When NFL Fans Become Fanatics

By: Beth Gillin
Posted In: Sports

PHILADELPHIA- This week, Eagles fans will put teeny green jerseys on newborns and drape championship banners on tombstones.

They will go into hock for big-screen TVs, serve peanuts in bowls shaped like helmets, and place giant inflatable quarterbacks on their lawns.

Are they out of their minds?

Generally speaking, no, say academics in the growing fields of sports psychology and sports sociology. But there are exceptions.

“People have a universal need to be part of groups, and being a fan is an easy way to achieve that,” said Christian End, who teaches and researches fan psychology at Xavier University in Ohio.

“All you have to do is walk into a stadium with a stuffed eagle on your head to feel that sense of belonging.”

Some, though- scholars of fan behavior call them “highly identified fans”- can become so entwined with a team that they react like jilted lovers when things go wrong.

Last year, after the Eagles lost the NFC championship game for the third consecutive time, a weeping Eagles fan was caught by television cameras wailing, “Every year they break my heart! I hate them. I hate them. I hate them.”

Another fan was so angry that he reportedly strapped on a helmet and crashed his head through a car windshield.

“It’s unusual, but fan behavior can turn pathological and even ruin lives,” said psychologist Beth Dietz-Uhler of Miami University of Ohio. This is more likely to happen with men, said Dietz-Uhler, who studies the differences between male and female sports fans. (Briefly, she said, men like to gather knowledge, women like to hang out and cheer.)

“For most people, sports is just a form of entertainment, like TV or the movies,” Dietz-Uhler said. “It’s an escape, a distraction from everyday life. But there have been case studies of men who got so involved with watching sports that they ruined their marriages.

“They knew it was happening, knew their wives would leave them, but they just couldn’t stop themselves.”

The word “fan,” say some sources, derives from “fancier.” This suggests croquet or cats, but not Eagles followers. Fanciers do not pluck cheeseheads from the noggins of stadium visitors and sail them into the stands.

They don’t boo opponents with serious injuries while they are lying on the field, or at dogs catching Frisbees at halftime, or Donovan McNabb on his first day on the job.

Here in the home of the bacon-eggs-and-beer tailgate breakfast, where devotees have a rep for being rowdy, raucous and rude, “fan is clearly short for “fanatic.

True fanatics, however, are a breed apart. “Highly identified fans have much more powerful psychological needs than average,” said Merrill J. Melnick, co-author of “Sport Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators.

“Their identities are bound up with their favorite team. It resonates in their psyche. It’s what they live and breathe.”

Such folks are not special to Philadelphia. For his book “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania,” author Warren St. John joined a community of rabid fans with RVs as they followed the University of Alabama’s football team across the South.

One fan vomited out of anxiety before every kickoff. A couple skipped their daughter’s wedding to go to a game. A man awaiting a heart transplant gave up his spot on the organ list rather than miss a game.

While upward of 70 percent of the population identifies with some team, fan scholar End said, most are not that over the top.

“We’re passionate,” explained Eagles fan Anthony Howard of Roxborough, Pa., as he left the Modell’s sporting goods store in Wyncote the other day with a new Brian Dawkins shirt. “We’re very passionate.”

And the passion is contagious. “If you’re a Philadelphian and you haven’t been following the Eagles, you start to feel that you’re missing out,” End said.

This gives rise to a phenomenon called BIRG, or Basking In Reflected Glory, End said. It is characterized by newly minted fans snapping up team shirts and tossing around the “we word, to wit, “We’re going to the Super Bowl.”

End might have been talking about Sharon Robinson of Germantown, Pa., who after stocking up on Eagles merchandise at the Cedarbrook Mall in Wyncote, Pa., on Thursday cheerfully confessed, “I didn’t used to like them, but now that they’re winning, I do.”

In bad times, low-identifiers like Robinson tend to CORF, or Cut Off Reflected Failure, End said. They hide their team paraphernalia, and distance themselves by using “they, as in, “They lost.”

Most fans go with the flow. Only a minuscule portion take team love to extremes, scholars say. “Those are the people who lock themselves in the house for a week and refuse to talk to anyone if their team loses,” End said. “Or they act aggressively toward others in the stands.”

Fanatical fans have been around forever. In “The Iliad,” Homer described spectators at a chariot race peering through the dust and trying to see who was winning. Arguments ensued, bets were made, and a fight almost erupted before Achilles told everyone to chill.

Brawls aside, most of what fans do is “perfectly healthy behavior” said Melnick, a psychology professor at the State University of New York in Brockport.

Being a fan is a “compensatory mechanism,” Melnick said. It buttresses identity at a time when family, community and work- institutions that historically provided Americans a sense of self- are crumbling.

“Saying `I am an Eagles fan’ may be superficial. But it does help address the existential question, `Who am I?'”

In other words, to be a fan is to confront the meaning of life.

That is something to ponder if your neighbor paints an eagle on the side of his house.

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c 2005, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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