social-psychological health of Packers fans during the off-season was about the same as it was during the season. The impact of having a team to draw your mind back home, to remind you of the people and places and sights and sounds, isn’t merely seasonal. It is a lasting joy.

  A tale of two tattoos.

  Tyler Austin Black graduated from Madison Southern High School in Berea, Kentucky, in 2009, and like most people his age without college plans, he wondered, What the hell do I do now? He took a job at the local Sonic, which gave him a g
limpse into the future. Many of the people he worked alongside were in their thirties and had also started at that fast-food joint right out of high school.

  Berea (population 14,374) was a dry town then, and Berea College, a Christian school, has a strong influence in the community. “It is just a real conservative place and not my style,” Black says. He didn’t experience anything close to the liberation one envisions after exiting high school, and his social options had also dwindled, as many of the people he hung with in school were gone, many forty miles north to the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. He had also played football and baseball in high school and had nothing like those sports to occupy his free time. “I didn’t have a hobby,” he says.

  He was bored and probably a little depressed, but then a friend, Will, came to the rescue. It was around November, the start of the college basketball season, and Will, who also hadn’t left Berea, urged Black to become a fan of the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball program. Black knew about the state’s beloved basketball team, of course; it is the winningest program in college basketball history. Black had been a casual fan of the team in high school—he owned a few pieces of Wildcats clothing, like most kids in the state—but he didn’t watch many games or track the team’s progress. His father wasn’t around, and though his mom followed the team a bit, he wasn’t indoctrinated into Kentucky basketball like many kids were. “I wish I could say I was this diehard baby that was passionate about [Kentucky basketball], but I ain’t gonna lie to you,” he says.

  The 2009–10 season was John Calipari’s first as the Wildcats coach. His arrival portended a renaissance for the program, a return to greatness. Will was excited about the season, and he “was always getting me to watch games with him, ya know, pumping me up about the team,” Black says. So, because he had no other significant interests, and with Will urging him on, Kentucky basketball became central to Black’s life. “There was this game that season when they lost—I don’t remember which game—but it tore me up like a girlfriend just broke up with me. If Kentucky lost before, I was like, Oh, man, that sucks, but I didn’t really care. But that season it got to where them losing was a heartbreak. I remember thinking to myself at the time, Wow, I am getting pretty deep into this.”

  What happened to Black up to this point doesn’t require much time on the couch. He was adrift after high school, seeking an identity, and he latched on to Kentucky basketball. (Somewhere, Dan Wann shouts “Identity!” and raises a fist to the air.) Fans often get serious about a team in moments of transition, like right after high school or college or after getting out of a relationship or moving to a new place. There is a void and sports fandom fills it.

  What happened to Black next, however, requires a little more analysis.

  Fast-forward to the 2013–14 Kentucky season. Black had gotten out of Berea, even if “out” was only five miles north to Richmond. He secured a job doing maintenance at Richmond Auto Parts Technology, which makes transmission gears, and he got a girlfriend and she helped him build a new social circle. “There’s definitely people I started hanging out with who I would have never seen myself hanging out with because we would have never had anything in common,” he says. “But now we have this one thing in common, Kentucky basketball, that got these relationships started off.”

  Fred Coalter, a sociologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, has done extensive work on the role that sports and other physical activity can have on the lives of adults. The benefits of exercise to one’s physical health are obvious, but Coalter also found that participating on teams in adulthood created more elaborate social networks. It’s not apples to apples, but being a fan of a professional or college team can do the same, as Black’s experience shows. Arenas and stadiums and sports bars (and even fan message boards) can function as neutral meeting grounds for people who agree on this one thing—their love of a team—if not necessarily much else. They connect over this shared passion, and that mutual devotion keeps them connected as their differences emerge and as they work out a system to manage them, culminating in healthy (or at least healthier) interpersonal relationships between people who might otherwise not know one another at all.

  Black has a thick, dark beard, and both of his arms are covered in tattoos. He typically wears well-worn jeans, a dark T-shirt, dark Vans, and always a baseball hat. His look is blue collar but could be mistaken for hipster. One of the new friends he made in Richmond was a guy named Nathan. “He’s like this preppy frat-type dude,” Black says. “He wears khaki frat-boy shorts and the Ralph Lauren polo and all that. And, obviously, I am not that kind of dude at all. I am sure people see us out together and think, That’s a weird match. But we got UK basketball in common.”

  Kentucky entered the 2013–14 season as the number one team in the nation but didn’t live up to that ranking. They lost a few early games to good teams and then, in late February and March, dropped back-to-back games to Arkansas and South Carolina, two unranked foes. The Kentucky fan base was apoplectic.

  “That South Carolina loss—they are the worst team—so losing to them, well, I noticed people were really upset,” Black recalls. “I noticed that on Twitter people were tweeting at [the Kentucky] players, just horrible stuff like, ‘We can’t wait for you to leave.’ In my head I’m thinking, We’re supposed to be the best fans in college basketball; we’re not supposed to do stuff like that.”

  Black was equally upset that people seemed to be giving up on the season. “There are people losing hope just like, you know, saying we’re going to lose in the first round of the NCAA tournament. That’s not how it works. You’re supposed to stick with your team through ups and downs. I was seeing diehard fans on Twitter just saying it was over.”

  A day or two after the South Carolina loss, Black was sitting at his home with his girlfriend, his brother, and another friend. They were talking about the negativity that fans were projecting onto the Kentucky players, and then Black suddenly announced: “I am going to get a ‘2014 National Championship’ tattoo.”

  Their response—“Yer crazy!”—was appropriate. “But I told them, ‘You know, I think [the team] is gonna pick it up. They’ve got the talent. I’ve got faith in them. I am going to go for it.’ ”

  No one believed Black would actually do it. A week passed and that looked to be the case. “But then I was thinking, you know, I got to get this done because it’s tournament time and I believe they are about to make a run,” Black says. “If I do this after they start playing and winning, it is going to be irrelevant.”

  There was a brief moment of hesitation when the tattoo artist said, “Are you sure?” just before the needle touched Black’s right calf, but otherwise he never wavered. He felt he had to do this for his Wildcats.

  The artist wrote “2014” and below that “NATI9NAL CHAMPIONS UK.” (The “9” referenced the number of national championships Kentucky would have if it won this year.) She framed everything but the year in a Kentucky blue outline, making it look like a sort of badge. It was a pretty simple tattoo, about the size of a cocktail coaster. It took the artist about two hours to complete and cost $80.

  Getting the tattoo was phase one of Black’s plan to lift the spirits (and, he hoped, the fortunes) of the Kentucky team. “I knew the media, the social media today, how quick things can travel. Before Twitter, there was no way I would be able to say anything to the team.” He tweeted out a picture of the tattoo to players on the team and to other diehard Kentucky fans he followed. “I really wanted the players to see it. I wanted them to see that this dude still has faith in us, you know? I also did it for other fans, too, even if they were laughing at me. It gave them something to lighten up about so they weren’t so heartbroken over this horrible team and all that.”

  Tyler Austin Black’s tattoo. Still waiting for that ninth title.

  Kentucky center Willie Cauley-Stein, a player who has spent many hours in tattoo parlors, was the first to retweet the picture of Black’s tattoo, and it took off
from there, with other players and fans sharing it across social media. Black got a call from an ESPN reporter, who wrote a story about the tattoo, and Black became, for an instant, the most famous Wildcats fan in the state. Discussions about him and his tattoo dominated talk radio. Was it brilliant, the sign of a true fan? Or was he just an idiot? On Twitter, where the dark side seems to dominate, Black was encouraged to cut off his leg. “A lot of people called me inbred and said I lived in a trailer,” Black says, shaking his head.

  He went to Lexington for a few days after getting the tattoo and ended up in the same bar as Kentucky players Jon Hood and Jarrod Polson. “They all got a picture with me and told me how much they loved what I’d done,” Black says.

  He was blissful, and it only got better. The NCAA Tournament began about two weeks later, and the Wildcats were seeded eighth in one of the four regionals (in a sixty-eight-team field), meaning there were at least twenty-eight teams seeded higher. But the Wildcats won five straight games, reaching the national championship game against Connecticut in Arlington, Texas. “People were freaking out,” Black says. “They were calling me ‘The Eight Prophet’ or something like that. They were like, ‘This man is Notre Dame, blah blah blah. He is about to be correct. Who’s the idiot now?’ ”

  A local CBS crew filmed Black while he watched the semifinals victory over Wisconsin. Afterward, a CBS reporter called him and said she had two tickets to the national title game for him if he could make it to Texas. He invited Nathan, the “preppy frat-type dude,” and Nathan borrowed his mom’s car, and they drove thirteen hours to Texas.