Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Before the 2010–11 season, Mongan distanced himself even further, relocating to Austin, Texas, where he operates a business that sets up photo booths at events. He remains a rabid Aztecs fan. “I am the only guy in Austin you’ll see wearing an SDSU hat,” he says.

  As for the Michael Jackson big head, the first of its kind, it has survived, and for a spell hung above a dresser in the bedroom of Mongan’s younger brother, Sean, in their childhood home in San Diego. If you look close enough at the Jackson big head, if you can bear the sight, you will see more than a dozen names written all over Jackson’s chalky face. Following a game early in the 2003–2004 season, Mongan lined up with other San Diego State fans to get autographs from the team. The players and coaches sat at folding tables on the court at Viejas Arena, and Mongan went one by one and had them sign Jackson’s face. Last in the line was Steve Fisher, the Aztecs’ sexagenarian coach. When Mongan placed the Jackson head before Fisher, the coach sat back in his chair and “he laughed a little, kind of under his breath,” Mongan says. There is little Fisher hasn’t seen in his half century of coaching basketball (he coached Michigan’s famous Fab Five to consecutive appearances in the NCAA championship game), and he hasn’t lasted this long by shunning innovation.

  Fisher looked up at Mongan and smiled, and then he scribed his autograph across Jackson’s big forehead.

  On July 4, 2016, Kevin Durant, one of the five best players in the NBA, announced that he was leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder to sign as a free agent with the Golden State Warriors. Basketball players of Durant’s ability, true superstars, rarely switch teams in the prime of their careers. The NBA’s salary structure was designed to prevent it; a free agent is guaranteed millions of dollars more if he re-signs with his existing team than if he leaves for a new one. But Durant wanted to play for the Warriors, and so he left Oklahoma City after eight seasons.

  Thunder fans were, predictably, upset. For weeks they had been reading news reports stating that Durant was “likely” to re-sign with the team. His departure caught them by surprise. There was no time to gird themselves for the sudden transformation of their team from NBA Finals contender to one near the middle of the pack in the Western Conference, nor for the blow to their identity, their self-esteem. Durant had also been an active ambassador for the city and heavily involved in many causes around the state. He often spoke of how he’d grown up with the franchise, which moved to Oklahoma City from Seattle in 2008, Durant’s second season in the NBA. For some Oklahomans, his leaving for the bigger and glitzier San Francisco Bay Area felt like a betrayal, a favorite son turning his back on the city, the state, and the people who had embraced him.

  Immediately after Durant made his decision public, spurned Thunder fans posted videos to social media of them burning their Durant jerseys. Another fan posted to Twitter a clip of his young son crying upon receiving the news that Durant was leaving. He tagged Durant in the tweet and wrote, “Hey @KDtrey5, thanks for ruining my son’s day.” One fan went to Durant’s home and planted a sign in his front yard that read “Coward.” He made a video of the event that also included him saying Durant had a lack of “balls” and “heart.” Another fan altered his Durant jersey so it read “Traitor” on the back. Later, an Oklahoma man created an online petition to change the name of Durant, Oklahoma (not named after Kevin), to Westbrook, Oklahoma, after Russell Westbrook, a star Thunder player who remained with the team. The petition got 2,833 signatures.

  This used to be a Kevin Durant jersey.

  It was another fan response, though, that got my attention. In the days after Durant’s announcement, Thunder fans took to Yelp, the crowd-sourced review site, and visited the page of Kd’s, the restaurant Durant co-owned in the Bricktown district of Oklahoma City. During sunnier times, Kd’s was hailed as a major contributor to the revitalization of downtown. Now it was a giant target for embittered fans. They posted reviews of the restaurant that were poorly veiled (albeit creative) shots at Durant. A sampling:

  “When I first ate his food it tasted amazing, food made with respect, honesty and trust. Now it just tastes like the food of a traitor. I haven’t had this bad taste in my mouth since 1775.”

  “Much like his game it was overpriced and flashy. But at the end of the day it was average. Lots of little wins but no big moment on this menu.”

  “Ordered a 2007 [the year Durant was drafted] Pinot noir that was highly recommended by the waiter. Thought it would have gotten much better with age, but it lacked the boldness that I expected. Will go with a California varietal next time. And the fried Chicken was terrible.”

  “So much potential that never materialized. I was going to give it another chance but opted for the other restaurant across town that was better. If you can’t eat em join em!”

  Why did this particular eruption by fans stand out from the others? First, it was a touch more creative than the usual jersey burning and Twitter bashing. Second, it was a perfect illustration of something that has fascinated Dan Wann and his peers for years: the way fans cope with disappointment.

  After Robert Cialdini coined his famous acronyms—BIRGing, for Basking in Reflected Glory, and CORFing, for Cutting Off Reflected Failure—his research continued, and he and colleagues focused on a form of CORFing called blasting (not an acronym). Faced with a blow to their self-worth, fans enhanced their psychological state by drawing attention to something negative about a rival team or its fans. Think of a Stanford fan after his team loses to Washington drawing attention to Washington’s inferior academic reputation or the fact that a Huskies player got in trouble with the police. That is blasting.

  How could Thunder fans make themselves feel better after Durant’s departure? By blasting his restaurant on Yelp while also slipping in some not so subtle digs at his character and performance in a public forum. “Lots of little wins but no big moment on this menu,” as one person wrote, was a reference to the fact that Durant’s Oklahoma City teams did well in the playoffs but never won an NBA title. When it appeared Durant was staying with the Thunder, fans weren’t highlighting that he had not led the team to a championship. The moment he left, however, they zeroed in on that because diminishing him (and his restaurant) bolstered their positive social identity.

  Durant has the potential to be a drag on the self-esteem of Thunder fans for years and years. Every success he has with Golden State is one that might have belonged to Oklahoma City. When the two teams squared off for the first time since his exit, Durant scored 39 points and the Warriors routed the Thunder 122–96. But Oklahoma City fans aren’t going to just sit there and take continual blows to their self-worth. Already some in Oklahoma have begun referring to Durant as “Cupcake.” (It was a favorite term of Kendrick Perkins, one of Durant’s former teammates; he used it whenever he thought one of his teammates was playing “soft” on the court.) Fans have customized Durant’s old number 35 Thunder jerseys, replacing his name on the back with “Cupcake.” They blast him for being soft and jumping to a team that made the NBA Finals in the two seasons before he arrived, rather than being “man enough” to stick around and build his own winner. When/if Durant wins a title with the Warriors, it won’t sting Thunder fans as much (or at all) because they will have created a protective new reality: they didn’t want Cupcake Kevin on their team anyway.

  Blasting has also become a way for some fans to feel like they are contributing to their favorite team’s fortunes. This is most apparent in one of the more detestable fan developments over the past decade: people engaging with recruits over social media. Follow a top high school football or basketball player on Twitter or Facebook or another social media platform and you’ll witness a cascade of posts from fans of different schools. At the start, they are fawning. They gush about a player’s ability and how perfect a fit he’d be at their school. Morally, this is indefensible, a bunch of strangers sweet-talking a teenager. Socially, it is desperate and pathetic. But psychologically, it is unsurprising. It allows fans to believe they are playing a role
in persuading the best players to select their school, thus contributing to the team’s success.

  But what happens when a player doesn’t do what the fans want?

  In 2014, the highly touted football recruit Terrell Clinkscales committed to play for Nebraska. Immediately his Twitter timeline was filled by Huskers fans praising his abilities and saying what a wise choice he’d made. You will be the next SUH and will be the next Outland Trophy winner, one fan wrote, referring to former Nebraska great Ndamukong Suh and to the award given to the best interior lineman in college football. But a few months later, Clinkscales changed his mind, as teenagers often do, and he announced on Twitter that he was going to Kansas State.

  Nebraska fans didn’t take his change of heart well. We showed you love from DAY ONE. You don’t deserve to be a blackshirt anyway, one stated. Another wrote to Clinkscales: Just heard the Husker coached w/drew offer because you are an imbecile #SHOULDhaveStudiedMORE. (Safe to say this was not the agrarian decency and integrity that Roger Aden wrote about. In Willa Cather’s Nebraska, people don’t call a kid an “imbecile.”) Clinkscales began retweeting all the insults, which angered the Huskers fans even more, to have their behavior highlighted. One fan hilariously referred to Clinkscales as a “hypocrite” for retweeting the hate, adding I figured a big football player could take the Criticism.

  Those Nebraska fans failed in their attempt to help their team land a player, and that, plus the fact that Clinkscales preferred another school, stung their self-esteem. Their need to make themselves feel better was so great they blasted a teenager.

  For those who cover sports teams for a living, getting blasted comes with the job. Whenever journalists write or broadcast something critical about a player or coach or team, they brace themselves for the inevitable onslaught of personal attacks from the scores of diehard fans sowing doubt about a story (or the journalist’s character) in order to feel better.

  Charles Robinson was covering the NFL for Yahoo! in 2006 when he traveled to New England to write a story about Corey Dillon, the Patriots running back. Overall it was a pretty benign article, and no one from Dillon’s camp (such as his agent) or the Patriots called or emailed to complain about its tone or content.

  But some Patriots fans were pissed. They took to a message board to complain that Robinson had felt the need to mention Dillon’s age, that he would be thirty-two that season and potentially in decline. Then they went further. One poster found a story from The Boston Globe that included some of the same quotes from Dillon that Robinson had used in his piece. This fan (and many others) made the leap that Robinson had plagiarized the newspaper article. They debated what to do, and ultimately decided they should contact the NFL editor at Yahoo! They made their goal clear: they wanted Robinson fired.

  Robinson had no clue this was happening until a New York Jets fan saw the posts about Robinson and emailed him. Robinson went to the message board, “and I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen an entire thread devoted to something that I wrote.”

  Robinson never got fired because he never stole quotes from The Boston Globe. When he caught wind of the smear campaign against him, he tracked down a video of the interview Dillon did when he spoke the words Robinson quoted in his article. Dillon was speaking to a pack of reporters, and Robinson was in the video, standing right next to the running back. He shared the video with the fans. “They were ready to storm the bastille with their pitchforks. Over a Corey Dillon story. That should have foreshadowed for me what was coming in the years ahead.”

  Ask any NFL reporter their least favorite part of the job, and you’ll find they despise nothing more than compiling weekly team power rankings. Editors love them because fans click on them, anxious to see where their favorite team slots among the thirty-two NFL franchises. But editors don’t have to deal with the vitriol from fans taking issue with the placement of their team. Robinson did weekly power rankings in his early years as an NFL reporter with Yahoo!, and he would regularly receive five hundred emails or more in response. “I’d look over my rankings, which we all know are meaningless, and I’d see a team ranked like twenty-third and think, ‘Oh, man, this is the fan base that is going to go nuts.’ ” He was never wrong. “I would get these emails that were these Kafkaesque arguments, just a long litany of ambiguity and arguments that would make you think: Wow, this person is writing from a mental institution. I would get emails that were over two thousand words, longer than my rankings would be. It would blow my mind. It was unbelievable to me how important these teams are to certain individuals, so important they would write two thousand words refuting somebody’s power rankings.”

  One week, his rankings included a tidbit about Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Schaub. “A fan emailed me saying the information about Schaub was wrong. I looked into it and, while it could have been written more clearly, it was not incorrect. I explained that to the guy over email, but he wouldn’t accept that. He wrote back that if I didn’t correct it to his satisfaction I would get an email every single day until I did. Then he organized a group of people and they did it. They emailed me every day. It went on for three years. Three years! And judging by their emails, which were usually polite, these weren’t crazy people. They were just very serious Falcons fans.”

  Robinson is best known for a series of investigations he led that exposed wrongdoing in the college football programs at USC, Oregon, Miami, and other schools. Fans of those schools despise him because his articles embarrassed those programs and also made it more difficult for them to win, as most were hit with NCAA sanctions, such as scholarship reductions or a postseason ban.

  USC was the first of those investigations, and not surprisingly, the reaction of Trojans fans was to blast away. They told Robinson he wrote the articles only because he wished he was a football player or because he was trying to make a name for himself as a reporter or because he was jealous that Reggie Bush, the player at the center of his investigations, was better-looking than him—anything to create a pretext for why Robinson would be biased or motivated to manufacture his stories.

  During that investigation and others, Robinson noticed an uptick in people trying to connect with him over LinkedIn and Facebook, people whose profiles made it clear they were fans of one of the schools he’d investigated. He believed they were looking for personal information about him or photographs they could use to attack him, to sow doubt (in their minds) about his work. “The USC story was also the first time I got enough death threats that when I went back to Los Angeles to do more reporting, I was careful about who knew I was out there,” he says.

  Robinson’s 2011 article about wrongdoing in the Miami football program was probably the biggest of his career and also drew the strongest response from fans. Yahoo! owns Rivals, a network of sites for fans of the top college football and basketball programs. After the Miami story broke, the person who runs the Miami Rivals site asked Robinson to do a chat there. Rivals sites are havens for defenders and apologists; they are echo chambers. Robinson participating in a chat there was akin to a guy in a Yankees hat walking into a Red Sox bar in Boston. “But I didn’t care. I was going to go in there and give them the facts,” Robinson says. A moderator asked him some questions at the start and then took questions from fans. Robinson responded politely and completely to each query, listing off the number of sources he had and citing the details from his well-reported story. Miami fans were hoping to pull a thread that would unravel Robinson’s story, to make themselves feel better by blasting him and his report. Instead they got about ninety minutes of Robinson making it clear that everything he wrote had been thoroughly vetted. “The fans logged on were losing their minds,” Robinson says.

  A few days after the chat, Robinson says an executive at Rivals told him that it had been “a disaster.” The Miami site lost hundreds of subscribers, the executive said, and he made it clear that when Robinson exposed wrongdoing at a school in the future, Rivals could not be involved with him. It was bad for business to bring logic
and facts into that world.

  The Miami investigation dragged on for more than two years, and angry fans polluted Robinson’s inbox and Twitter feed for most of that time. “I hope you get AIDS and not the Magic Johnson kind,” one fan wrote. Another said in an email that he hoped “you, your family and your kids die a slow painful death…you piece of shit.” Sometimes, Robinson would take a closer look at the people who were emailing him. He wanted to know what kind of person could wish that someone’s children would die a slow, painful death. “I always expected them to be someone in their twenties, someone in that mode of your life when you react in pure emotion. But the guy who was saying ‘Die a slow, painful death’ was in his fifties. He had kids and a family. He was a professional. It was like that for a lot of them. You would look at their profiles and they would profess their love for their children or say they were a man of God, and yet here they are conducting themselves in a manner so contrary to the way they describe themselves.”

  Robinson grew up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, a big fan of the Detroit Lions and Michigan State basketball. He has vivid memories of watching the Lions in the 1994 NFL playoffs against the rival Green Bay Packers. He was a junior in high school and his family had just purchased a new television, and it was a big deal to be watching that game on that new TV. With 55 seconds remaining, Packers quarterback Brett Favre threw a 40-yard touchdown pass to Sterling Sharpe to win the game. “I don’t know why, but I was holding a Phillips-head screwdriver for some reason,” Robinson says. “At that moment when Sharpe scored, I threw it at the TV and it chipped the screen. For years, I lied to my mom about how it got chipped.” So Robinson understands why people would have a strong attachment to a team. “But I don’t think there is anything in my life that someone could do that would upset me to the point that I’d write to them and say I wanted them to die,” he says. Later, he adds: “The way I’ve learned to wrap my head around it is that I think some fans are like drug addicts, and they are reacting as if someone is threatening their stash, their drug of choice. If you are not an addict, you have a hard time connecting with that.”