Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Working over the next few days out of a local Kinko’s, Mongan divided an image of Jackson into quarters using Photoshop and then printed each quarter on an 11-by-17-inch piece of paper. He then pieced the photo back together, adhered it to a 20-by-30-inch poster board, and cut the outline with scissors.

  The Jackson big head made its first appearance at the Aztecs’ December 12 game at Long Beach State. Mongan positioned himself two rows behind one basket and waited. With 11:03 left in the first half, Long Beach State guard Darnell Thompson stepped to the line to attempt a free throw. Just as Thompson was set to shoot, Mongan held up the giant Jackson head and moved it from side to side. Thompson stopped, clearly startled, and then looked to the sideline, as if asking his coaches: Do I really have to shoot with that in my eye line?

  Thompson missed his first free throw and his second, and Mongan and the other members of the Show roared. “I knew we were on to something,” Mongan says. Over the next few seasons, Mongan led a creative explosion among members of the Show, and their section at Vejas Arena was their canvas. They debuted dozens of new heads, including Gene Simmons (“with a movable red sock tongue”), Siegfried and Roy (“Roy’s eyes were x-ed out after he was mauled by that tiger”), and David Hasselhoff (“before he got cool again”). There were inside jokes, like the head of Aztec Joe (a troll on a message board popular with members of the Show) and a head of San Diego State center Brian Carlwell, taken from a photo of him dressed as a vampire for Halloween.

  Then there was what Mongan considers the Show’s pièce de résistance: the three-year campaign mocking Wyoming coach Steve McClain, known among Mountain West conference fans as Rat Face. Even today, a decade later, Mongan beams with pride over how successful they were at mocking McClain. As he provides the details, there is something like a twinkle in his eye.

  “The first one I did of McClain, I superimposed his head on a rat’s body, gave him whiskers and teeth,” Mongan says. “The players on the Wyoming bench saw it and were covering their faces with towels to hide their laughter.” By McClain’s final season (2006–2007), many “Rat Face” McClain heads were displayed whenever Wyoming played the Aztecs—one featured him holding a glowing piece of cheese—and members of the Show also held up giant cutouts of a rat trap and similar props. After one game, McClain flipped off the Show, Mongan says, and McClain’s mother approached the group and expressed her disappointment with the “rat”-ification of her son.

  Mongan was unaware of this at the time, but he had created a true fan innovation, on par with the foam finger or the rally towel or (God help us) the vuvuzela, the long plastic horn that turned the 2010 World Cup into a symphony of tortured goose calls. “I never looked at the heads as anything other than something to distract a shooter,” Mongan says. But they became a phenomenon, spreading to schools across the country. One theory is that the nation embraced big heads in full around December 2005, when a picture of the Show appeared in ESPN the Magazine. In that photo, no fewer than nine heads are visible: those of Conan O’Brien, Larry King, Emilio Estevez, Chris Farley, Michael Moore, Lil Jon, Richard Simmons, Chuck Norris, and Aztec Joe.

  “I saw that photo and we talked about what the San Diego State students were doing and we decided to try it,” says Craig Pintens, who in 2005 was the assistant athletic director for marketing at Marquette. He and other staffers created big heads of Mike Tyson (with face tattoo), Britney Spears (bald version), Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker (Mohawk included), and a life-size version of Mini-Me from the Austin Powers movies. Those big heads debuted at Marquette’s Big East conference opener against Connecticut and were a huge hit.

  Marquette eventually found a local company—JobNoggin, a job-listings website—to sponsor its heads, and renamed them “Big Noggins.” Later, the athletic department created an online poll where fans could vote on one of four potential heads to be revealed at each home game; the winning noggins were unveiled during the first time-out of the second half and presented to the student section to the opening music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Marquette’s website also featured a gallery of every head ever used and the Golden Eagles’ win-loss record with each head in attendance. (Charles Barkley’s substantial noggin was an impressive 33-5 at one point; Gary Busey’s a disappointing 7-7.)

  Pintens once received a two a.m. voicemail from a member of the Show. The caller, whose name Pintens could not recall, commented that Marquette had stolen San Diego State’s idea. (He also inquired about an internship.) Says Pintens: “I called him back and told him that absolutely we stole their idea, but that we always credit San Diego State for being first.”

  McClain (aka Rat Face) eventually became an assistant coach at Indiana, a school that embraced the use of big heads like few others. When Tom Crean moved from Marquette to Indiana in 2008, he brought the heads with him (figuratively speaking). Indiana athletic department staffers began handing out between seventy-five and a hundred big heads before each game. At halftime, they’d move the heads from the north to the south end of Assembly Hall so that visitors were always shooting into a sea of big bobbing heads. At game’s end, staffers would stand at the exits closest to the student section and collect the heads, or at least try to. “One year, when we beat number one Kentucky, we lost about 40 to 50 percent of our stock,” says Mark Skirvin, Indiana’s associate athletic director for marketing. “Kids were tearing them into pieces and throwing them in the air.”

  Indiana began producing so many heads—a local printer charged $75 apiece for the largest heads, which are mounted on foam board—that there was a line item for them in the athletic department’s budget.

  “It is pretty cool that I started something,” says Mongan. “What has happened—it has blown me away.”

  Still, as happy as Mongan is about his creation, he acknowledges something: he’s not sure that big heads actually work. Yes, they’re fun. Yes, they got him and the Show some attention. But other than that very first game when Darnell Thompson of Long Beach State missed both free throws after seeing the hideous Michael Jackson head, Mongan doesn’t know if the big heads have made a real difference in any other games. Conor Mongan created the rare fan innovation, and it spread across the country. And yet he acknowledges: “Does it really influence a game? I don’t know.”

  Indulge me, for a moment, a personal story.

  In October 1997, I was covering the University of Minnesota football team when it traveled to State College, Pennsylvania, to play Penn State. One aspect of my job as a beat writer was to watch warm-ups and look for trends that might affect the game. I always paid close attention to how the Gophers kicker, Adam Bailey, did during his pregame routine, given how often a single field goal or extra point can decide a game’s outcome. Bailey was a very good kicker, so that day in State College I was stunned by what I witnessed. He was pushing kicks in every direction. Again and again, I saw a perfect snap, a perfect hold, and then Bailey would send the ball wide right or left. There was no obvious explanation for this. It wasn’t wet or windy that day; Bailey wasn’t nursing an injury. In practice earlier in the week, he had looked excellent.

  Bailey was an avid golfer, and I remember thinking at the time that maybe he had developed the shanks. In my notebook I wrote: “Ask Adam what the hell was up pregame.”

  Then the game started, and Bailey had the finest day ever by a Minnesota kicker. He made field goals of 52, 23, 32, 50, and 33 yards, breaking the school record and tying the modern-day Big Ten conference mark for made field goals in a game. The Gophers, 34-point underdogs, lost to the number-one-ranked Nittany Lions by a mere point, 16–15. Adam’s five field goals accounted for every Minnesota point.

  After the game, I found Bailey outside the team’s locker room and mentioned that I had seen his misses in warm-ups. “You saw that, huh?” he said, and then he laughed. He was a little embarrassed as he explained what had happened.

  During pregame, there was a Penn State fan seated behind the goalpost at Beaver Stadium and he had a really loud voice. H
e was heckling Bailey, and he was really good at it. A year earlier, the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore had come out, and it was popular among the Minnesota players (and pretty much all male college students at the time). A favorite scene involved a man pestering Gilmore on the golf course, leading him to lose his cool and eventually get into a fight with game show host Bob Barker. The heckler at Beaver Stadium was reciting lines from the movie: “You suck, ya jackass!” he shouted, and, “You will not make this, ya jackass!” Every time Bailey struck the ball pregame, the heckler said, at the least, “Ya jackass!”

  Why did that cause Bailey to miss all those kicks?

  “I was laughing too hard,” he said. “The guy was doing a perfect impression.”

  Then the game started. That one brilliant heckler was drowned out by more than 96,000 other fans, and all Bailey heard as he lined up for the kicks that mattered was the white noise of a stadium crowd, something he’d heard many times before and learned to block out. “You hear the crowd, but you also don’t really hear the crowd,” Bailey explained.

  Since that day, I have come to believe something about the impact fans have on the outcome of games: they rarely, if ever, influence a player’s performance. That belief was reinforced while researching an earlier book, Play Their Hearts Out, for which I followed a group of basketball prodigies from age nine through high school. I watched as those young boys endured hostile crowds year after year, lining up for free throws and taking other shots with adults screaming at them, often just a few feet away. It hardened those young players, and by the time they reached high school nothing bothered them. Short of someone coming onto the court, they could not be distracted.

  That is not to say that where a game is played doesn’t have some impact. Home-court or home-field advantage is real, and anecdotally fans witness this when, for example, loud crowd noise disrupts an NFL team’s ability to change a play at the last moment or execute a successful snap of the ball. As a collective, fans do have some influence over events, though studies have shown that the biggest impact they have is in affecting how officials and referees call a game. Thomas Dohmen, a professor of applied microeconomics at the University of Bonn, in Germany, did research in this area, focusing on the Bundesliga, the top division of German soccer. He found that “the social atmosphere in the stadium leads referees into favoritism” for the home team. But instances where fans actually influence individual performers, like making Adam Bailey laugh so hard he misses a kick during a game, are rare.

  Yet fans believe, or want to believe, that they can impact a game by unnerving players. That was Conor Mongan’s goal when he came up with the idea for big heads, and it was also the hope of the people behind another brilliant fan innovation: Arizona State’s Curtain of Distraction.

  Its origin story is similar to that of the big heads. In 2013, a group of Arizona State basketball fans known as the 942 Crew (named for the number of seats in the student section at Wells Fargo Arena) were looking for a creative way to distract opposing free-throw shooters. They liked how the student section at Duke University had for a time sat down in unison during free-throw attempts by opponents save for a single student, known as Speedo Boy, who wore only a Speedo and danced wildly in the shooter’s eye line. The 942 Crew set out to create a similar disturbance.

  Using thick PVC pipe painted yellow, they created the Curtain of Distraction or, more accurately, two Curtains of Distraction. The pipe formed an eight-by-eight-foot frame, from which hung two black curtains. In a game that November, they positioned them on the court, just below the student section at the east end of Wells Fargo Arena. If you were shooting a free throw, looking straight ahead, the two Curtains of Distraction were on either side of the basket. Four students, two students for each of the Curtains, waited until just before a free-throw shooter was about to release the ball, and then they pulled back the curtains, revealing…

  Well, what was behind the first Curtains of Distraction “is kind of lost to history,” says Bill Kennedy, a senior associate athletic director at Arizona State who has overseen the Curtain of Distraction project since its inception. But early reveals included a Miley Cyrus impersonator (in Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” video persona), two unicorns making out, a student in a kayak paddling as the student section sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and two Richard Simmons look-alikes (in 1980s gym shorts, headbands, and fro wig).

  The most famous reveal came in 2015, when the curtains were pulled back and there stood Michael Phelps, the most decorated athlete in Olympic history. Phelps, who was training at Arizona State in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, reenacted the famous Saturday Night Live skit featuring a very fat Chris Farley and a very fit Patrick Swayze auditioning for a job as a male stripper. Phelps wore his Olympic medals, an Arizona State yellow Speedo, and matching swim cap, and danced while two portly, shirtless students did the same on each side of him.

  “It kind of blew up from there,” Kennedy says.

  One person who took note of the 942 Crew’s work was Nick Wan, a doctoral student in neuroscience at Utah State University. Wan is a basketball fan, especially of his alma mater, St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, across the bay from his hometown of San Francisco. “I think I saw [the Curtain of Distraction] on ESPN. Either St. Mary’s was playing Arizona State or it was the game before St. Mary’s was to play, and the announcers were making such a big deal about it,” Wan says. “I use sports to get away from neuroscience stuff, but when you are good at something you bring it to whatever you are looking at, and that is what I did.”

  He compiled data on free throws for Arizona State’s opponents for the first fourteen home games of the 2015 season and then analyzed the data several different ways. He wrote on his blog that purely based on an “eyeball analysis” of the data, the Curtain of Distraction worked, “as 11 of the 14 teams have a lower free throw percentage (FT% = free throws made/free throws attempted) at the ASU game than any other away game.” But when he looked at the data further, he wasn’t as convinced, particularly because the Curtain of Distraction influenced the free-throw percentage only of teams that lost at Wells Fargo Arena, not of those that won. In other words, there was no way to discern whether the visiting team missed an unusually high percentage of their free throws because they were distracted or because of some other reason. In closing, Wan wrote on his blog: “Whether there is actually a substantial effect is difficult to say, but we can definitely say two things: 1) there’s no way it is helping the other team and, 2) it is pure hilarity and amazing.”

  Wan’s post started a debate about the Curtain of Distraction among some very smart people. Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at Michigan, used Wan’s data but considered certain free-throw shooting factors to be important and added weights to the raw data where Wan had not. Wolfers concluded in an article for The New York Times that the Curtain gave Arizona State a one- or two-point advantage. Researchers at Harvard confirmed Wolfers’s view that it gave the Sun Devils an edge, while others disputed the findings, in part because opponents shot as poorly in the first half (when the Curtain was at their back) as they did in the second half (when they faced it). Wan took no issue with Wolfers’s findings, other than to remark that all methods of statistical analysis are open to interpretation.

  “The raw data says one thing, but if you normalize the data or adjust the data to take into consideration specific factors, you could say it goes either way,” Wan says. “You get to a point where you are speaking more about psychology, because if someone believes the Curtain of Distraction does something, then they can find proof it helps [Arizona State]. And if you believe there is no effect, that it is just kids having fun, then you can prove that, too.”

  One of the subjects that Dan Wann and I returned to often during our many talks was how fans manage the absence of control over a large part of their identity. Fans are powerless to improve their favorite team’s fortune and, thus, enhance their happiness. Most don’t accept that, though. They work to creat
e illusions of influence. Most common, they embrace superstitions. A study Wann conducted in 2013 with other researchers found that more than 40 percent of the 1,661 college students surveyed had at least one superstition. (Apparel superstitions, such as a lucky shirt, were the most common.) Further, the more highly identified a fan was, the more likely that person was to believe that their superstition had an impact on the performance of a team. In the absence of any control over the outcome of games, the most invested fans create the appearance of control and then believe it to be real.

  Wann’s SSIS has seven questions that determine the level of a fan’s identification with a sports team, but a quicker way to learn how devoted someone is to their team might be to ask this single question: What do you do to help your team win? If a fan offers an answer other than “nothing,” if they talk about their pregame routine, the clothes they wear while watching every game, if they mention a tattoo or a lucky coin or whatever, you know their identification with that team is extreme.

  “Look, I have a PhD in social psychology and I’ve studied this for decades and I still go to Murray State games and try and put a hex on a free-throw shooter at critical moments,” says Wann. “Fandom is a powerful thing.”

  A postscript about Mongan and his big heads: In 2009, Mongan “retired” from the Show at the age of thirty-two. All that meant was that he bought a season ticket in a different part of Viejas Arena for the 2009–10 season, but “it was still hard,” he says. “I’d look at the [student section] and see them doing something and be like, ‘I would do that differently.’ But it was time to move on.”