Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Wann loves sports, and he finds the people who follow them fascinating. He always has. As he worked on his first paper on fans, it just seemed logical to try to differentiate fans’ levels of dedication, to examine each fan as a unique individual worthy of individual analysis. What he didn’t anticipate was how easily that could be done.

  The SSIS is a simple and straightforward tool. A researcher picks a sports team—Wann used the Kansas men’s basketball squad in his initial paper—and then asks participants to respond to seven questions along a ratings scale with end points from 1 to 8. (This sort of psychometric scale is called a Likert-type scale, named after American organizational psychologist Rensis Likert.) In the SSIS, the higher the number chosen, the greater the fan’s allegiance. A generic SSIS might look like this:

  WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SPORTS TEAM?:

  1. How important is it to YOU that the team listed above wins?

  2. How strongly do YOU see YOURSELF as a fan of the team listed above?

  3. How strongly do YOUR FRIENDS see YOU as a fan of the team listed above?

  4. During the season, how closely do you follow the team listed above via ANY of the following: A) in person or on television, B) on the radio, C) television news or a newspaper, or D) the Internet?

  5. How important is being a fan of the team listed above to YOU?

  6. How much do you dislike the biggest rivals of the team listed above?

  7. How often do you display the team’s name or insignia at your place of work, where you live, or on your clothing?

  The lowest total score a person can achieve is a 7, the highest a 56. Generally, Wann places scores into four categories:

  07–18 = Low Identification

  19–35 = Moderate Identification

  36–49 = High Identification

  50–56 = Extreme Identification

  Both anecdotally and empirically, the SSIS is an accurate gauge of a fan’s interest in a team. Steven Lenhart, who everyone would agree is a fiercely dedicated Portland Timbers fan, scored a 53 out of 56. (“Wow, that’s high,” Wann says.) Lenhart fell short of a perfect 56 only because he scored the first question a 7 and gave himself a 6 on the final question. But that answer comes with a caveat, as Lenhart explains: “I hardly ever wear any official Timbers stuff. I own some, but I wear the colors like a green pair of shoes or a green flannel or jacket or something but nothing official.” Had the final SSIS question included the phrase “team colors,” Lenhart would have scored it an 8 and finished with a near-perfect 55. Michael Hopson scored even higher, a 54. Hopson scored 8s across the board save for the first question. He would prefer the Colts win, but that is less important than just being there to support them, so he scored that question a 6. (Over the years, Dan Wann has taken the SSIS many times. His scores have gone down a bit, as other aspects of his life have taken on more importance, “but I’ve still never scored below 50.”)

  In his first paper, Wann gave examples of how the SSIS could be used to dissect behavior such as how often fans attend sporting events, how they view other fans, and what they attribute a team’s success to. He posed questions on those topics to 358 Kansas students, and the results were intriguing. But that part of his paper was more of a tease than deep research. It was as if he was saying to other psychologists: “Look at all you can do now that you’ve got the SSIS. Go forth and do it!”

  While the SSIS remains Wann’s most tangible contribution to the field, his broader impact is that he has changed the way psychologists think about and study sports fans. His predecessors hammered away at the behavior of fans, particularly the violence they committed, an enticing subject for any psychologist. (Remember, Wann’s original impulse to study fans was sparked by a television report on a riot.) They just rarely went any further. A few made passing connections to fan behavior and identity, but no one took it as far as Wann did in his first paper and in the papers that immediately followed, which had titles such as “The Positive Social and Self Concept Consequences of Sports Team Identification.”

  Today, the self-deprecating Wann downplays the significance of the shift in fan research that he started. “It’s identification. Well, duh!” he said, as if he were the first to realize the obvious. But it took a different kind of psychologist, one who was also a diehard fan, to push the research in this new direction.

  Once you view a person’s interest in a team as part of their identity and not some sort of relationship with an outside entity, it is, to borrow a sports term, a game-changer. Wann gets to see this each year while teaching a course titled Psychology of Sports Fans. “About half the students in the class have some interest in studying psychology and maybe had me for another class and liked the way I teach,” Wann says. “The other half are people who are highly identified sports fans who took the course thinking they’d just get to talk about sports all day.” It takes a few weeks, but once Wann’s lectures and the reading assignments sink in, “there is this moment when the conversations and the way students ask questions change. They begin to see how being a fan changes people’s lives and the lives of the people around them, even how it has changed them. The class suddenly shifts from a gym class to a science class.”

  It is not unlike a breakthrough one might experience in therapy, a jolting realization that explains everything.

  If a fan can make the jump from “I am a diehard supporter of this team” to “the team is a huge part of my identity,” it frees them up to rethink their actions and behavior. Almost all of the behavior, good and bad, we associate with passionate fans takes on new meaning when framed as acts in support of or in defense of one’s identity. When you defend your team against insults from fans of a rival team, you are actually defending yourself. When you are justifying your team signing a player who has a long rap sheet, you are making yourself feel better about supporting that team. When you downplay your team’s chances before a big game, you are bracing your identity, your self-esteem, for a potential blow.

  This is all logical, even obvious, but it is surprising how sports fans resist it. I discussed identity with Steven Lenhart on many occasions, and while he agreed with the concept, it was obvious he wasn’t totally comfortable embracing it. It was the same with the other fans you’ll soon be reading about. “I’m not surprised by the pushback,” Wann says. “You are taking this thing they think of as otherworldly, an abstract, and trying to make it scientific and concrete. It is like explaining to someone that the reason they love their partner is because their neurons fire a certain way when they are around them. People don’t like that. They like the love story. Fandom is the same way. Deep down they don’t want to hear an unromantic explanation for fandom.”

  There is another reason fans bristle at their passion for a team being put on the couch: the term diehard fan has negative connotations. It brings to mind the fans who become violent (though studies have found fans to be generally no more violent than the average person) or who behave inappropriately, who scream horrible things at opposing fans, who soil the message boards of America with so much hate, who accost you at the bar or at a party and tell you your team is garbage. (This once happened at my sister’s wedding. A drunk guest berated my brother—yes, the brother of the bride—about how much better USC’s football team was than Notre Dame’s, my brother’s school. Safe to say, the guest didn’t get to see the cutting of the cake.)

  People don’t want to be associated with the worst of fans, so when you start poking them with words like identity, they bristle. But most people shouldn’t. Just because someone scores high on the SSIS, just because being a fan is a huge part of who they are, doesn’t (necessarily) mean they have a problem.

  Michael Hopson is a great illustration of this. If you didn’t know him, if you only saw him in one of his getups, it would be easy to make some generalizations about his mental health, his life. Someone who spends that much time and effort preparing for and dressing up for a football game, who has a section of his home devoted to storing and building his ma
ny costumes, who has created a fully realized alter ego, could be viewed from afar as having an unhealthy obsession with the Colts.

  But in the expert opinion of Rick Grieve, the clinical psychologist, Hopson’s relationship with that team exhibits no obvious signs for concern. “You look at whether fandom interferes with someone’s life, with getting work done, with creating meaningful relationships,” Grieve says. “Does it stop them from continuing their education, say, or are they spending money on sports that needs to be spent on food, shelter, taking care of their family? Really, you are looking at the balance it has with the other parts of their life.”

  Hopson and Steven Lenhart demonstrate that a healthy balance can exist in even the most devoted fans, those with an extreme identification. They have jobs; they are in stable relationships. It is hard to find a way that their fandom has negatively impacted their lives or the lives of those around them (unless you count the potential damage to Lenhart’s liver or the feng shui in Hopson’s home). Their fandom has helped them find and build a community of friends. It also opened the door for other aspects of their self to come forth. Lenhart’s passion for photography was diminishing until he connected it with his fandom. Same with Hopson and his creative side. Being an extreme sports fan has, without question, made them happier and (mentally) healthier individuals.

  Extremely identified sports fans may be leery of being put on a couch, having their interest in a team be scrutinized, but, like Hopson and Lenhart, most of them probably shouldn’t.

  “I know some people probably look at me and say, ‘He’s crazy!’ ” Hopson says. “And I know I do have this crazy, artistic mind. But I love it. I’m happy. I flow as it goes. I flow as it goes.”

  When the first radio and television producers called, the assumption they made about Pat Lindemann and his family was “that we lived in a trailer in South Philly.”

  It was an understandable mistake.

  In November 2011, Lindemann posted on YouTube a 56-second video of his five-year-old son, Christopher. It was the day after the Philadelphia Eagles lost, 38–20, to the New England Patriots, a game marked by the stellar performance of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who threw three touchdown passes to rally his team from an early deficit. Young Christopher watched the game from the living room of the Lindemann’s home, and as Brady continued to dice up the Eagles secondary, “there was this shriek,” says Pat. He came downstairs from his office and found Christopher melting down in front of the television. He pulled out his phone and began to record.

  In the video, little Christopher is wearing a red, white, and blue plaid shirt. At first, he is seated on the edge of a large ottoman, but as he notices his father recording him he moves to a brown leather chair nearby. From the start, Christopher is crying, and almost every word out of his mouth is screamed, including his initial request, made as he tosses a pillow on the ground, that his father stop videoing him.

  Pat ignores that plea and goads his son: “Why are you so mad at Tom Brady?”

  “Because I hate him!…Idiot!” responds Christopher.

  “Well, I think Tom Brady is an idiot, too,” Pat says. He then trains the camera on the television, where Brady is dropping back to pass. “He might throw a pick.”

  “He is never going to throw a pick!” Christopher shouts. “He is always going to throw a touchdown!”

  “Why do you hate Tom Brady so much? ’Cause he’s mean?” the father asks.

  “No, because I hate him!”

  “Oh, Christopher, don’t get so upset.”

  The boy screams something inaudible, and then Pat responds, “You want to go give him a punch?”

  Christopher’s tone softens. “I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t be so mad at Tom Brady,” Pat says.

  “I hate him, though….He’s sucky.”

  The video ends a few seconds later, but it could have been twice as long had Pat gotten to Christopher earlier in his tirade.

  The next day, Pat showed the video to some relatives and then posted it on YouTube so he could share it with a few others. “About forty-eight hours later, on Wednesday, I got to the office and I’ve got an email from the Boston Herald.” He watched as the video went from a few hundred views to 25,000 and then 75,000, all in a single day. It would eventually reach 2.5 million and draw 2,300 comments. For comparison, the highlights from Super Bowl XLVI, at the end of the 2011–12 season, posted to YouTube by the NFL, were watched by about 3 million people and garnered 950 comments.

  By Thursday, Pat had heard from radio shows all over the East Coast—some had already begun playing the audio of his son’s tantrum on a loop—and producers from The Tonight Show (then hosted by Jay Leno) and Jimmy Kimmel Live also reached out. Many of the people who contacted Pat assumed Christopher was a member of a middle-class or lower-middle-class family living near Philadelphia. They were surprised to learn that the Lindemanns reside in Lake Forest, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and that Pat is the CFO of a large commercial real estate firm and quite well-off. Even more shocking: the Lindemanns aren’t even an Eagles family.

  Christopher Lindemann. Does this look like the face of Tom Brady hate?

  “I am a [Green Bay] Packers season ticket holder,” Pat says. “If you step into my home, you will see a shrine to the Packers.”

  That is not an exaggeration. On the walls of his basement are posters and framed Sports Illustrated covers featuring his favorite Packers players. Yellow and green hard hats hang on the walls; Pat and his sons each choose one to wear on game days. There are signed footballs encased in glass and a giant likeness of former Green Bay star defensive lineman Reggie White covering most of one wall. Even the couch is Packer-fied: when Pat’s dog chewed it up a few years back, he had it reupholstered in Packers green and gold, complete with the team’s logo.

  Pat grew up in Whitefish Bay, north of Milwaukee, and he attended the University of Wisconsin. “So I am a Packers fan and a Badger,” he says. He began going to Packers games with his father at the old Milwaukee County Stadium in the 1970s, and has been to about 120 Packers games total in his forty-four years. His wife, Laura, was mostly indifferent to sports when they married, but then Pat took her to a Packers game at Lambeau Field early in their marriage. “It was the total Lambeau experience. She was drinking brandy hot cocoa, around all these people having so much fun, and she said, ‘I had no idea football games could be like this!’ ”

  Pat then indoctrinated his sons, Patrick (who was born in 2004) and Christopher (2006), into Packers nation. “It started right out of the womb. They had Packers onesies on. As they got older it was Packer jackets, gloves, backpacks, all of it.” Pat further inculcated the importance of the Packers by taking his boys to games and by his behavior at home when he watched Green Bay on television.

  “I like to be alone with my family or just me. I get nervous. Maybe nervous isn’t the word. I have angst. That’s the word. I go to church on Sundays, but will go to 9:30 a.m. mass so I have more time to prepare for a [noon] game. I get in full gear. Jeans and one of the ten jerseys I have, and I put a specific hard hat on.” Pat is far less demonstrative than Christopher when watching his team. He is into the game, but he doesn’t curse or throw things. He will occasionally call a player “stupid” or an “idiot,” but that is the worst it gets.

  He takes losses hard, however. How did he react after the Packers’ devastating loss to the Seattle Seahawks in the 2015 NFC Championship game? “I can’t imagine a more visceral reaction after a game, including from my kids. I literally curled up in a ball on my bed and wanted to cry.” Laura has a saying: “If the Packers win, everybody wins. If they lose, then, well…”

  Patrick and Christopher cried after the loss to Seattle, coming upstairs to where Pat was curled on the bed and questioning him about why the Packers didn’t get a chance to score in overtime. “They think about the game the same way we adults do,” Pat says.

  Christopher is a bit different in that he has aligned with two teams. W
hen he was around four years old he showed an interest in birds, and then he discovered there was an NFL team called the Eagles, and that became the other team he loved. “He is like a little football Rain Man, memorizing scores and statistics and the roster. He can even pronounce ‘Nnamdi Asomugha’ [the tongue-twisting name of a former Eagles cornerback].” Pat says he could have made another video of Christopher going “berserk” when he learned that the Eagles had traded popular running back LeSean McCoy in 2015.

  YouTube is loaded with clips of kids getting emotional about a game or after learning some bit of news involving their favorite team. Search YouTube for “I HATE the Panthers!” and you’ll see a meltdown by a boy about the same age as Christopher, who just learned from his father that his favorite Carolina Panthers player, Steve Smith Sr., had been traded. There is even a cameo by his little sister, who offers her opinion on the trade from her car seat. You can find a video of a young 49ers fan weeping in his father’s arms after the 2013 Super Bowl loss, and another of a six-year-old Packers fan crying in front of a white Christmas tree after the 2015 NFC Championship game loss to Seattle (the same defeat that had Pat Lindemann curled up on his bed in a ball). There are many, many more, as videos of children melting down or celebrating their team’s failures and successes have become part of what sports fans consume, part of the noise. Most people view them without giving it much thought, without pondering the question that Pat Lindemann asked himself after Christopher’s meltdown drew so much attention.