Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  On the float, Jim gets emotional several times talking about Hannah. Each day, he gets up and tries to push the devastation he feels into some corner of his soul. Some days, it stays put. On others, like when a writer visits to probe his past, it moves to the center and takes hold. Jim doesn’t try to guard anything about the sorrow he has endured, doesn’t see the worth in that. Ask him how he feels, and he’ll give you all of it, even if it makes him cry. He doesn’t dread thinking and talking about Hannah, but he hates the idea that people would feel uncomfortable around him, that they’d see nothing but his broken heart. So he asks a lot of questions, tries to really get to know you, and then he keeps the connection alive with calls and emails and visits. It’s as if his response to Hannah’s death has been to connect with as many people as possible, to use it as a way to meet people also interested in spreading the love.

  Early in the float, we talk about how the Timbers and Timbers Army helped him after Hannah’s death. Jim Taylor counseled Jim Serrill, helped ease him back into his role as the team’s mascot. The Timbers got the Serrill family a suite for a game and included Jim in more team activities after Hannah died, making sure he felt connected to others. In 2016, when the Timbers won the MLS title, the team gave Jim a championship ring and a spot in the victory parade. He was also the second person ever inducted into the team’s Ring of Honor. Groups affiliated with the Timbers also helped. Sunderland, the English club that played the Timbers in an exhibition game the year before Hannah died, heard about Jim’s loss and sent Keiana a check for $1,500.

  Then there were the gestures from Nevets and his cohorts, the song every game, the scarves, the shrine, the outpouring of support. “It was working with the Timbers and my friends in Timbers Army that got me through it,” Jim says. “If it wasn’t for them, well…”

  As we make our way around Ross Island, Jim begins to list all the things he loves about the Timbers Army community. There is the charitable work they do: renovating soccer fields at parks and schools, tree plantings, blood drives, fundraisers for members who have lost loved ones, and more. There is the way the members’ collective passion for the team has connected people, leading to friendships, business partnerships, even weddings. “A lot of people have met at games and then come back and gotten married in the North End,” Jim says.

  Then there is the ceremony surrounding it all (called tifo, an Italian word that in some countries refers to choreographed displays by fans)—the chants and songs, the huge banners that they hold up, some covering the entire North End. Jim’s favorite is something more intimate: each year, before the season opener, a contingent of Timbers fans and employees travels to the Camp 18 Logging Museum west of Portland to pick out a log that will be the one cut after each Timbers goal. Timber Jim started the tradition, and he wrote a blessing for the occasion that is read when they select the log that will be cut that season. It is adapted from an Irish wedding blessing and goes:

  May your house be strong of beam,

  Firm of wall and rafter,

  Built with timbers from a dream,

  And girded well with laughter.

  May your home have a winding stair

  With a lovers landing,

  Windows to let in the air

  With the light of understanding.

  May your home have a roof of faith

  For every change of weather

  And LOVE upon your hearth

  To warm your years…forever.

  It is known as the “Timbers Toast,” but, as Jim says, “it is kinda like our prayer.”

  Serrill was raised in a religious home and has long been an active member of the Tualatin United Methodist Church, known as the Hilltop Church because of its location atop a sloping grassy hill. He is not just someone who rolls into church on Sundays; he is a true believer, especially in the power of a religious community to guide and help its members. Today, Hilltop Church is best known for an act of kindness that Jim spearheaded. He lobbied for permission to get a large unused lot next to the church converted into a garden and then did most of the hard labor to bring it to fruition. It opened in 2014 and now donates about 3,600 pounds of produce a year to the Tualatin Schoolhouse Pantry, which provides food to the needy. Jim spends at least part of most days maintaining the garden and a nearby kids’ garden he also developed. He wakes up and puts his hands to work helping grow food for the poor and enhancing his relationship with God.

  To be clear, the Timbers remain a huge part of his life, his identity. On the night after we floated the Willamette River, I was at a Timbers game with Steven Lenhart, sitting with Timbers Army, and I ran into Jim. I made sure to ask where he was sitting, as I wanted to go there at the 80th minute, to see him at that moment when Timbers Army serenaded his deceased daughter. But when that time came, when I went to look for him, he was nowhere to be found. Later, long after the game, I asked him where he’d gone. He sighed and admitted that when he goes to games now, as the 80th minute approaches, he usually slips back through the tunnel, to the concession area underneath the North End, and he waits out the song. “I start crying and people are there to have a good time, and I don’t want them to see me like that,” Serrill says. I asked him if there is a small part of him that hates that song now, hates the hurt that it brings to the surface. He nods but then makes it clear that there is another part of him, a much larger part, that is so touched by the gesture, by this group of friends and strangers singing for him, for Hannah.

  “So much crap has happened to me it is hard to keep up sometimes,” he says. He pauses and composes himself, and then he puts his hand on my shoulder. “But I know there is goodness in this world. You know how I know that? Because of Timbers Army.”

  Before the 2015 MLS season, the unthinkable happened: Steven Lenhart left Portland.

  He and his longtime girlfriend, Amy Wilcox, moved to Poulsbo, a small town on the Kitsap Peninsula across from Seattle. Amy grew up on nearby Bainbridge Island, and they wanted to be closer to her family, “and it just felt like it was time for a change,” Lenhart says. “I lived in and around Portland forever.”

  It is hard to wrap your head around. Nevets. Mr. Quintessential 1980s Portland. The founder of Timbers Army. Living in the land of the Seattle Sounders.

  “Yeah, it took me some time to get used to that,” he says. “I’d walk around and see people wearing their Sounders jersey, especially if it was after the Sounders won, and I’d go ‘grrrrrrr.’ ”

  But geography is no match for a fan of Nevets’s caliber and level of commitment. Lenhart still attended almost every Timbers home game during the 2015 season. He would catch a ride with another Timbers Army member or take the BoltBus. The journey took about three and a half hours each way and typically required him to spend a night or two at his parents’ home. That is devotion, the actions of a Superfan, but Lenhart’s relationship with the Timbers was changing. That season, he also stopped sitting in the North End. He had become an accomplished enough photographer that he was given field access to shoot the games. Rather than drink beers with his brother and others before and during the matches, he stayed sober, making a little money shooting for different outlets and adding to his portfolio.

  A Portland gastropub, Bazi Bierbrasserie, featured Lenhart’s work in a show titled “The Beautiful Game of Cascadia.” There were action shots from games, but most of the photographs were of fans. That had become something of an obsession of his, finding those moments when the people watching the games were more inspirational than the game itself. There was one shot in the exhibit that caught my eye. It is of a pack of Timbers fans on the rare sunny day at Providence Park. They are bunched together in the North End, looking up to the sky, holding their scarves high, and several of those scarves are the “Spread the Love” scarves with sunflowers on them. There are men and women in the photograph, dark faces and light, and if you didn’t know anything about sports, you might guess the photograph was taken at a religious revival, that the people in the photograph were looking to
the heavens in a moment of prayer.

  During the 2015 season, on the night before a game between the Timbers and the Los Angeles Galaxy, I meet with Lenhart and Jeremy Wright, aka Finnegan, at a downtown Portland pub. They swap stories from the early Timbers Army days while I sit back and listen. Eventually, I pose a question that has been on my mind. I have traveled the country visiting with fans, I say, but I keep coming back to Portland to hang out with Lenhart. There’s something about him, the kind of fan he’s become, that sticks with me, that I feel deserves more consideration. I ask Wright my question: Is Nevets the perfect sports fan?

  Wright sips his beer and sits quietly, thinking. It’s an awkward few moments as Lenhart looks on while two men ponder what kind of fan he is. Finally, Wright breaks the silence: “I think stepping behind the lens of a camera has created more perspective for him. It has created this little bit of distance, probably a healthy distance that some of us don’t have. And he’s not as jaded as the rest of us. Look, this team has found so many ways to break our hearts, but you don’t feel he has been as affected by that as the rest of us. Nevets has also always had a lot of patience, more so than some of us. Patience with the team, with front-office personnel when some of us were banging the drum for their heads. He was one of the most rational members of the crew, and he’s probably even more rational now.”

  Lenhart interrupts, saying he does wish the team would win more, but Wright seems to have a realization about Nevets. Wright continues: “I think I know what you are getting at, your question, which is really tough to answer. Is he the perfect kind of fan? You know, I wouldn’t disagree with that.”

  It strikes me that Lenhart’s motivations for being a fan, what he might list on Dan Wann’s Sport Fan Motivation Scale, have shifted. He was once driven by entertainment and group affiliation; now he’s pivoting more toward aesthetic, which seems like the healthiest reason to be a fan, to appreciate the beauty of sport and all that surrounds it. No matter if the Timbers win or lose, he can find enjoyment in the game, in his affiliation with the team and a group of fans. His self-esteem is not as heavily tied to the team’s success, meaning he’s not inclined to blast anyone or let setbacks impact other aspects of life, such as his relationship with his girlfriend. His dynamic with his preferred team is the healthiest of any of the extremely identified fans I’ve encountered.

  During my time talking to fans around the country, rarely did anyone talk about the joy they got from going to games and seeing great athletes at work. There was too much at stake, too much of their identity tied up in a team, too much of their self-esteem in play, for people to stop and consider how lucky they were to witness Tom Brady or Kevin Durant or other elite athletes at their best. Nevets is different. We talk a lot about Darlington Nagbe, the Timbers talented midfielder, and while Nevets has plenty to say about how the coaching staff could use Nagbe more effectively or what Nagbe needs to do to improve, Nevets never loses sight of the pure joy he feels watching Nagbe play. It is his privilege, above all else, to go to Providence Park and see Nagbe and the rest of the Timbers perform.

  Lenhart is, of course, still a highly identified Timbers fan who scores off the charts on the SSIS. He is still passionate and dedicated enough to journey four hours each way for a Timbers home game, and when he moved up to Washington, one of the first things he did was create a Timbers shrine around his television. It includes a small light he turns on at game time that spotlights the Timbers’ pennant and poster from the 1981 season and other memorabilia that he hung around his TV. His social identity remains anchored to the Timbers, yet he has avoided the negatives that can come with being a passionate fan. Living in Sounder country does occasionally rankle him, though. He can’t help but point out the shortcomings of Seattle’s fan group relative to Timbers Army. (In-group bias dies hard, after all.)

  During the 2015 MLS season, Lenhart watched most Timbers away games from his couch, except for one game when he decided he needed to be with some other Portlanders (a little place attachment, perhaps). There is a branch of Timbers Army called the TA:COs (Timbers Army Covert Ops), and they meet at a bar in downtown Seattle to watch games. Lenhart went to the bar and approached a table of guys in Timbers gear. He said hello and told them that he was a new member of the TA:COs, having recently relocated from Portland. They asked him where he lived, and he told them he just got off the Bainbridge Island ferry.

  “Hey, did you hear?” one of the guys at the table said to the others. “People are saying Nevets just moved out there.”

  Lenhart somewhat sheepishly broke the news to the table. “Yeah, I know; I’m Nevets.”

  The TA:COs were thrilled, eagerly shaking his hand and introducing themselves, ushering him to a nearby table. They were honored to watch a game with the founder of Timbers Army.

  After Lenhart tells that story, I mention that he omitted an important detail. Did they buy him a beer?

  “Hell, yes, they did! It was rad.”

  Among the away games that Lenhart attended during the 2015 season was the MLS Cup on December 5 in Columbus, Ohio. The Timbers culminated an improbable playoff run with a 2–1 victory over the host Columbus Crew, winning the league title for the first time. Lenhart didn’t photograph that game. He didn’t want distance or perspective on that occasion, so he sat with his Timbers Army brethren. He sent me one photo taken at that game, a picture someone snapped of him. He is in the stands after the game has ended, and he is looking into the camera, his hair and beard as scruffy as ever, his eyes barely open. He has a cigar in his right hand, and he is blowing smoke into the camera. “What a night!” he texted with the photo. “Best time of my life.”

  Nevets’s vision in full bloom.

  The following season, 2016, Lenhart, then forty-five, went back to sitting in the North End; no longer would he photograph games. The experience at MLS Cup made him realize that, as much as he liked shooting Timbers matches, being among the fans was better.

  He senses that this development might torpedo my theory of him as the perfect fan. “You know, I’ve never really known about all that perfect fan stuff anyway,” he says. I don’t tell Lenhart, but the fact that he likes to be just a guy in the crowd, literally and figuratively, bolsters my lofty opinion of him and his fandom. Still, I ask him what in the end he would like people to remember about him, about his love for the Timbers.

  “I guess, maybe, that I’m just another fan,” he says. “That’s not very exciting. Sorry about that.”

  For Sharon, Jessica, and Justin, my biggest fans

  I had two editors on this project, Mark Tavani and Brendan Vaughan. Mark helped conceive the idea and then Brendan made certain that the vision Mark and I had was achieved. Every writer should be so lucky to work with such smart, dedicated professionals.

  Andrew Blauner has been my literary agent for over a decade and has been a consistent source of encouragement and inspiration. Several friends and colleagues helped me in various ways during the reporting and writing of this book. David Epstein, Charles Robinson, and B. J. Schecter were especially generous with their time.

  One of my former journalism students at Southern Oregon University, Eli Stillman, helped with research and did amazing work. I hope that he learned enough in the process to make it worth his efforts. Zac Ellis and Jamie Aron provided crucial reporting help. Jamie in particular went above and beyond. Tom Colligan is an ace fact checker and astute reader.

  Imagine getting a phone call out of the blue from a writer who wants to delve into your life, ask you about your family, your fandom, your motivations. I am constantly amazed by the openness and generosity of people, their willingness to allow me into their lives and share their stories.

  Steven Lenhart, Jim Serrill, and Jeremy Wright were extremely accommodating. I will forever root for the Timbers because of that trio and the incredible people in Timbers Army. Pat Lindemann is a great parent and graciously shared his experiences as a fan-father, illuminating a difficult topic. Diggz Garza and Michael Hopson wer
e two of my favorite people to interview, so jubilant and passionate. Teddy Kervin, Michael Gray, and Conor Mongan are sharp and self-deprecating, and they like bars. They are a reporter’s dream subjects. Tyler Austin Black and Rich Madole put up with my many questions, and for that I am thankful.

  Wendi Bromlie and Geoff Gass spent hours describing moments from difficult transition points in their lives. This book is better because of their honesty.

  I drew from the work of numerous academics and attempted to acknowledge each within the chapters. I find that to be a more respectful acknowledgment than source notes at the back of a book. If I missed a citation, it was an oversight and not intentional. Julie Partridge, Rick Grieve, Kim Toffoletti, Ted Peetz, Roger Aden, Nick Wan, and Susan Harter provided essential insight that broadened my understanding of sports fandom.

  I cannot count the number of hours Dan Wann spent answering my calls and emails, responding to question after question with patience and thoroughness. I hope that my rendering of Dan conveyed what an incredibly warm and generous person he is to so many people. This book would simply not exist without his generosity.

  Every writer has people who enable the pursuit of this craft. I have my wife, Sharon, and my children, Jessica and Justin. Because of them, I start each day with an unending supply of love and support.

    1.   Photo by Steven Lenhart.

    2.   Photo courtesy of Rick Grieve.

    3.   Photo courtesy of Cathy Holland.