Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  You could argue that that is all valueless. Yet the eagerness with which the professors and students attacked these issues, and the mere fact they spent so much time on them—Wallace’s project, for one, took eight months to complete—was, at the least, inspiring.

  Ask the psychologists about the work they are doing, about its relevance, and they often point out that sports is the rare piece of popular culture that exposes people of differing cultures, races, religions, and classes to one another, that brings them together on a large scale. What else remains in society that breaches the walls we have built, the echo chambers we inhabit, that cuts through a prevailing tendency to surround ourselves with people of similar backgrounds, who share the same values, who mirror our view of the world? In arenas and stadiums and sports bars, on message boards and call-in shows, on Twitter and Facebook, people who would normally shun one another mix and connect, a shared passion for a team trumping differences that would otherwise divide them. In a society that is becoming more and more fragmented, and more and more entrenched in our little bubbles, what other than a devotion to a sports team achieves that?

  Sports fandom has become the central diversion, the primary passion, for so many, and that isn’t abating. Since 2000, when Gallup began asking people if they are sports fans, the number has remained right around 60 percent every year. Because Wann, Grieve, Partridge, and the rest aren’t professors at Harvard or Stanford, and because their work isn’t always beneficial to teams or corporations looking to move a product, it is easy to dismiss what they do. But studying why people are drawn to sports, how fandom influences their lives, and examining the power of sports to bring different people together would seem more essential now than ever.

  And then there is this:

  A few hours after the Sports Psychology Forum ended, the streets of Bowling Green emptied; it was a ghost town. The denizens of that city and others across Kentucky stopped what they were doing and found a television and rooted for (or against) the Kentucky Wildcats as they played Wisconsin in the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament. Wann, Partridge, Lanter, Grieve, and Havard were among those in Bowling Green glued to a television for the Final Four. They gathered at Grieve’s house to watch the games because, contrary to what you might think, they are all huge sports fans. There was pizza and beers and sodas and lots of grumbles and cheers and shouting at the television.

  Partridge got her undergraduate degree at Kansas State, which pits her opposite Wann, the Kansas Jayhawk. She got her master’s degree at North Carolina, so she hates Duke with a passion. Once, she got so angry while watching a Duke–North Carolina basketball game that she hurled a cup across the room hard enough that she thought it punctured a bedroom door. The door was fine, her husband told her, and then he added that the door had a hollow core and could easily be damaged by an angry person. “You probably shouldn’t have told me that,” she responded. After the forum, she watched Duke defeat Michigan State to move on to the NCAA Championship game, which was like having her fingernails pulled out. “God, I hate them,” she says more than once. Grieve is a baseball nerd, proudly showing off a fantasy app on his phone. Havard discloses that he has four seats from Rosenblatt Stadium, the former home of the College World Series, in what he calls the “Sports Stadium” area of his home. He grew up a Houston Astros fan, and so the seat numbers he chose include 7 (for Craig Biggio) and 34 (Nolan Ryan). On the “field wall” behind the seats he painted the dimensions from the old Astrodome. Asking Wann what he thinks about the Cubs’ or Royals’ playoff chances is not advisable unless you have time to spare.

  These academics behave like the people they study. They know how the sausage is made and yet they still have ordered a double helping.

  “There is some metacognition for sure,” Lanter says. “But it doesn’t matter. We’re still fans.”

  In the Hopson home in Savannah, Tennessee, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was little time for sports. Bernice Hopson was raising nine kids by herself, five boys and four girls, and by the sixth grade most of those kids had part-time jobs, as everyone had to chip in to make ends meet. Michael, the third child, had a paper route and cut grass, and in high school he worked part-time as a janitor. After school there was no football practice or baseball games. There was just work and a few dollars passed on to Mom.

  Michael Hopson was an average student, except in art class. Put a crayon or a Magic Marker in his hand and he could create something special. He liked to draw flowers and ships, and he “just loved fireplaces for some reason,” he says. Sometimes, he would steal a few moments and go outside, sit among the chickens scurrying around the family property, and draw leafless trees with twisted branches.

  If he had been born at a different time, in a different place, or if there had been the money and energy to help him cultivate that gift, who knows where Hopson would have ended up. Surely, it would not have been Terre Haute, Indiana, working at a foundry that turned raw coal into coke, which is where he landed after high school. The foundry was owned by Tony Hulman, a prominent Indiana businessman famous for buying and rehabilitating the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Hopson was paid well—he got time and a half on weekends and holidays—but “it was hard, hot work in front of those ovens all day.”

  Hopson was employed there for ten years, and during that time he found small outlets for his creative energy. He would DJ at local clubs and at events, painting his face or wearing crazy hats, but he wasn’t drawing anymore, wasn’t really creating. Around 1988, when Hopson was thirty-four, the foundry closed. He might have been able to move to another foundry in another town, cling to his place in that declining industry. Instead, he visited his mom for a while and then went back to DJ-ing at parties and clubs in Terre Haute. But he was stagnating and struggling financially, and then “a friend finally convinced me that I needed to get out of Terre Haute,” he says. “There wasn’t anything for me there anymore.”

  In 1989, he moved seventy-six miles east to Indianapolis. He got a job working at a Kroger’s, the grocery store. It was located in the Speedway Super Center, a stone’s throw from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He stocked shelves at night, then on the day shift, and then he worked in the frozen-foods section. He was moving up the chain, a valued employee.

  One day in 1992, a coworker had an extra ticket to a race at the speedway, and Hopson went, and “it was fantastic,” he says. It wasn’t the first sporting event he’d ever attended, but it felt like it; he really can’t remember any before that. The vibe at the speedway was similar to that at a club, the raw energy, the organized chaos, how people were dressed differently, expressing themselves and their passion for different drivers. “Something just pulled me in,” he says. “I can’t explain it.”

  A short time later, another friend offered him a ticket to a Colts football game in downtown Indianapolis. Before the game, Hopson got ahold of a rubber Halloween mask in the shape of a football helmet. He doesn’t remember where he got it. He remembers vividly, however, the reaction he got as he parked at the Indianapolis Zoo, across the White River from downtown, put on that silly, oversize mask, and then walked over the bridge into the hub of the city. Many of the fans were hyped, but Hopson’s energy, the way he high-fived people as he marched through downtown and around the stadium, stood out. He was approaching the pregame like he would a DJ gig, trying to get people up and moving, getting them excited. He is a natural performer—the extrovert in a room of extroverts.

  A photographer from The Indianapolis Star spotted Hopson in his crazy mask. At the time, the Colts were campaigning for a new downtown stadium. The photographer posed Hopson in front of the current stadium, and the picture ran with an article about the stadium push.

  One day a few weeks later, Hopson was at work and noticed a pair of inflatable football shoulder pads in the back of a pickup truck. They were part of a Coors Light promotion, with logos all over them. Hopson took the pads home, and not long after he decided to tailgate with friends before a Col
ts game. He put the pads on and liked how they looked. He covered most of the Coors Light logos with Colts stickers and painted over the rest. Then he grabbed a Colts flag he had, another found object, and headed downtown.

  “Something about the way the people responded to me as I walked around, they were so nice and I was making people smile,” Hopson says. “I felt like this little ambassador to the city.”

  To be clear, Hopson is not little. He is five-foot-ten with wide shoulders and thick arms. Walking around with inflatable shoulder pads, waving a flag, whooping and hollering, he was a sight. He speaks in bursts, a DJ unleashed in the real world, his sentences full of rhythms and rhymes. “I flow as it goes, just the way I was born, my feet hit the ground running and, whoop, I just went,” he explains. Later, when talking about a visit to an opposing team’s stadium, he says: “Wherever I go, I flow and go. Some knuckleheads, they may take it too far, so I go to the people who appreciate, congratulate, and celebrate.” Much of what he tells me about his experience as a Colts fan is hard to follow, but it sounds great going down.

  Hopson wore the inflatable shoulder pads downtown on game days for more than a year, but then they started leaking air, and eventually there were too many holes to patch. He replaced them with some real shoulder pads he bought at a secondhand sports store. But when he put them on they looked bare, boring, so he painted them Colts blue. That was better, but they still didn’t look right. He scoured his small house in a neighborhood north of downtown, collecting objects he had amassed over the years: pom-poms and buttons, badges and jewels and beads, Colts pins and horseshoes, a small plastic football, player figurines. He glued them to the shoulder pads. Later he attached miniature Colts helmets to the top of each shoulder, making it look like he had football pygmies on either side of his head. Almost everything he put on the pads, a hundred items, maybe more, were given to him or picked out of the garbage or grabbed at a flea market for less than a dollar.

  Michael Hopson, obviously.

  The purpose of it all, Hopson would say, was to get people excited, to make them happy. But the painting and the placing of all those found objects, the careful curating, the color variation, the idea that each item had a perfect place, this hit another nerve. He was suddenly that young boy back in art class in Savannah. Decades of wanting, needing, to create came pouring out.

  Hopson added a white rubber horse head to his getup, which he wore high atop his own head. He attached blue and white and silver metallic streamers and braided yarn to it, and they draped down and made it appear as if the horse had a mane in the Colts’ colors. He also took a pair of large sunglasses and adorned them just as he did the shoulder pads, with anything he could find that spoke to him, and the glasses were soon so wide that you could see his mouth and chin and that was about it. He then painted his entire face blue, so even the part of him that was visible blended into the rest of his masterpiece.

  If Hopson had gone to art school, you might have guessed his influences were Joseph Cornell or Man Ray or another artist who worked with found objects. And what he created was art. “It is amazing how things sort of boomerang back to you,” he says. “When I meet kids now, I tell them: ‘There is nothing wrong with art class.’ ”

  He was a walking collage, a true original, and when he went to his first game in the full getup, he was unlike anyone Colts fans had ever seen. The walk from the zoo where he parked to the stadium was a 3.4-mile round trip. He also walked around downtown before the game, hitting the various spots where fans tailgated or gathered in bars. Conservatively, he marched about five miles around Indianapolis, greeting anyone who smiled at him, anyone who looked like they needed a lift.

  He eventually gave himself an alter ego, Superfan, and that is how he is known around Indianapolis. As I ate lunch with Hopson in a downtown sports bar, the manager of the bar shouted “Superfan!” and came over to greet him. (Hopson was not in his getup; he wore jeans and a Colts jacket.) Later, the manager asked if Hopson, in exchange for free drinks and food, could help bring in more Pacers fans to the bar to watch away games.

  Over the next decade, Hopson would create eight different costumes, many based on comic-book or cartoon characters he favors (such as Captain America, Power Rangers, and Transformers), though some are topical (a pink one for breast cancer awareness, for example). He also built outfits to wear to Indiana Pacers games and the Indianapolis 500. He can mix and match most of the getups, making his game-day wardrobe almost limitless, a guy never caught in the exact same outfit twice.

  Hopson turned an 8-by-8 room in his home into a sort of Superfan chamber. Every bit of wall space is covered with pictures and posters and autographed memorabilia. It is also his workspace. There is a line of tape rolls with various colors hanging on the wall and different types of adhesives and paint lying about. The items he intends to use line shelves and sit on the floor or are in little cabinets built for Hopson by his friends.

  On Sundays before Colts home games, he wakes at three a.m., slips on fluffy Colts slippers (he has four pairs), and heads to the chamber. His brown cat, Bugsy, follows him. (“He is a Colts fan, too,” Hopson says.) He listens to or watches pregame football shows until around five a.m., and then he puts on the bottom half of his outfit, usually some kind of Colts blue baggy pants. He then eats and hydrates voraciously, like someone about to run a marathon. “Once I put all that paint on my face I can only drink through a straw and can’t really eat,” Hopson explains. He paints his face around seven a.m., and then puts on the shoulder pads and the rest of his getup. He then walks out his front gate (adorned with a blue horseshoe) and gets in his dark gray van, which is covered in Colts decals and has “Super Fan” written on a shield just above the front grill and at the top of the windshield (among other spots). Then he heads downtown. For a one p.m. game, he will arrive at the zoo promptly at nine a.m.

  In his early years as Superfan, Hopson didn’t have season tickets. Most often, as he was walking the streets, someone would just give him a spare ticket, a sort of acknowledgment of his extraordinary fandom. In 2013 he bought a single-season ticket for the Colts, and he attends the occasional Pacers games when tickets become available. He attends most Pacers games with Cathy Holland, his partner of more than twenty years. They met at Kroger’s and have lived together for the entirety of Hopson’s transformation into Superfan. “She is proof that there is someone for everyone,” Hopson says. Though generally a shy person, Holland is a big Pacers fan and allowed Hopson to create an outfit for her. It is a muted version of his getups, with blue hair and adorned glasses, but still worthy of an alter ego. Hopson calls her Pacers Blue Belle.

  Being Superfan has some minor downsides. Hopson has been stopped from entering a bank and a gas station in his costume. (“I didn’t think about how you can’t wear a mask in those places,” he says.) And he is certainly manic about dressing up now, unable to imagine not getting into character for games. Finding Hopson at a Colts or Pacers game wearing normal clothes would be like spotting Sasquatch. But those are tiny burdens relative to what becoming Superfan has brought to his life. It gave him an outlet for his energy and his need to be social, and it helped him tap back into his artistic side. When Hopson moved to Indianapolis in 1989, he had no job. He knew almost no one. He was a little scared, a little insecure. Today, Hopson is as confident and happy as one could be. And he knows precisely who he is.

  How big of a sports fan are you?

  It is, on the face, a ridiculous question, like asking someone how much he or she loves a spouse or a child. How do you measure or score that?

  That doesn’t stop people from asking the question, nor does it stop media outlets from constantly prodding fans to prove the depth of their allegiances. ESPN created a Fan Hall of Fame and inducts people each year, based, in part, on an essay candidates submit describing how big of a fan they are. Many of them read like bad college application letters. “The Buck-I-Guy personality extends far beyond the football stadium. Being community-minded, I atten
d Pop Warner Football Games all over Ohio, and contribute to their activities. I am also involved in various community events, local school functions, and visitation to seniors in assisted living facilities,” wrote Ohio State football fan John Chubb, aka Buck-I-Guy. He then described how he once pulled a person from a burning car moments before the car exploded. “I am not only considered a super-fan, but also a super-hero.”

  As much as Dan Wann might love some time with Buck-I-Guy on a couch, he has little use for questions like, How big of a fan are you? The people asking that question are click chasers. They want to stir up fan bases and get them clicking and commenting. Hey Michigan fans, there is an Ohio State fan in the Fan Hall of Fame but none from your school! How do you feel about that?! There is gold for ESPN and others in pitting fan bases against one another, but for a researcher like Wann, the responses to that question and others like it are typically just worthless noise.

  Wann knows the questions to ask if you really want to gauge a fan’s passion for a team. There are seven of them, and he came up with them in 1987 while sitting in the office of his adviser in the University of Kansas’s doctoral program. “It took us, like, maybe fifteen minutes to come up with the questions that would become the Sport Spectator Identification Scale,” he says. Wann was like a rookie pitcher in baseball who threw a perfect game in his first professional start. The first work he did on sports fans—born out of that hypothesis he cooked up just before his first doctoral class—became “Sports Fans: Measuring Degree of Identification with Their Team.” It was eventually published in the International Journal of Sport Psychology and has forever altered the way researchers talk about and study fans.

  Prior to Wann’s paper and his emergence in the field of fan psychology, “little empirical research has been directed toward individual differences among sports spectators in terms of their level of commitment or identification with a particular team,” Wann wrote in his paper. In other words, before Wann came along researchers didn’t often differentiate between an individual who spent a good portion of every day thinking about, say, the Miami Dolphins, and a person who just watched the team a few Sundays during the fall. This was both unscientific and lazy, but Wann suspects it was rooted in something else: “You go back to the sixties and seventies, and it is clear that the few people studying sports fans really hated sports fans.”