George Dohrmann - Superfans: Into the Heart of Obsessive Sports Fandom

The idea for this book evolved over many years, but if there was a moment the seed was planted it came during my first job as a professional journalist in the summer of 1995. I was working on the copy desk of the Los Angeles Timesmy title was night desk assistantand I was tasked with doing whatever the actual copy editors didnt want to do. Mostly, I answered the phones. Calls poured in from fans of the Dodgers and the Angels and of the Lakers and the Clippers (those poor souls), USC and UCLA supporters, devotees of the Kings of the National Hockey League, and others. This was before chat rooms and message boards, eons before Twitter and Facebook. People needed an outlet for their thoughts about their favorite teams, for their gripes about a rival, so they called the Times between three p.m. and midnight, asked for the sports desk, and got me.

My job, as explained by my bosses, was to shut up and listen. These were readers who were calling, subscribers, and the Times wanted to keep them reading and subscribing. So I listened to people grumble about the Dodgers bullpen, about the Lakers sorry defense, about how USC football got more favorable coverage than UCLAs team, about how columnists at the Times were biased against the Angels, and more. Day after day, hour after hour, I listened to whatever these sports fans wanted to say. Sometimes, I couldnt stay silent and debated with them about whether Magic Johnson was superior to Larry Bird, offered my two cents on which of John Woodens UCLA teams was the best or who should be USCs starting quarterback. Occasionally, theyd get angry at something I said. Theyd yell. Id yell. It was great fun for the veterans working on the copy desk when the lowly desk assistant lost his cool.

I held that job for nearly two years, and during that time I probably talked to more sports fans than anyone at the Times. I learned how passionate they were, the depths of their devotion. I experienced how their love for a team and its players shifted, how firm and tenuous it could be all at once. I listened as people conveyed a relationship with a team, with its players and coaches and owner, that was, in their minds, intimate and special.

Familiarity doesnt always breed clarity. As I listened and listened to these fans, I never fully understood their behavior. I didnt know how they had become such diehards, or what fandom brought to their lives. I didnt know why they would call a stranger to debate some unanswerable question, why they would lock on to notions about their team or a rival that were clearly untrue. I recognized some of their behavior as my ownI too was an intense fan of some teams (including the San Francisco Giants, leading to many heated debates with the devoted Dodgers fans on the copy desk)so my blindness to the root causes of their thinking and conduct was also ignorance about myself.

In the more than two decades since my stint answering phones in Los Angeles, sports fans and sports fandom has undergone a sea change. Fans are interconnected over social media and other digital outlets, their thoughts shareable with thousands of others in an instant. No longer anonymous, fans (and fan groups) are now powerful voices, famous (and infamous) as tweeters (e.g. @fauxPelini, a Nebraska fan with 472,000 followers), as posters on popular message boards, and as callers in to radio shows (such as those hosted by Paul Finebaum and Jim Rome). The importance of having allegiance to a sports team has been reinforced and heightened, to the point that it comes up on first dates and during job interviews and in almost any setting when we are asked to define ourselves. For many people, a fan group has usurped church membership or another community organization as the primary binding agent in their lives.

We are now clearly a nation of people in intense relationships with our favorite sports teams, and yet there remains little to no cognition of how we became so obsessed and how life-altering that obsession can be. Like the lowly desk assistant answering the phone at the Los Angeles Times, we hear and hear from fans every day, but we dont really know them, dont truly understand why they behave as they do.

Superfans is a first step in trying to change that.

You will be taken on a journey to the extremes of fandom, yes, but this book is not a vehicle to lampoon people who have made rooting for a sports team the central focus of their lives. On social media and on websites big and small, these hyper-committed devotees are often reduced to freaks behind the glass. We laugh or shake our heads at how they dress themselves and their children. We mock what they say and write. Over and over we play the YouTube clips of their meltdowns and fights. I have no interest in further indulging that voyeurism. My aim is to shatter the glass and get to know the people behind it, to better understand them and their fandom in all its neon-Mohawked, shirtless-on-the-frozen-tundra glory.

In the pages that follow, you will be introduced to a Milwaukee Brewers supporter and his banana costume. You will meet the Indianapolis Colts superfan who honors that team by sticking garbage to his body. You will get to know a general in the (Minnesota) Viking World Order and meet the crew that operates the Chicago Bears Fanbulance. You will encounter Kentucky fans whose devotion to that universitys basketball team is literally needled into their skin, a San Diego State diehard who changed the way fans across the country behave, and a young child whose hatred for New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady made him famous.

You will meet two women in Atlanta who believe they know what makes women love sports teams, and a pastor in Dallas coping with a clash of faiths among his football-loving flock. You will meet a mascot who suffered the greatest loss imaginable and the fans who serenaded him back from the edge. Finally, you will get to know the person whom I, after three years of meeting fanatics across the country, consider to be the perfect fan.

You will also be introduced to a small band of sports-loving academics who have pioneered and legitimized the study of fandom. Have you ever wondered why you became a fan in the first place? What you get out of connecting with (or berating) other fans? How big of a fan you are relative to others? Whether your husbands or boyfriends behavior on game days is abnormal? Have you ever pondered when it was that you crossed the line from casual sports observer to obsessive? Wanted to know what makes male and female fans different? A man named Dan Wann and the other researchers you will meet have devoted the prime of their professional lives to answering these questions and others.

Not everyone is as devoted to their favorite team as the Superfans I spotlight. In fact, hardly anyone is, and that probably includes you. But no matter the level of your commitment to your team, the stories in the pages that follow will offer an opportunity to evaluate your own fandom and the choices youve made. By spotlighting a few fans, I hope to illuminate the many.