Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  “There are churches that won’t cancel, won’t budge on Super Bowl Sunday. They say, ‘What message are we going to send by canceling church for the Super Bowl?’ There are still churches that post on social media: ‘Is the game more important than coming to church?’ ” Drew says. “But you can also embrace it. The way I see it is that it is good to have tools as long as you aren’t a tool to the tool.”

  One Sunday in the fall of 2015, Drew was in an anteroom of the Potter’s House youth chapel preparing to speak to about two hundred kids. The chapel is in the basement below the sanctuary, and it feels like a high school drama classroom. Black paint or black curtains cover the walls surrounding a V-shaped stage at one end of the room. “Firehouse” is written in various places, and behind the stage in wood it says “FHYM,” which stands for Firehouse Youth Ministry. Their motto is “A house that is on fire for God.”

  Drew takes the stage wearing olive green cargo pants, an untucked gray T-shirt, and a blue jean jacket. He is kind of squat; if you were to guess which position he played in baseball, you’d probably say catcher, not outfielder. He has a round face with bright green eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. His dark hair is shorn on the sides and in the back but longer and coiffed at the top. He carries an iPad, which has the night’s program on it, and he moves around the stage with urgency, someone with lots to share and not enough time to get through it all.

  The service begins with a song, and then Drew invites the kids to mingle and welcome one another “to the fire.” They are encouraged to take selfies and post them to Twitter or Instagram or Facebook.

  The morning’s program is part of a series on relationships, and Drew has turned to sports to help carry the message. The first speaker is a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who is now a family practitioner. She speaks about teen pregnancy. Later, former NFL cornerback Chris Johnson and his wife, Mioshi, speak. Johnson lost a sister to domestic violence and has a past similar to Drew’s; he did a stint in jail for selling drugs when he was a juvenile. The couple talks about recognizing when you are in an abusive relationship and how to get out.

  This is what Drew means about using sports as a tool to bring kids closer to Christ. At one point he tells the group, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t like fake people. Amen to not liking fake people. And I know teenagers are really good at sniffing out who is fake. And listen, I don’t believe that today we have assembled a fake group of panelists. We’ve got the real deal here….I pray that it gives you hope.”

  When Drew talks about the conflict between sports and religion, he doesn’t take a hard line. He is not one to quote John’s letters: “Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts.” He has accepted that sports are in people’s hearts and too entrenched to eradicate. “My pastor friend was telling me earlier, ‘I woke up today and God put something in my heart and I really wanted to pray.’ Well, the first thing I did today was turn on sports radio to see if the Cowboys were going to put the franchise tag on Dez [Bryant]….If we could transfer the devotion people have toward a team or a sport to a church, wow, it would be amazing. But I am a realist because of my own experience.”

  He is also an optimist, a believer that he can turn even the most ardent sports nut to God. He has some boys in his group who are LeBron James fanatics. “I recall telling one of them, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to know more about Jesus than LeBron?’ I want your devotion for Christ to be higher than your devotion to LeBron by one percent, one degree, whatever. Let’s start there.”

  It struck me when considering Drew’s remarks that if the choice is framed as God or LeBron, God is going to get dunked on. Not because kids don’t see the merits of a relationship with Christ, but because of what we know typically accompanies a fervent interest in a team: a fan group. The challenge for people like Drew Castillo seems to be not that people’s love for a team is supplanting their love for God. It is that the connections people once made at church, and the role a religious group played in people’s lives, are increasingly being satisfied by fan groups.

  Look at a group like Timbers Army. It holds regular services (during the season) where people meet because of a shared interest—some would say faith—in the team, where songs are sung and people chant. It is a community where people connect and become domestic partners or business partners, where there are many offshoot events, like Christmas parties and monthly social gatherings. There are volunteer opportunities (at a food bank, at a children’s book bank), and members regularly come to the aid of other members in need, fundraising for them and/or offering emotional support. Those are all characteristics or services one might associate with a church.

  Sports groups can also be more inclusive, at a time when many Americans are rejecting the tendency of religion to organize society into tribal factions that can be stubbornly exclusive. “Sports transcend denominations, creed, ethnicity, or anything. Their product transcends everything,” Drew says. “Tonight there’s going to be white men, black men, Hispanics, Asians, and all of them are going to the Mavericks game. There are going to be Jews there, Christians there, Muslims, and atheists there. But they have something in common, a love for that team. There’s something to learn from that.”

  It would seem that religion’s best hope may be to become what fans turn to later in life when/if their devotion to a sports team wanes. With young people, the best approach Drew and other church leaders might take is to incorporate sports so thoroughly that groups meld, that a fan group and a church group become one and the same. Double down on Jersey Days and the game-watching events, be totally accommodating to the fans’ wishes, with the hopes that sports and church become synonymous. While people are rooting for the Cowboys, some of Christ’s teachings might get through.

  “Christ has to win here at the end of the day, but I realize what I’m up against,” Drew says. “And that’s why I’ll use sports and its momentum to benefit me and the church. Let’s just pretend there was a grudge match happening between the church and sports. And the way you score points is based upon popularity and following. Sports is going to win. Without a doubt. So I’m going to use their strengths and use it as momentum for what I’ve got going on….That is the challenge, but it doesn’t intimidate me. I’m ready for it.” He then calls upon a sports reference to drive his point home. “I’m going to stand in the pocket and get it done.”

  Most weeks, Jim Serrill wakes up early and drives about fourteen miles from his home in Tualatin, Oregon, to Willamette Park in southwest Portland. The park runs along the banks of the Willamette River, jutting out at what is called Stevens Point. Serrill’s car is often the only one in the vast parking lot that early, and he takes his time backing his truck down the boat ramp.

  He is sixty-three years old but stocky and still strong. He has a gray goatee, and he wears his hat backward, an old tree-trimmer habit. Every job he has ever had was muscle work (power-line builder, tree trimmer, construction worker, firefighter, tree planter for the US Forest Service), and he has paid for it. “I’ve got major arthritis,” he says, and it shows as he stiffly drags the kayak into the water and then struggles to get into it.

  Serrill has navigated this stretch of the river regularly for ten years. Once afloat, he cuts straight across the river. It splits there, bending around giant Ross Island and its smaller sister islands, Toe, East, and Hardtack. He paddles with the current, Ross Island to his left and the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge to his right. The Willamette River is Portland’s central waterway, spanned by twelve bridges and lined on both sides with hotels and condo complexes, factories, and industrial plants. Paddling on this stretch of the river, however, you can forget you are in a city. Herons and red-tailed hawks nest in the riparian cottonwood and ash trees. Osprey swoop down and grab fish with deadly precision. It is a beautiful and serene stretch, and Serrill usually slows his paddling and lets the current do the work. He gazes at the birds overhead and scans the water for rising fish. Life slows down. And it is in
these moments when he thinks of her.

  When Hannah was young, Serrill would take her rafting, and she developed his love for the water. She was a tough little girl, like her dad, but also sweet. She would dress up the family dog, Sam, a giant bullmastiff, in colored T-shirts. She liked getting dirty in the garden and performing on a dance team. She loved sunflowers and soccer, the latter because it was also her father’s passion.

  Timber Jim.

  Jim Serrill is not a household name around Portland. Mention Timber Jim, though, and everyone has at least heard of him. In the late 1970s, when the Timbers were in the North American Soccer League, Serrill, then in his twenties, started going to games at Civic Stadium. He would go with his father and younger brother, and they didn’t care much at first about soccer, but they loved the atmosphere, the buckets of beer, the rowdy fans. Eventually, he asked team management if he could bring a chain saw to the games, and they told him “hell no.” They eventually relented, probably because the team was dying and would do whatever it took to lure fans. Timber Jim became the unofficial and later official mascot of the team. He would hold the chain saw above his head and rev it; he would cut a slab of wood off a log after each goal; he would climb up on a zip line with a drum, hovering over the crowd as he banged out a beat; he would hang upside down from the stadium’s rafters. His greatest trick was using boot spikes to climb an eighty-foot spar pole at the south end of the stadium. He’d stand on the top, a platform of no more than 24 inches of wood, and bang his drum or rev his chain saw. He was the perfect mascot for the Timbers back then, an actual woodsman with a dark beard and thick arms and a deep love for everything Portland. A young Steven Lenhart remembers going to NASL games and witnessing the antics of Timber Jim. “Oh, man, he was one of my heroes.”

  When the Timbers re-formed in 2001, Timber Jim returned. He was nearly fifty but still did all his tricks, and he got a chain-saw sponsor and even made a few hundred bucks a game. Lenhart and his band of misfits were in full bloom at that time, and at first Timber Jim, by then the official mascot, was viewed as part of management. One Timbers Army regular named Craig would sneak down after games and steal the slabs Timber Jim cut from the log after a Portland goal. Craig, Nevets, Finnegan, and the bunch would then carry the slab back to the Bitter End bar across from the stadium, and Lenhart would use green paint to put the score and date on it, and then they’d nail it to one of the bar’s walls. “Then someone, and I forget who it was, said, ‘Hey, Timber Jim is cool. Just ask him for the slabs.’ So we did, and Jim was great and gave them to us,” Lenhart says. It was the moment Timber Jim became fully integrated into Timbers Army.

  Hannah was around thirteen then, with brown hair and dark eyes and a nose that sloped up at the tip. Serrill would take her to games, and you can imagine her pride, looking down on her dad from Section 109 as he revved that chain saw and the crowd cheered, as he climbed that huge pole and the crowd roared, as he sliced off a thick slab of wood and held it high, looking like a guy who could lift the world.

  Before marrying his wife, Diane, before Hannah came along, Serrill had endured an unfair amount of heartache and pain. In 1977, when Jim was twenty-three, his father, Bob, went duck hunting on the Columbia River, seventeen miles upriver from Astoria, Oregon, on the coast. Bob fell off the floating duck shack and drowned. After his death, Serrill kept going to Timbers games as a way to feel connected to his deceased father, and it was a year after Bob’s death that Serrill would become Timber Jim. “I became a bigger fan after my dad died,” he says. “I’d go and it would remind me of him, help me remember him.”

  Three years later, Serrill was trimming trees for Portland General Electric when a cedar tree he was on touched a 7,200-volt tap line. It blew him out of the tree and into the air, fifty feet above the ground and falling fast. “I was going down upside down, was gonna land on my head, but I managed to grab some branches and flip myself around.” He landed ass-first on a tree stump, cracking his pelvis and tearing his right butt cheek completely off the bone. It took him months to recover, and the pain from the injuries has never totally subsided. Later, he would battle prostate cancer, and he kept working through the treatment. “I’d trim trees wearing a diaper, smelling like piss,” he says. “It was awful.”

  Serrill married Diane on Valentine’s Day, 1982, and five years later Hannah was born. Serrill seemed to finally have exhausted his tank of bad luck. Now was the time for the good stuff.

  But for some people, the good just never sticks.

  In 1999, Hannah told her parents she was pregnant. She was fourteen, and it floored them. She wanted to have the baby, and they supported that decision despite her youth, despite being uncertain how involved the baby’s father would be, knowing that it was likely that much of the care for Hannah’s baby would fall to them. Hannah became a child with a child, giving birth to a daughter, Keiana, when she was still not old enough to drive. And for Jim and Diane, life became more complicated, harder.

  “We did what we could do; we loved her and we loved our granddaughter and we supported them,” Serrill says. It was an unorthodox arrangement, but they made it work. His answer whenever faced with a difficulty is to “spread the love,” shower the people and the problem with affection and attention. It was the name of an ad campaign that Jim Taylor, the former Timbers general manager, came up with for the team, and Serrill appropriated it, signing it below his name on autographs and making it his personal mantra and guiding principle. How would he and Diane respond to the challenge of Hannah having a baby? By spreading the love.

  On the evening of August 5, 2004, Serrill was at a Timbers game against the Minnesota Thunder. Keiana, who was two, was at a relative’s house. Hannah was seventeen and in the passenger seat of a car driven by her boyfriend, Keiana’s father. He fell asleep at the wheel, and the car veered and collided head-on with an oncoming car. Hannah was wearing her seatbelt, but she was vaulted forward upon impact and the belt caught her at the neck. She died instantly. Her boyfriend survived.

  Someone from the team found Serrill at the game, and he left the stadium abruptly, which caught the attention of some Timbers Army diehards. Steven Lenhart remembers Timber Jim being there, and then he was just gone; Lenhart assumed he was sick.

  “Some people, they are just tortured souls,” says Jim Taylor. “And there are few people who have been as tortured as Timber Jim.”

  In the days and weeks after Hannah’s death, Jim and Diane were so overcome with grief they found it difficult to even sit down for a meal. “We felt guilty eating,” he says. “We were here enjoying this meal when she was dead. It felt like cheating.”

  His instinct was to focus entirely on his wife and his granddaughter, as raising her would now fall almost entirely on him and Diane. That meant no more Timber Jim. When Serrill told Taylor that he was going to quit, Taylor wouldn’t let him. “No, you need to come back,” Taylor said. “You need this.”

  It took Serrill several weeks before he could return to the stadium, and even then he was a shell. He was going through the motions, the revving of the saw, the zip line, and then it came time for his biggest trick, climbing the tall spar pole. He grabbed a bouquet of sunflowers someone from Timbers Army had given him, and he muscled his way up the pole and then sat on the top. “I wanted to stay up there forever. But then somebody scored and I had to come down and saw the log.”

  He did that, and then Diane or someone else from his family walked down to where the old dugout was below Timbers Army and handed Keiana to Jim. It was around the 80th minute of the match, and there was Timber Jim, standing before Timbers Army, maybe a hundred or so strong back then, holding that little girl. “We’re looking down at him and, oh man, here is this guy we all admire, one of us, and he’s just hurting,” Lenhart says. “You could see the tears coming down his face.”

  And then Timber Jim did something extraordinary, something “that just came to me. I didn’t plan it. I can’t explain it.”

  He began to sing.


  His voice is gruff and deep, and he didn’t hold back. As loud as he could, he sang, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine / You make me happy when skies are gray / You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you / Please don’t take my sunshine away.”

  It was Hannah’s favorite song, a song Jim sang to her, a song they sang together. The diehards in Timbers Army didn’t know that, or maybe a few did, but that didn’t matter. If Timber Jim needed to sing in that moment, they would sing with him, and so Nevets and the rest bellowed along into the night sky, their voices rising up to Hannah in the heavens.

  Later, Timbers Army would design a scarf with sunflowers on it, a remembrance of Hannah, and they would create a shrine to her in the stadium, those scarves hanging over a railing near where Hannah used to watch her father perform. It is still there at every Timbers game, and people still place sunflowers at that spot. And that song, so perfectly Portland with its line about being happy even “when skies are gray,” is still sung at every game, the members of Timbers Army, now five thousand strong, waiting until precisely the 80th minute and then filling Providence Park with their voices.

  Timbers Army is so big now that most of its members have probably never met Timber Jim. He retired as the team’s mascot in 2008 (and from working power lines not long after that). But the origins of the song, Serrill and Hannah’s story, are shared with new members and prominently displayed and explained on the team’s website and the site for Timbers Army. They will not let Hannah drift from memory. For as long as there is a Timbers Army, they will sing that song, making the memory of Hannah, her spirit, eternal.

  One fall morning about ten years after Hannah’s death, I paddle the Willamette River with Jim Serrill. When we meet in the parking lot at Willamette Park, he hands me a silver-and-red pin with “Spread the Love” on it. I end up giving it to my five-year-old daughter. When I tell Jim that later, explaining how she pinned it to her favorite sweatshirt and wore it to school almost every day, he goes quiet for a few seconds and then says, “That’s perfect.”