Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Fan bases are like ancient religions in that most are so old it is impossible to accurately trace their origin. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were founded in 1869, the Green Bay Packers in 1919; the earliest fans of those teams have long since passed. NBA teams are younger—the league recognizes a game in 1946 as its first—but good luck trying to find the first supporters of the squads in that game, one of which was the Toronto Huskies. Soccer in the United States goes back a ways—there was an American Soccer League from 1921 to 1933—and had flashes of earlier relevance, notably during the prime years of the NASL. But the majority of the domestic soccer teams supported today are of a recent vintage, emerging with the launch of MLS in 1996. Followers of those teams are more genealogically accessible, akin to the followers of a contemporary religion like Mormonism. If you dig deep enough, you can find the individual who could be called fan zero.

  For the Timbers, that fan is Lenhart, and yet today there is little differentiating him from the approximately four thousand other dues-paying members of the 107 Independent Supporters Trust.

  And he is fine with that.

  “What is unique about Nevets is the kind of fan he is,” says Jim Taylor. “He loves this region. I see him at Blazers games, other events. He loves Portland. And, for as big a fan as he is, he isn’t obnoxious. He doesn’t want attention. And, he doesn’t hate. For him and anyone who was there at the beginning, having been involved for so long and having worked so hard, the satisfaction and reward comes when you are sitting there [in the North End] and experiencing that atmosphere.”

  At around halftime of the game against the Earthquakes, Lenhart turns from his seat and his eyes scan up to the rim of Providence Park and then around the stadium. The cement barrier he once used to gauge the growth of his group is gone, removed to make room for more seats. With no space to expand vertically, Timbers Army is pushing into the reserved seating to its sides. Lenhart marks progress now by counting the sections to the left and right of the North End that are filled with fans standing and chanting. The enthusiasm of the group is spreading, and it seems likely that in the coming years more than half the fans in the stadium will be—in their actions, if not officially—members of Timbers Army. “I never guessed it would be like this,” Lenhart says. “I hoped it would be, but I didn’t expect it.”

  How does it make him feel to know that it all started with him?

  “It’s rad.”

  At the old Timbers Army haunts surrounding the stadium, fans often gather postgame, and inevitably someone new to the experience of attending a game gushes. “I never imagined it would be like that, so much fun,” they say. If one of the original 107ists is within earshot, he or she is likely to tap that newbie on the shoulder and, whether Lenhart is present or not, offer a salute to the guy who founded Timbers Army.

  “Go buy Nevets a beer.”

  If you were to compile a list of places where a group of psychologists might gather, the Southern Lanes bowling alley and entertainment center in Bowling Green, Kentucky, would probably not warrant inclusion. Located in a strip mall off US 231, behind the Sassy Sisters consignment shop, Southern Lanes has seemingly gone untouched by time. The lobby smells of sweat and beer, and jumbles of mini-claw machines and vintage arcade games hug the walls. Up a few steps, the bowling lanes come into view, lining the walls to the left and right. On most nights, you will find teenagers hurling balls with giggling abandon and older folks treating each roll as if it were their life’s purpose. They bowl to a soundtrack of eighties heavy metal—“Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard, “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses—blared so loudly that only the most violent collisions between ball and pins break through.

  Past the lanes and down a few stairs, deeper into the warehouse-like building, is an area of pool tables and a batting cage and a glass-topped counter, behind which an Icee machine churns red and blue slush. Then, finally, tucked into a distant corner, is a mini-golf course.

  Or, at least it once was a mini-golf course.

  It is dimly lit, as if management would prefer you not notice it. Four of the eighteen holes are out of service, buried under large plastic obstacles, remnants perhaps from a long-gone laser-tag course. Other holes are barely playable due to ripped seams in the faded green turf. The course appears to have at one time aspired to have a jungle motif. On the surrounding cinderblock walls someone painted a landscape of grass, trees, and baby-blue sky with bushy clouds. Large fiberglass animals (a giraffe, a gorilla, an elephant) are stationed randomly around the space. They don’t factor in to any of the holes—no putts between the giraffe’s legs or up an elephant’s trunk. They just stand in sad silence, as if the circus left town without them.

  On a Friday evening not long ago, about twenty people paid three dollars each for a putter and a brightly painted ball. About a half dozen of them were college professors, most in their forties or fifties, and almost all wore polo shirts or sweatshirts with a school logo on them. The remainder of the competitors were college students, many with a bewildered look on their faces. They had been told that they would be attending the eleventh annual Sports Psychology Forum, an important-sounding event. Some had applied for grants to cover travel costs. Many were nervous about coming, believing they weren’t far enough along in their studies.

  Then they showed up here at the kickoff event and found the psychologists they had heard so much about, whose work they had studied, talking mini-golf trash to one another and lamenting competitive meltdowns from forums past.

  “I had it last year,” says Julie Partridge, a psychology professor at Southern Illinois University. “Had everyone beat. Then I just choked. Totally choked. I’ve got to redeem myself.”

  One of the students from Morehead State is on that college’s golf team, which gets the attention of the professors. “We’ve got a ringer!” shouts Rick Grieve, a clinical psychologist at nearby Western Kentucky University. He stands next to the first hole, announces the pairings, and lists the rules and the stakes. (Yes, they are playing for something.) “On the first tee…” he yells, sounding like the starter at Augusta National. He does so with enough seriousness that someone not in the know might wonder: Why do all these PhDs care this much about a game of putt-putt golf?

  If you ask the psychology professors that question, they might concede that their behavior is a bit of a defense mechanism. They are well aware that no one outside their small band cares about the Sports Psychology Forum. And if the world views the event as irrelevant, what does that say about the work of its attendees? “We all sort of know our place in the universe,” says Jason Lanter, a social psychologist from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. The fact that most of them work at lesser-known schools—Southern Illinois, Morehead State, Western Kentucky, Murray State, Kutztown, Belmont in Tennessee—reinforces the notion that their field of study is unimportant. Some scholars might be troubled by that, might let it destroy their self-esteem. This small group instead chooses to pick up a putter and ball and celebrate their insignificance.

  Going into the final hole, there is a three-way tie between Partridge, the ringer from Morehead State, and Dan Wann, a professor at Murray State. A tall Kansan with a sweep of flat brown hair, Wann, fifty-four, is the unofficial dean of the group. “Here we go—this is it,” he says, giddy that it’s all coming down to the eighteenth (actually the fourteenth) hole. As each putter takes his or her turn, he provides analysis in hushed golf tones, like he’s Johnny Miller or Gary McCord: “Oh, he might have hit that a touch too strong.” The professors are, overall, jocular, but Wann is the loudest and silliest of the bunch. Fitting, then, that he taps in a four-inch putt to win the tournament. He celebrates by doing a dance that is a previously unimaginable mix of the twist and a crab crawl.

  That’s me on the far left, mini-golfing with (from left) academics Joel Cormier, Julie Partridge, the great Dan Wann, and a Morehead State student, Brad Martin.

  The following day, at the start of the actual forum, Wann receives h
is prize: a giant stuffed panda with Mardi Gras beads around its neck. He acts as if it were the Claret Jug or the Wanamaker Trophy, holding it high above his head.

  “This is unlike any conference I go to,” Partridge says, unnecessarily. “I’ve been to some where it is mostly about people trying to prove how important they are. This is more collaborative and fun….There is some benefit to no one paying attention to what we are doing.”

  The term sports psychology brings to mind people who counsel athletes, whisperers who help them manage failure or injuries or anything else affecting their play. That field is called performance psychology, and it is a booming industry. In 2015, the thirtieth annual conference for the Association for Applied Sport Psychology was held over four days in Indianapolis. It was attended by hundreds of people. There is also a subset of sports psychologists who are really sports marketers with a background in psychology. They help teams or leagues or corporations reach consumers. That, too, is a growing field.

  The professors who conferenced in Bowling Green specialize in an area of study far less popular and lucrative: the behavior of sports fans. If you want to know why a Pittsburgh Steelers devotee insists on wearing the same underwear to every game, these are the people to ask. If you want to know why a Boston fan puts a Red Sox onesie on his son on the day of his birth, these people can tell you. Why do Ohio State fans troll Michigan message boards and vice versa? Why might a Los Angeles Dodgers fan downplay his team’s chances before a big playoff game? This small group of psychologists has long pondered these and other questions, and they have the answers.

  Given the increasing interest in sports in general and the significant role supporting an athletic team plays in many people’s lives, their research would seem to have great relevance. But the sports-psychology industry just doesn’t see much use for them. For a few years, some of the professors attended the Association for Applied Sport Psychology conference, but they felt marginalized and eventually stopped going. A few years ago, Wann tried to get back in, applying to be a presenter. He put together a talk on sports fans and gambling, believing it would appeal to organizers since the conference was in Las Vegas. His application was rejected.

  He settled for another trip to Bowling Green, another round at the Southern Lanes mini-golf course, followed by presentations on Saturday in a lecture hall on Western Kentucky’s campus. During those presentations, the professors revealed their specializations. “Shame is kind of my thing,” Partridge says; Cody Havard from Memphis discloses, “I am the rivalries guy”; Lanter’s best work has focused on riots; Grieve is an expert on bias and coping strategies. Wann’s specialty is identification, that is, how strongly people identify with a team or school. The tool he developed to measure that, the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (SSIS), was mentioned so often during the forum that it became a running joke. When a slide during Partridge’s presentation referenced Wann’s tool, she said: “If you are playing the SSIS drinking game, now is the moment when I say: ‘Drink!’ ”

  For some, disclosing their specialty sounds like the admission of a vice, like admitting to eating Twinkies or watching The Bachelor. Most universities won’t support a faculty member fully devoted to the study of sports fans. For Partridge, Havard, Lanter, Grieve, and others, their work on fans is a side gig, a passion project. Wann is the exception. Murray State gives him free rein to focus on the behavior of sports fans, and there is likely no person in the United States who spends more hours of the day doing just that.

  Wann is in this unique position because of one moment of youthful indecision and another of forgetfulness. Coming out of high school in Kansas City in 1981, Wann thought he wanted to be a gym teacher—his fallback after his dream of playing for the Royals or Chicago Cubs was dashed. But his mom told him there were no gym jobs left, that too many people had been going into that field as of late. “You should study psychology,” she said, and so that is what Wann majored in at Baker University, a Methodist college fifty miles from his hometown. In 1987 he enrolled in a social psychology doctorate program at Kansas, and the first assignment of his first class was to come up with a testable hypothesis. “It seemed simple enough, but things aren’t simple if you forget about them. Just before the class I was talking to a friend, and he was like, ‘What hypothesis did you come up with?,’ and I was like, ‘What?,’ and my eyes got really big.”

  Wann had watched SportsCenter earlier that day, and there had been a report on a riot at some sporting event. When his adviser asked him for his hypothesis, that report popped into his head. He responded: “My hypothesis is that if fans really care about a sports team, then they’re more likely to act violent, like if they identify with the team more.” His adviser loved the idea. “She didn’t know anything about sports. She didn’t even know how many points you get for a goal made in basketball. But she really homed in on the idea that someone identified with a team. She said, ‘That’s really cool.’ I was like, ‘It is?’ ”

  While working toward his doctorate, Wann would discuss research projects with fellow students. “And everybody was saying their research stinks, that they were bored, and here I am studying fans and enjoying it. I was like, ‘Okay, somebody is telling me something.’ ” When he got to Murray State in 1991, “they sort of left me alone and so I kept doing the same kind of research.” Wann dabbled in other areas, “but it was the fan stuff that really kind of captured my interests, and no one was doing it.” As of 2015, he had authored or coauthored more than 150 research papers related to sports fandom.

  Wann has an endearing Midwestern manner. He favors comfortable brown shoes and khaki pants. He is whip-smart but allows you to figure that out on your own. Like any good psychologist, he is a great listener, able to connect with anyone, no matter his or her background or age. If he engages with a Murray State student, it is a good bet that he or she will be working with him on a research project a short time later. He is also on the board of the National Alliance for Youth Sports and often gives speeches on how to properly coach young children. A favorite anecdote he uses in his talks comes from his days umpiring T-ball games with four- and five-year-olds in Murray. He saw some parents keeping scorebooks and thought that sent the wrong message, so he banned the practice. Not to be deterred, one parent filled his pockets with rocks and would set a rock on the bench in front of him whenever a runner crossed home plate. “That’s when you know you are never going to run out of people to study,” Wann says.

  Basketball fans often talk about coaching trees, how a legendary head coach like Bob Knight or Dean Smith or Larry Brown has had numerous assistants go on to become successful head coaches. Many of the professors at the Sports Psychology Forum in Bowling Green were encouraged by Wann to study sports fandom. They sought him out at a conference or cold-called him, confided that they shared his passion, and Wann then acted as the fertilizer. Most have coauthored multiple papers with him. That the majority of professors known to study fan behavior reside within about two hundred miles from Murray is sheer coincidence, but it makes it seem as if they intentionally stuck close to the trunk of the tree.

  Then there are Wann’s students, with whom he publishes regularly. One of them, Sara Wallace, a twenty-one-year-old from Paducah, Kentucky, accompanied Wann to Bowling Green for the Sports Psychology Forum. Wann had mentored her for three years, and she had already been accepted into the master’s program at Western Kentucky. He was clearly proud of her, beaming as she stood at the bottom of the lecture hall and confidently delivered a presentation that was the talk of the forum. It was called “Your Team Stinks! The Impact of Team Identification on Biased Ratings of Odors.”

  Wallace had attempted to determine if highly identified sports fans would find an odor more or less repugnant or more or less pleasant if the smell was coming from gear bearing a college team’s logo. Given that most of her subjects (153 Murray State students) hailed from Kentucky, she used a University of Louisville T-shirt and one from the University of Kentucky. She then sprayed
the sweatshirts with either Tink’s #69 Doe-in-Rut Buck Lure (otherwise known as deer urine) or Febreze air freshener. There were chuckles as Wallace outlined her project and demonstrated her testing methods and again when she revealed the results, which showed that team identification did not influence what people thought about the smell of deer urine or Febreze.

  It would have been easy to dismiss Wallace’s research as a total failure, but then Lanter and Partridge and Grieve and others started suggesting ways to change the conditions of the test. It was as if lightbulbs were going off above heads all over the room. The conclusion seemed to be that Wallace’s “failed” experiment had great potential if tweaked slightly. Instead of two different scents on two different shirts, she should put an identical scent on two sweatshirts, one Kentucky, one Louisville. That would answer the question: Do diehard fans think deer urine smells less horrible if the smell emanates from their team’s gear?

  It is certainly debatable whether the world needs to know the answer to that question. Similarly, do we need to know if fans of the United States in the 2014 World Cup represent “True Fandom or Bandwagon,” as a study by Lanter and a student was titled? Is it important to measure the happiness levels of Green Bay Packers fans watching games together in bars in Nashville, as Ted Peetz of Belmont was doing? Do we also need two of Peetz’s brightest students poring over the comments at the bottom of an ESPN.com article to compile “a taxonomy of Internet trolling”?