Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Equating this level of fandom to drug addiction is not uncommon, but it’s problematic, according to Rick Grieve, the clinical psychologist at Western Kentucky who often publishes with Wann and has also treated addicts. While your team winning can have a physiological effect on the brain’s pleasure center, that effect is in no way comparable to a narcotic, Grieve says. For this reason, he prefers the term obsession to addiction. But you can understand why Robinson and others who are regularly targeted by fans would come to think of their behavior as the result of a disease, “something inside them that makes them care more about this team than I ever could,” Robinson says.

  There are, of course, people for whom fandom has become a problem, who don’t have the balance in their lives that Grieve believes is healthy. Unlike Michael Hopson or Steven Lenhart or Diggz Garza, their obsession negatively impacts their work, their families. Some of the people who have wished death on Charles Robinson clearly need help. The vast majority, though, probably have a partner, kids, a job—all the signs of a “normal” existence. Engage them on something other than their favorite sports team, and you’d likely walk away thinking they are a decent human being. Yet when it comes to their favorite team, these people are still willing to say and do despicable things. As Dan Wann says, “Fandom is a powerful thing.”

  On social media, it has almost become a sport unto itself to get in the best dig at an athlete or journalist. In some fan groups, that behavior is a badge of honor. If a supporter gets a rise out of an athlete or a coach, if he or she gets in a good jab at a journalist, they can giddily share it with other group members as proof of their devotion to the team (while also helping some achieve optimal distinctiveness). Robinson once exchanged several emails with a particularly trollish Miami fan who told Robinson he wished he would “die in a fire.” Robinson engaged with him civilly at first, but at some point the guy called Robinson a “coward” at a time when Robinson was especially fed up with the “sea of shit” flowing into his inbox. So he sent a return email that said, simply, “Go fuck yourself.” He immediately regretted it. Not because the guy didn’t deserve it, but because Robinson imagined the fan sitting at his computer, forwarding that email to his fan buddies, gleefully boasting that he’d gotten under the skin of the reporter who damaged Miami’s football program. It is a fact of life for those who get blasted by fans: if you blast back, they win.

  Of all the horrible calls and tweets and emails from fans that Robinson has received over the years, there is one that sticks with him the most. It was in response to the USC investigation, but Robinson didn’t receive it until more than a year after the publication of the initial article that broke the scandal open. Robinson was working out of the Yahoo! office in Chicago on the day the email hit his inbox. It was from a USC fan, who informed Robinson that he was “a piece of trash” and invited him to have sex with himself. That was not unusual. “But then I looked closer at the email and I realized it came from a guy who worked in that office. He was a Yahoo! employee.” Robinson went to the office manager and showed her the email and learned that it had been sent on the USC fan’s final day of employment. “This guy shared a workspace with me, and he kept his feelings inside him for more than a year, and then on his last day of work, just before he goes out the door, he decides: Now I’m taking my shot.”

  Robinson laughs at the memory, and then delivers the kicker to his story. “And you know what the office manager said about him? ‘He’s such a nice guy.’ ”

  In 2013, Bill Baer, a writer for Crashburn Alley, a site devoted to the Philadelphia Phillies, conducted an experiment…of sorts.

  Like most baseball aficionados, Baer followed Buster Olney, perhaps the most respected baseball writer in America, on Twitter. Olney covered the San Diego Padres, the Baltimore Orioles, the New York Mets, and the New York Yankees for newspapers and then joined ESPN as a national baseball writer in 2003. His daily ESPN blog is a morning must-read, and he appears on the Baseball Tonight television show and has his own podcast. On some future day, Olney will be recognized in the Scribes and Mikemen exhibit (known as the “writers’ wing”) in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and few journalists will have been as deserving.

  As admired as Olney was by his peers and by players, Baer noticed that a lot of fans seemed to have a problem with him. On Twitter, fan after fan claimed that Olney was biased against their team or favored another team. It was such a regular occurrence, people calling Olney out for his supposed bias, that it gave Baer an idea. He combed through Olney’s mentions on Twitter, pulling out the tweets accusing Olney of bias or favoritism. He was trying to answer a question: Do fans of every team in Major League Baseball believe Olney is biased?

  Baer unearthed some gems, such as:

  robert richards @1211Robert 20 Sep 2013

  @Buster_ESPN you really don’t like braves your bias shows every time you post anything about Atlanta.

  David Sobey @Sobey1Kenobi 7 Apr 2012

  @Buster_ESPN my only problem with you buster, you give great statistics but always negative about Cleveland. #biasedmuch?

  Patrick Hite @Patrick_Hite 8 Jul 2012

  @Buster_ESPN Imagine that Buster. You finally tweet something about the #Nats and it’s negative.

  Steven Reinmund @Stevenreinmund 23 Sep 2013

  @Buster_ESPN another Astro-bashing by Buster. I’m so shocked #Bias

  After one pass through Twitter, Baer found that fans believed Olney was biased for or against twenty-eight out of thirty MLB teams. The Twins and Diamondbacks were the outliers, but only at the moment when Baer did his research. There’s no reason to assume those fan bases are any different. According to Twitter, Buster Olney, who grew up loving baseball, who has devoted his life to covering the sport and is among the most revered sports journalists in America, is incapable of reporting objectively about any team in the majors.

  The claim of bias by fans is, of course, a form of blasting. Fans make themselves feel better (or less worse) about something Olney wrote or said by alleging that his biases have blinded him to the truth. Among sport fans, bias is the harshest of the four-letter words, yet they are quick to use it. Talk to enough fans and you’ll quickly discover that everyone is biased…except the fan you are speaking with at that moment.

  When we divide ourselves into groups, any groups, we are prone toward favoritism of our group. Some of the best studies on what is known as in-group/out-group bias were led by Henri Tajfel, a Polish-born psychologist and prisoner-of-war during World War II. In the early 1970s, Tajfel showed a number of male high school students paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, two contemporary artists, and then divided the boys into two groups based on which painting they preferred. After the two groups had been formed, the students were given points and told to allocate them, believing that the more points they awarded to an individual the more that person would be paid for taking part in the experiment.

  When the students in Tajfel’s study handed out their points, they typically gave an equal number of points to the boys in their own group. But when tasked with divvying up points between boys from both groups, they overwhelmingly favored those in their group. They did this despite the fact that the groups had just been formed and were created over something as trivial as which painting they favored. (The boys didn’t even know who the artists were.) Even more interesting: the system of giving out points was designed so that the more a boy favored his group, the fewer points he could give overall. Rather than, say, give a member of each group thirteen points, participants generally preferred to give their group member seven and the opposing group member one. They favored their group even when it meant everyone got less.

  So what does this have to do with sports fans? Well, we know from Edward O. Wilson that it is inherent for humans to group. Studies like the one directed by Tajfel show another human propensity: an instinct to prefer members of our group (the in-group) over members of another group (the out-group). This tendency has been seen in children as young
as nine months old, so it would be a mistake to think of it as sports-centric. It is a human propensity. We all do it.

  Accepting that you are biased toward your favorite team and their supporters is a bitter pill one must swallow before becoming a self-aware sports fan. Admitting that your fandom is a huge part of your identity is a manageable leap. Accepting that your self-worth is tethered to your favorite team is something more. Conceding that you are the one who is biased (and not poor Buster Olney) is, for many fans, unthinkable.

  But the research on this is irrefutable. Fans are prone to view their team and its fans as having more positive traits and to view any negatives less severely. They are also less likely to believe one bad apple will ruin a bunch, provided that the bad apple comes from their group. Work by German psychologist Anne Maass showed that when someone from the in-group did something wrong, the negatives were restricted to that individual. On the other hand, when someone from the out-group was the bad apple, those same people were quick to call it a systemic problem. Translated to sports, that means that if the best player on your favorite team gets arrested for a DUI, you might say it was a onetime mistake and that severe punishment is unwarranted. But if the best player on a rival team gets arrested for the same offense, he is a horrible person and his team is full of renegades and no punishment is severe enough. It also means that if two LSU fans get in a fight with two Florida fans, it is a good bet that the supporters of each team will view the actions by the other as more severe—and typical of that fan group, not just those particular fans.

  While everyone displays in-group/out-group bias, sports fans as a whole are probably more prone to it. That’s because this kind of bias is found most often among people who rely on membership in a group to improve their social identity. Love for the art of Klee and Kandinsky was not a huge part of the identities of the boys in Tajfel’s study, yet they displayed bias. Imagine, then, the level of bias a Timbers Army member would show if asked to dole out points to members of its Seattle Sounders equivalent, the Emerald City Supporters. Imagine a lifelong Auburn football fan tasked with awarding points to Alabama fans or an LA Dodgers supporter doing the same with a group of San Francisco Giants diehards. It is a good bet that the higher one scores on Dan Wann’s SSIS, the likelier one is to display in-group/out-group bias.

  For the most devoted fans, the bad news regarding bias doesn’t stop there. In addition to basic in-group/out-group bias, fans routinely display cognitive bias, which is the tendency to favor information that confirms a previously held belief. Again, this is something we all do, but in sports the examples are acute and especially illogical. When I watched Duke and Michigan State play in the 2015 Final Four with Julie Partridge, a North Carolina fan with a deep reservoir of Duke hate, she remarked again and again how Duke gets “all the calls” in the NCAA Tournament. Most college basketball fans are familiar with this phenomenon, the tilting of calls in Duke’s favor come March. But in fact, it is not a phenomenon at all. It is cognitive bias. Partridge sees calls going in Duke’s favor because that is what she wants to see. The alternative explanation—Duke is just consistently better in the NCAA Tournament—is just too difficult to bear. Partridge is self-aware and an expert in her field; she knows it is cognitive bias at work when she laments Duke and its never-ending stream of favorable calls, but that doesn’t stop her from doing it.

  Among baseball fans, Buster Olney has a brother in bias: Joe Buck, the Fox announcer. He has been accused of bias by so many fans of so many teams that his Twitter bio playfully states: “I love all teams EXCEPT yours.” Olney has also learned that there is no fighting the bias brigade. Now when accused of being biased on Twitter, he frequently responds with a link to an article about Bill Baer’s experiment and a line that could apply to all sports fans: “Welcome to the bias bandwagon!”

  Wendi Bromlie tells people that she has been a Seattle Seahawks fan since she was a young girl, but that is not entirely true. She first became aware of the team when she was around nine or ten, noticing that the Seahawks logo was similar to the Native American symbols she grew up around in Baker City, a town of about ten thousand in eastern Oregon. (Her father was a Cree Indian.) Her association with the Seahawks stopped there, however, as she was not glued to the television on football Sundays, not a wearer of the team’s gear, not screaming “I hate Steve Young!” at the television as the 49ers quarterback vanquished her beloved team. It would be most accurate to say she was aware of the Seahawks at a young age, but that the team had zero to do with her self-identity.

  In 1995, when she was about fifteen, Bromlie ran away from home, bouncing between places in Oregon and Idaho. She became addicted to methamphetamine, and by twenty-three she had had three children by two different men. The children were put into foster homes and later adopted. She struggled for years to get clean, often relapsing around the holidays. The second Sunday in May—Mother’s Day—was one of the roughest days of the year, a trap she walked into again and again.

  It took until 2003 for Bromlie to kick her meth habit; a short time later, she engaged with the Seahawks again. The team was winning big in the 2005 season—they would play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl—and for the first time in a long while, Bromlie had regular access to a television. “I had a sponsor in AA at the time, and he was a Steelers fan. And my AA group was all these Steelers fans. I had like sixty to ninety days [clean] at this point, had a chip for it, and when the Seahawks lost in the Super Bowl, I was just bawling. Everyone was worried I would relapse. We actually talked about it in a meeting.”

  Around 2008, she met Brad (a pseudonym), and she believed that after years of short and/or tumultuous relationships, she had finally found a partner who could help her build a stable life. It was a miscalculation with horrible consequences, as Brad abused her emotionally and physically. Brad would often slap Bromlie suddenly for no reason, as if to keep her forever alert and in fear of his physical dominance. Once, he dragged her out of a hotel room in Lewiston, Idaho, and threw her against a car windshield. She was fired from a job as a grocery clerk after Brad accused the store manager of sleeping with Bromlie. Brad rushed into the store and confronted the manager, who had made the “mistake” of giving Bromlie some money off the books to help her buy food. Bromlie stayed with Brad for nearly four years, believing he would change and become the anchor she hoped he’d be when they met. Finally, in 2012, she found drugs in their apartment and caught him cheating on her, and she left him for good. But not before one last fight. “I broke his nose. His septum collapsed,” she said. “He still has the scar. I am proud of myself for that.”

  Bromlie, thirty-five, is a short woman, five-foot-two, with a wide nose and dark eyes that she obscures with thick-rimmed glasses. She likes to wear Seahawks beanies, and her blond-streaked hair falls down from underneath, hugging her face. It is a style for a younger woman, and generally Bromlie strikes you as a person still clinging to a youth she lost to drugs and missteps. She plays a lot of Xbox, and she talks fast and excitedly, sounding at times like a Saturday Night Live actor doing an over-the-top impersonation of a teenage girl. Here is Bromlie answering the question What do you like to wear on game days?:

  It used to be I’d wear my 12th Man shirt I got from Albertson’s. [The 12th Man is a reference to the Seahawks’ fan base.] But then I got my laundry basket stolen from my car, and so then I didn’t have that to wear, and I posted about that on Facebook, and then people were asking to help me, and so then I got another shirt from Albertson’s, and I was wearing that shirt when they won the [2014] Super Bowl and so always that shirt. Before the [2015] Super Bowl, three days before the Super Bowl, I bought a Marshawn Lynch jersey. We have lost every game I’ve worn that jersey. I would try and wear that and we would lose. Now I’m not sure what to wear. And the lucky earrings that I wore, and I got a purse I made autographed, but then I lost an earring. And I have a big green beaded necklace I wear. I need to go back to my 12th Man shirt.

  During the rough years with
Brad, the Seahawks did not have a single winning season. It was only in 2012—the year she left Brad—that the team started winning again. She began to believe she and the Seahawks had a supernatural connection, that their fates were intertwined. “Everything about them matches everything about me. Every success they’ve had has been the same time frame as me. I swear to God I am supposed to be the biggest Seahawks fan.”

  Wendi Bromlie at CenturyLink Field.

  Bromlie is never more enthusiastic than when talking about Lynch, the former Seahawks running back and her favorite player, who is nicknamed Beast Mode. Her focus on Lynch brought her national attention when, during the 2015 NFL playoffs, Bromlie became so distressed that the NFL was making Lynch talk to the media and/or fining him for noncompliance that she started an online petition titled “Enough is enough! Stop bullying Beast Mode!” The petition (which would receive more than fifty thousand electronic signatures) read, in part:

  As a fan, I have witnessed enough harassment and undeserving consequences regarding Marshawn Lynch due to his very obvious anxiety interacting with the media. I feel, and many agree, that what you [the NFL] are doing is wrong. You advocate against bullying and domestic violence, but force your players into uncomfortable situations? With a fine attached? There are other players willing to talk to the media and it should be a personal choice.