Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Gass banned more people, and then he decided he had to do something drastic. “There were lots of people on the site who were not posting offensive comments, but there was this sizable minority and I had just had enough,” he says. “This was running on my servers, and I was not going to host that level of dialogue. I was not going to support that. And I was horrified by what the Vikings had done. I was not going to support the team in any way.”

  Gass talked briefly with his wife, who, he says, “could see how it was distressing me.” Monday evening, with a few keystrokes, he seemingly ended the eleven-year run of Vikingsmessageboard.com.

  The homepage was blank save for this statement:

  Vikings Message Board has been shut down permanently. It will not return. There are two primary reasons.

  1. The Vikings cowardly decision to reinstate a child abuser and think that an apology will make this blow over. We will not stand for this arrogance and we will no longer be the home of any support of the Vikings. We stand for those who cannot defend themselves.

  2. We will not give a voice to thugs who think child abuse is “cultural” or worse, openly advocate child abuse as a reasonable method of punishment. This ends here. Yes, a few board members have ruined it for everyone. Congratulations, a—holes.

  Some members were outraged; others just felt lost. At purplepride.org, where many of the posters from Vikingsmessageboard.com migrated to, people wrote of feeling like “refugees” and “orphans.” Wrote one poster: “I think I can speak for some of us at least, those of us from VMB are deeply saddened by the loss of our home.” Many spewed hatred at Gass, but several showed a surprising understanding for why he did what he did. “Plenty of us…have been having some pangs of conscience with following a sport that has a lot of problems and gives lots of reasons to question one’s loyalty…but eliminating the medium through which we could discuss what is a major ordeal (AD’s horrible/ignorant acts) was not the answer.”

  Gass found that thread, and after reading it Tuesday night and more posts on Wednesday morning, he realized he had made a mistake. Gass contacted the person who had agreed to take over as administrator and sent him a backup of the site he’d made just before shutting it down. By Wednesday afternoon, Vikingsmessageboard.com was back up and people were posting there again, including Gass, who apologized to the group for “a rash decision [that] brought down a community much larger than me.”

  He posted only once more on the site (a link to an SI.com article about why he shut down the site), and then he was done—with the site, with the Vikings, with football. He has not watched a Vikings or Northwestern game since. During the 2015 season, he went to a tailgater before a Northwestern game to socialize with friends, but he didn’t go into the game. When he attends parties wrapped around the viewing of a game, “I will usually leave soon after the game starts.”

  Football is, simply, no longer part of his life.

  Surely there are other football fans who cringe while watching the sport, who have become aware of the toll that playing the games takes on the physical and mental health of the players. Toss in the off-the-field incidents involving players—Peterson’s child abuse, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punching his fiancée in an elevator, the fact that the Seahawks embraced a player with Frank Clark’s past—and there is more than enough despicableness in the game to drive people away. Yet what does it really take for a fan like Gass to permanently give up football?

  His compassion for the players, for the injuries they suffer, is real. He is also smart and introspective, able to step away from his life and view it from some distance, to judge his actions clear of emotion. When he did that, he saw a guy invested far too much in brutality, in a sport that harms, and he didn’t like that guy. The Peterson mess also showed him he had grouped himself with some people whose devotion to the Vikings was so strong it led them to minimize even the abuse of a child. That was a minority of people, but they existed, and Gass is a believer that we are the company we keep, even if it is only on a message board.

  Yet it was likely something else that enabled him to completely cut football out of his life.

  In 2010, while he was still grappling with the sport’s concussion crisis, he watched the Vikings play the Saints in the NFC Championship game from his home in Chicago. “My wife and daughter, who was like two at the time, had left the house. My wife didn’t want to be around me. She knew what I would be like. Well, that was the game when the Saints, we would later find out, had the bounties on some Vikings players, and so I am watching all these dirty hits and just going bananas. My wife came home when she thought the game was over, but it had gone into overtime. She comes in with my daughter right when [Vikings quarterback] Brett Favre throws an interception, and here I am yelling, and my daughter, she doesn’t understand fandom, doesn’t understand why Daddy is yelling. To her, I am just yelling.”

  As he was grappling with the brutality of the sport, with the harm it did to the players, he also began to question the wisdom of devoting so much of his time and energy to the Vikings. “I’d spend ten or eleven hours on Sunday watching football, even if I couldn’t get the Vikings on television.” Spending the entirety of twenty-one Sundays a year watching the NFL is hard when you have a daughter and a wife who need and want your attention. Moreover, he began to consider the behavior he was modeling for his child. Did he really want his daughter to see him as a crazed guy screaming at the television?

  Studies have shown that people in committed romantic relationships are more likely to leave their partner after they have identified another person with whom they can couple. Breaking up with your sports team is easier if you have an alternative as well, something you can love just as ardently. Wendi Bromlie couldn’t let go of the Seahawks because then what would she have? Gass realized that if he walked away from football, he would become a more devoted father and husband. Letting go of a large part of your identity is a lot easier if you bolster one of your other identities—if you have something to fill the void.

  On a Sunday in October 2015, around the same time the early NFL games were kicking off, Gass stood in an apple orchard in northern Indiana, just across the border from Chicago. It was one of those great fall days in the Midwest, the trees exploding with color, a soft wind hinting of the winter to come. He watched his daughter take a tractor ride with other kids. He helped his wife fill a basket with apples. They talked about their child and their jobs and what they would do with the rest of their Sunday.

  Football, the Vikings, never came up.

  In 1987, Drew Castillo was living with his older sister and his mother, Christine, in a crappy neighborhood near Baylor University’s Floyd Casey Stadium in Waco, Texas. Before settling there, they had lived in a housing project and had also spent many months crashing with whoever of Christine’s friends was feeling generous. A home in one of the worst neighborhoods in Waco was, in many ways, an upgrade.

  Christine worked at a printing plant, and she would come home in the evenings with ink-stained fingers, her clothes and hair smelling of chemicals. To this day, there is a certain odor from ink pads and industrial soaps that triggers memories for Drew, such as sitting on the couch and twisting his mother’s thick brown hair around his finger.

  Drew’s father had left home when Drew was about a year old. Christine, who had two kids before she was twenty-one, was a partier. Almost every night of the week she went to a club, and on one such night, March 11, 1987, she called to check on Drew and his sister, who were staying at their grandparents’ house. A short time later, Christine was stabbed to death in the chest during a dispute with another woman. Drew was seven years old, and he got the news from a couple who had been at the club that night and barged into his grandparents’ home. “You could still smell alcohol and everything on them, and they are saying, ‘We’ve got to tell them; I’m going to tell them.’ They’re the ones who told us that my mom had died.”

  Drew and his sister moved in with their grandparents, and Drew g
rew close to his grandfather, who did hauling and excavation work. Drew would sometimes ride along to job sites and help him out on the weekends. “I had two cousins and they were chubby and [my grandpa] would say, ‘Don’t be like your cousins! All they want to do is eat!’ My whole life, I’ve always worked hard. That is from my grandfather.”

  In 1993, when Drew was thirteen, his grandfather died. (They buried him on the day law enforcement arrived at a compound near Waco controlled by David Koresh and his Branch Davidians.) Drew next went to live with an aunt and uncle, moving into “a party animal house. We’d see cocaine on the coffee table. It was a normal thing.” At fifteen he ran away from home, and by his junior year at University High in Waco he was living on his own, renting a place he paid for with his mother’s Social Security check. He smoked marijuana and sold a little on the side to buy the newest Air Jordans, and he carried a gun for protection. “I was super-scared of getting caught, getting robbed, getting killed, getting stabbed, whatever.”

  He was only about five-foot-eight but strong and tough. In Texas, that means heeding the call of football. He made the varsity team as a freshman and would eventually become the school’s starting quarterback. He was one of the team’s stars, though it was University High’s running back that got the most attention. He was a year older than Drew and would go on to play at Texas Christian University and then professionally. His name was LaDainian Tomlinson, and he is one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. Drew would joke that he helped “LaDainian become LaDainian” by handing off to him fifty times a game.

  Drew also played baseball, his best sport. He was on a select travel team during the summer and was an outfielder for the University High team. His favorite player was Ozzie Smith of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was also a huge Dallas Cowboys fan and, really, a fan of anything related to Texas sports. He and his friends once climbed atop a church across the street from the Baylor University track facility so they could watch sprinter Michael Johnson, a fellow Texan, train for the 1996 Summer Olympics.

  Drew’s senior year, when he was the starting quarterback and one of the baseball team’s best players, was a transformative time. “I really tried to focus on sports more to help me stay out of trouble. I was trying to live a different lifestyle than from the last six, seven years. I needed to stop hanging around a certain crowd, stop smoking and drinking.” Aiding that effort was his girlfriend, Olivia, who began taking Drew to church. Drew’s family was mostly lax Catholics. Olivia went to the First Spanish Assemblies of God, an all-Hispanic church. The services there were nothing like what Drew had experienced before. He gravitated toward a youth minister, a guy he knew as Coach Cuevas. “He was a Little League baseball coach in the same league I had played in. He had the best team every year. They weren’t arrogant, like the best team typically would be. Everybody wanted to play for him. I never knew why all the players were so connected to him. I just always saw him from a distance.”

  Over time, as he attended more and more of Cuevas’s services, Drew would give his life to Christ. He also moved in with an aunt, his dad’s sister. She found him living in a run-down place with no power or hot water, and she took him in and vowed to help him stay out of trouble. She wasn’t a Christian at the time, but she took him to services at First Spanish Assemblies of God, saying, “It’ll keep you out of trouble.” Eventually she, too, would say the “prayer of salvation,” giving her life over to God. By the time Drew graduated from high school, the weed and the guns had been replaced by his faith.

  Drew accepted a football scholarship to Tyler Junior College, but at the last minute he went to Cuevas and told him that he believed his calling was to become a youth pastor. Cuevas directed him to Bible school, and in 1999 Drew enrolled at Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie. That NAIA school was just beginning to build its athletic program, and Drew played football and baseball. “We traveled to Tennessee, Nebraska, Oklahoma, all around the Midwest, and we were getting killed everywhere we went. I played quarterback and linebacker. That’s how bad it was. I had never played defense in my life. Never. And I was a linebacker. We had maybe twenty-two people on the team, just enough to each go one way, but sometimes guys had to go both ways. It was fun, a great experience. I ended up playing for three years. They also started up a baseball program, and I played one year of that.”

  As a college freshman, he visited a church in Waxahachie that was starting a Spanish ministry, and within a few weeks he was named its youth pastor. He and a friend would eventually find an old grocery store in a neighboring town, gut it, and build their own church. By his junior year, he was overseeing a congregation of more than three hundred kids. It took up so much of his time that he eventually had to quit the church so he could finish his studies and graduate.

  In 2005, Drew moved to Dallas and took a job with the NBA’s Mavericks, hawking programs at games and working at the memorabilia shop. He then took a similar job with the Dallas Cowboys. He was still speaking to youth groups, but sports, being around those teams, held a strong appeal. Eventually he ran into an old classmate at Southwestern Assemblies of God who was the youth coordinator at Potter’s House Church, one of the biggest megachurches in the country. T. D. Jakes, the televangelist, took over the church in the mid-1990s and led an expansion that included a $45 million sanctuary covering 191,000 square feet. More than twenty thousand people attend services every Sunday.

  Drew Castillo worships Jesus more than football, but not by a huge margin.

  “My friend from college said I should speak at this little event they had going on. It was a small event, and I spoke, and then she said to come back and speak at this other event. Before you knew it, they offered me a job as a youth coordinator.” Landing at Potter’s House was like being drafted by the Dallas Cowboys or Drew’s beloved Texas Rangers. It was the big leagues, and for Drew a dream come true.

  In 2009, the youth minister at Potter’s House left, and Jakes offered Drew the job of overseeing the one thousand young people in the congregation. Drew was flattered but reluctant. “I didn’t consider myself worthy enough,” he tells me. “That stems from childhood issues that follow us—insecurities and scars and hurts and pains. The weight that comes with being T. D. Jakes’s youth pastor and running a youth ministry of that size, I didn’t think I was ready for it.”

  Jakes invited Drew to lunch at his house after the next Sunday’s service to discuss the position. “It was during football season, and the Cowboys had like a three-o’clock game. I figured I’d have plenty of time after eating lunch with [Jakes] to watch. Or I figured we’d talk and watch the game together. So I get to his house at about one p.m. and we start talking, and by the time we finished it was seven or seven thirty p.m.” At one point, Drew thought to say something, perhaps ask Jakes if they could at least catch the fourth quarter. But he kept silent. For at least that Sunday, God trumped football.

  Jakes convinced Drew to take the job, and the fact that he was swayed during a meeting that conflicted with a Cowboys game was a perfect harbinger. He would quickly learn that one of the great challenges of being a youth minister in a place like Dallas is managing the conflict between sports and religion. How do you convince young people to prioritize God when devotion to sports is more fun, more embraceable, more socially relevant? Drew is a “devout” (his word) follower of the Cowboys who sometimes prioritizes fandom over faith. After the Cowboys lost a playoff game a few years ago, he sat quietly for two hours trying to cope with the loss. He missed a Wednesday Bible study to watch the Rangers in the World Series a few years back. (He has season tickets.) How do you ask young people to put Christ before the Cowboys (or some other team) when in his own life he has at times failed at that goal?

  “If there’s a twelve-o’clock Cowboys kickoff and I’m done preaching at eleven o’clock, in my mind I’m like, I’ve got to hurry and go pick up my [chicken] wings and hurry to get home in time for kickoff. I’m very guilty of that. That means cutting conversations short
at church, telling people I’ve got to go, that I’ve got a meeting. I’ve got Verizon and the NFL app, there are days that I’m walking out of the church and I’ve got the game on right there….I’m a Christian leader. I’m a pastor. And I’m a crazy Cowboys fan. Crazy. I look at my own life and I know there’s a fine line.”

  When people link fandom and religion, it is typically a superficial connection, a way to illustrate someone’s passion for a team or a sport, as in “Alabama football is his religion” or “In Texas, high school football is a religion.” That misses the more salient dynamic between the two, how the rise of one has come at the expense of the other. That is the trend line that Drew Castillo sees. He is among the many church officials pondering what can be done to redirect the energy young people put into sports into their relationship with God.

  “I wish every pastor and every religious leader would look at what the church can learn from the sports world. Because at the end of the day, they’re winning. The sports world is winning,” he says.

  Religious organizations across the country have, for the most part, bent to the will of the people when it comes to sports. Services during the NFL playoffs or Super Bowl Sunday are moved so as to not conflict with the games; Pastor Drew won’t schedule fall events on Friday nights (because of Texas high school football). Some churches have Jersey Days and other events where people can show their team spirit. There are “fifth quarters” and other gimmicks that use a popular sporting event to get people to come together and worship. Famous athletes are regulars at Potter’s House (and other megachurches), and they’re used by the staff to reach people, especially the young; the church has even organized a seven-on-seven football tournament.