Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Before posting her petition, Bromlie read the language in the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union that pertains to media cooperation, and she even sought out (but didn’t find) the parts of Lynch’s contract that dealt with that issue. She truly believed she needed to speak out for Lynch, that he needed her help. Bromlie later added a clarification to the petition stating that she didn’t actually know or even believe that Lynch had an anxiety disorder, but her initial read on the situation is instructive, as it hits on two major themes of fandom. The obvious one is that she thinks that by helping Lynch she is helping the team, and therefore influencing the fate of the Seahawks. As for her bringing up domestic violence and anxiety, “those things, like the Seahawks, are a big part of her identity, so of course she is going to make that connection,” says Dan Wann.

  Today, Bromlie works as an in-home caregiver to the elderly and disabled in Lewiston. That has brought her some stability, but the Seahawks are the real bedrock of her life. She refers to her one-bedroom basement apartment as the “12th Woman She Cave.” On the wall above her bed, in place of a headboard, is a circular dream catcher, at least two feet wide, with a picture of a wolf in the middle, a nod to her Cree heritage. That is flanked on one side by a poster of Lynch in action, and on the other side by a poster of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. It is the kind of wall you’d typically find in a teenager’s bedroom. Adorning other walls are towels Seattle fans wave at games, a massive 12th Man flag, and newspaper clippings detailing the Seahawks’ biggest victories. Two Matt Hasselbeck number 8 jerseys hang in front of the bedroom’s only window.

  On game days, Bromlie brushes her TV with sage to ward off evil spirits who might compromise Seattle’s chances. Typically, she watches games alone, as she is too boisterous for most people to tolerate. Twice, police were called to her apartment because of noise complaints. During a game between the Seahawks and Rams in 2013, Bromlie became so enthusiastic during a Marshawn Lynch run, jumping up and down on her futon, that she ruptured a disk in her neck. She sits on the brown futon in her living room, a pile of green and blue Skittles—and only green and blue (the Seahawks colors)—next to her on the cushion. (Skittles are Lynch’s favorite candy.) Also by her side is a square glass ashtray. Sometimes she cheats and smokes in her apartment, but most often she stands in the doorway just outside; she angled her television so she can see the screen from there. She takes two to three puffs of her Camel 99’s then rushes back to her futon.

  Bromlie is self-aware about her passion for the Seahawks and where it comes from. “I am addicted,” she says. “I’ve swapped other addictions for the Seahawks.” (Somewhere, Rick Grieve shudders.) She also believes she belongs to two tribes. “Seahawk fans have a very unique connection, and nobody else matches that. I don’t think anyone else can feel what we have, just like only [fellow Native Americans] can know the connection we have.”

  Despite the totality of Bromlie’s devotion to her team, there was a moment, albeit brief, when that connection was tested. In April 2015, the Seahawks used their first pick in the NFL draft on Frank Clark, a defensive end from the University of Michigan. Clark did not play for much of his senior college season because he had been kicked off the team in November 2014 following an altercation in a hotel room in Sandusky, Ohio. The police report and other documents paint a sickening picture of what occurred that day. Clark was with his then-girlfriend, twenty-year-old Diamond Hurt, and her two young brothers. One brother later told police that he saw Clark holding his sister against the wall by her throat and that he picked her up and slammed her on the ground and then landed on top of her. Another brother said he saw Clark hitting his sister. Two women in a neighboring room heard the fracas and called the front desk. When they went to see what had occurred, Hurt “was just laying there. She looked like she was unconscious to me,” one of the women told The Seattle Times. “The kids were saying, ‘He killed my sister!’ ”

  The hotel’s manager, Stephanie Burkhardt, arrived at the room later, just as Clark was exiting. She told police that he said, “I will hit you like I hit her,” and then Clark bumped Burkhardt with his shoulder as he left the room. When police arrived and interviewed Clark, he said he never hit Hurt. During her interview with police, Hurt said she and Clark had been arguing, and she admitted that she had a short temper and that she threw a TV remote at Clark. She said they scuffled and Clark hit her in the face. Despite that, she told police she did not want to press charges.

  The Seahawks drafted Clark at a moment when the league was dealing with a series of high-profile cases involving players and domestic assault, and so the decision to select him brought considerable criticism. Team officials defended the move by saying they had investigated Clark and the incident and were convinced he had not hit his girlfriend. The Seattle Times and other outlets quickly questioned the depth of that “investigation.” The team, it turned out, had done little beyond looking at the police report and speaking to Clark. Seattle executives had not talked to Hurt or her brothers or other witnesses, such as Burkhardt.

  None of this stopped diehard fans from taking to Twitter and other platforms and defending the selection. They cherry-picked details that supported the idea that Clark didn’t hit his girlfriend, such as the fact that the prosecutor reduced his initial charge of first-degree misdemeanor domestic violence to fourth-degree persistent disorderly conduct. The fact that Clark pled guilty to that charge and completed a twenty-five-week domestic-violence-awareness course was, for the most committed fans, proof of nothing. Fans also jumped on quotes by the prosecutor, who defended the decision to reduce the charge—which was suddenly under scrutiny from national media—by saying that she believed Clark never punched his girlfriend. She said she was convinced of this after a private conversation with Hurt, but she wouldn’t divulge the details of that talk.

  If you were not a Seahawks fan, not inclined to rationalize what the team had done, it was pretty obvious what had occurred: Clark avoided a charge of domestic abuse despite significant evidence because the woman who had been abused didn’t want to press charges and later painted a version of what occurred that contradicted statements by witnesses in the hotel room and even her own statements immediately following the event (which is not uncommon in cases involving domestic violence).

  Three years earlier, Seattle general manager John Schneider had said, “Suffice to say, we would never, ever take a player that struck a female or had a domestic dispute.” But he said that before the team had an opportunity to draft a talented player like Clark who played a position of need, and before the team stoked its fan base with back-to-back Super Bowl appearances and created an atmosphere in which the taste of success made swallowing everything else palatable.

  For Wendi Bromlie, Seattle’s embrace of Frank Clark had the potential to create something like an existential crisis. On Sundays, when she settled in on the couch with her Skittles, she would be rooting for a team that included a woman-beater. Almost immediately after Clark was drafted, Bromlie expressed her frustration on Facebook, writing that it bothered her that the team had taken Clark. “My news feed [on Facebook], that was the hardest thing, seeing all the stories about it,” she says. Domestic violence had been thrust back into her life via her beloved Seahawks, and it was unsettling. Could it lead to a wholesale reevaluation of her devotion to the team?

  Bromlie went in the opposite direction. She embraced Clark and the Seahawks’ decision to draft him. On May 4, 2015, Bromlie posted this on Facebook:

  This seriously pisses me off that 12s r judging him. Listen, Im a domestic violence victim! I spent 4 years in an abusive relationship and ya wanna know what the most common question from ppl to me was? Why i put up with it so long. And the answer is simple, common and the truth - Its becuz i loved him and believed anybody and everybody has the ability to change. In my case he didnt, but i know ppl who have no matter what their behavior was. Im nowhere near the person i was 10 years ago and i have quite a few skeletons i
n my closet. I would hope that ppl i care about didnt judge mecuz of mistakes in my past, especially if they werent there and dont know all the facts. My hope is that being a Seahawk and being around all the positivity that our guys can teach this kid, he will have a good influence and support in his future decisions. On and off the field. We should be welcoming him.

  Later, she said she trusted that the Seahawks’ “investigation” had gotten to the bottom of what really occurred in that hotel room in Ohio, and that she doubted Clark had really hit his girlfriend. “I didn’t see this as domestic violence at all. This was the media overdramatizing it. It was him trying to get away from this crazy girl.”

  The Seahawks had become such a huge part of her identity that to abandon the team over the Clark mess would have created too big of a hole. Could Bromlie have filled that hole by following another team, one that hadn’t introduced another woman-beater into her life? What if she took a break from the team, returning once Clark was no longer on the roster? Those were, in her eyes, unfathomable moves. Her crisis of conscience lasted just long enough for her to consider an existence without the Seahawks—and to cower at the possibility.

  When I told Wann about Bromlie, he called her decision “a classic case of cognitive dissonance,” and her revised opinion of Clark was dissonance reduction. She needed harmony between her love of the Seahawks and their decision to draft Clark, and she was incapable of scaling down her passion for the team. So, she had to alter her view of Clark and what he did and the team’s embrace of him. There is no more striking of an illustration of the hold a team can have over someone, of that obsession, than this: on Sundays during the 2015 NFL season, Wendi Bromlie sat on her futon, her pile of Skittles and ashtray in place, wearing her lucky shirt, and cheered as wildly as ever for her Seahawks and for Frank Clark.

  If Wendi Bromlie wouldn’t abandon the Seahawks after they brought domestic violence back into her life, what would it take? What would have to happen for a diehard fan to cut a team out of his or her life, to un-identify, to recognize that the best way to reduce the anxiety generated by being a huge fan is to simply stop being one?

  In 2003, while living in Chicago, twenty-seven-year-old Geoff Gass began to feel some slippage in his connection to his home state of Minnesota. It was only a seven-hour drive or a ninety-minute flight to Minneapolis—he grew up in a nearby suburb—but he felt farther away than that. It was as if his roots were gradually receding.

  That is a common realization for someone in their twenties as they focus on their career and adult life, especially when they settle far from where they were raised. (Remember Ted Peetz’s study of the Green Bay Packers and place attachment?) Gass reacted the way a lot of people do: by becoming an even more fervid follower of his hometown team, the Vikings. Like Wendi Bromlie, Gass scheduled his life around games. When he planned a trip home to see his parents, he made sure to travel around a weekend when the Vikings were hosting a game. On Sundays, he could be found at a Chicago bar with other Minnesota transplants singing “Skol Vikings.” Gass is a large man, six-foot-five and nearly 280 pounds; he looks like a former offensive lineman though he never played football. He was too genial, his hazel eyes showing no hint of aggression. But in the bars you could not miss him. He was typically the biggest and loudest of all the dedicated Vikings fans.

  On the days between games, he visited websites and discussed the team with others. He was a regular poster on a Vikings Google group as early as 2000. In the off-season, he debated the draft and free-agent moves with people online. “I became a much bigger football fan after I moved to Chicago,” Gass says. “And what I learned was that many of the people posting on the site, most of them it seemed, were like me. They were living somewhere else and the Vikings were this connection.”

  In June 2003, he found Vikingsmessageboard.com, and he quickly became one of the site’s most prominent commentators. “It was largely a lot of the people from the Google group, a good chunk of the community migrated there. I developed friendships, and I met a couple of them at games.” Over the next nine years, Gass posted comments on Vikingsmessageboard.com about a thousand times a year, or 2.7 times a day.

  Mike Perkins, a sixty-year-old former Minnesotan now living in Kansas, founded Vikingsmessageboard.com in 2003 (his handle was Kansas Viking), but by 2008, running the site had become too much work. Perkins asked the online community if someone would be willing to take over as site administrator and moderator. Gass took on the job. He was a computer programmer, so that made it easy for him to handle the back-end operations of the site, and as far as monitoring posts: “I was reading everything that was posted there anyway.”

  Around 2009, Gass and the rest of America woke up to the concussion crisis in football. Gass read story after story about the mental and physical health of those who had played the game, and what he read sickened him. One article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker really stuck with him. Gladwell compared NFL contests to dogfights, and near the end of the story wrote this of the concussion problem: “There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.”

  The more Gass read, and the more he understood what was happening to the players on the field, the more difficult it became to watch Vikings games. “I’d cringe every time I saw someone get hit in the head,” he says. When he attended or watched games involving Northwestern (his alma mater), “it felt even worse. At least the guys in the NFL are getting paid.”

  He compartmentalized that, “but then the suicides started,” he says. “There was [Dave] Duerson [in 2011] and [Junior] Seau [in 2012]. Seau was a big one for me. For some reason, I remember him from that Nike commercial with Dennis Hopper when he is on the beach. And he was one of those really great players from my teens and early twenties.”

  Gass tried to keep watching, kept cringing at the hits, pretending to ignore what he saw and what he knew about the damage the players were doing to their brains, but by the 2013–14 NFL season he couldn’t do it anymore. He drew his first line: he would not attend any Vikings games or watch any of them on television for the entire season. “I kept my season tickets to Northwestern. That was my connection to my school,” he says. “But then I went to the first game and I got that sick-to-your-stomach feeling.”

  A few months after the 2013–14 season started, Gass read a column by ESPN’s Rick Reilly. “It expressed how I was feeling better than I could,” Gass says. Reilly wrote that now that he fully understood the toll the game takes on its players, “I see too much sorrow and ugliness to love football like I used to.” That column crystallized all that Gass was feeling and also made clear what he had to do: cut football out of his life. When the 2013–14 season ended, he gave up his Northwestern season tickets and vowed not to watch that team on television, just as he’d already done with the Vikings.

  The final step, Gass knew, was ending his involvement with Vikingsmessageboard.com. He had been an infrequent poster and, at times, an absentee moderator during the 2013–14 season, but cutting himself off completely would not be easy. Like a morning cup of coffee, the site was part of his daily routine. And if he stopped visiting the site, the friendships he forged there would surely end. He would be severing his connection to that community and to Minnesota, and that was no small step.

  “I struggled a lot with it that year,” Gass says. Over the summer, he contacted Perkins, the Kansas Viking, and asked if he’d return as administrator of the site. “Geoff said there were some things he learned, knowing what he knew now about football, and he couldn’t do it. He just said, ‘I can’t be part of this anymore,’ ” Perkins tells me. Eventually Gass found another frequent poster who agreed to take over the site, and on August 26, 2014, he announced his departure on the forum. “Unfortunately, I’ve found myself losing my love of the game,” he wrote. He then linked to
Reilly’s column. “I don’t mean to try to convert anyone or bum anyone out. I just can’t watch anymore. It saddens me because this board and football in general have been a lot of fun over the years.”

  The response from Gass’s fellow posters was universally supportive. Most just thanked him for keeping the board running for so many years.

  Gass was gone in spirit, but he was still transitioning the site to the new administrator when, in September 2014, news broke that Adrian Peterson, the Vikings star running back and most popular player, had been arrested for physically abusing his four-year-old son. (Peterson would later plead guilty to a reduced charge of reckless assault.) Peterson had hit the boy with a “switch.” Pictures of Peterson’s son with lashes on his arms and legs quickly spread across the Internet.

  Gass was monitoring the posts on Vikingsmessageboard.com as the news came in. “When the first thread started, there were very little details,” Gass says. “But then you followed it as the news dribbled out, and then you see people who now know what happened, who saw the pictures, and they are making excuses for it, saying like Charles Barkley did, that it is a cultural thing. Then you have people who start saying that the country would be better if more people did this.”

  Gass began banning people from the board, something typically he would do to fans of opposing teams who troll the site. “I probably banned like fifteen people,” he says. That may not seem like a lot—the site has more than two thousand registered users—but there are really only a couple of hundred active members. That meant he was banning a significant percentage of the community.

  The fervor died down over the weekend, but then the Vikings, who initially suspended Peterson, reinstated him to the team the following Monday. “Then came more and more people trying to justify that decision. There were some people saying it wasn’t child abuse because in Texas the specific charge is different, it is reckless or negligent injury to a child, as if it isn’t abuse because in Texas the language used in the law is different.”