Chapter 4. Our Town

by Bob Andelman

"I'm a die-hard. I love college football. My two brothers and I were Rutgers undergrads. I donate a pretty good sum of money. I watch the games live and if I can tape it, I'll watch it one more time. During the off-season, I'll watch again. It's a sickness."

Peter Hendricks
Attorney
New Brunswick, N.J.

Sports fans sustain a good-guy view of their hometown team and a bad-guy view of other teams. The hometown team's players are the community's champions, its gladiators, sent into the world to defend the community honor and reinforce community pride.

In Green Bay, the Packers represent far more than just random violence and mayhem committed against out-of-town guests. They are the good guys, superior athletic specimens who triumph due to their virtue and self-discipline, motivation, extraordinary willpower, training and teamwork. At least that's what fathers tell their sons in Green Bay.

In Chicago, where the Packers are mortal enemies of Windy City denizens, fathers regale their sons with tales of Packer misdeeds and ill-gotten gains, of the cheeseheads' cheating and miscreant ways.

When our team goes out and just totally shellacs another team blasting them into the next county, we are a part of it. We revel in the victories. When Cincinnati meets cross-state rival Cleveland, a "W" by any margin gives fans a year of bragging rights. "Your team sucks!" "We're a better city!" The bigger the win, the bigger the boasts. Even though the city had nothing to do with it. It was just a team. It has nothing to do with the city per se but we use it to brag about our community.

Communities assign their values to the athletes who wear their names to the world. New Yorkers expect the Giants to be bold and brassy; Los Angelenos demand the Rams be sleek and stylish. Chicago Bears take no shit from anybody. Denizens of these cities blindly trust their chosen warriors to fight for truth, justice and the NFL way.

The teams themselves nurture their local popularity by dutifully dispatching their young men to feed the poor, help the disabled, entertain the elderly and autograph broken limbs for hospitalized youngsters. (And be photographed doing it.) They invest thousand of hours to be one with their hometown, to veil themselves in an other-worldly mystique in order to mobilize fan support.

Newspaper reporters covering the NFL beat are assiduously courted to provide friendly articles even in a franchise's darkest days.

"I think most teams feel very protective of their good-guy image on their home turf because that is what the fans expect," says Dr. Gregory B. Collins, a psychiatrist and section head of the Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. He is also a consultant to NFL teams. "They feel that bad publicity hurts the team and hurts the team with the fans. If they just valued mayhem as an athletic skill I don't think they'd mind so much that the players were arrested for violent behavior but, in fact, they don't like that. They really feel it is detrimental to the overall mission of the club and they take offense when that kind of thing happens."

The people in the stands become convinced their own lives rise and fall with the people on the field. Sometimes a whole city can be depressed on Monday. It becomes a real attachment.

* * *

When you watch football you root for a team identified with a city. If your city does well it gives you a stronger sense of identity and a stronger sense of being special, important and central. There is something about rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles if you are from Philadelphia or the Kansas City Chiefs if you are from Kansas or Missouri that hooks you in with that community and puts you on the map if your team does well.

It becomes another way to feel good about yourself. If you identify with Dallas being No. 1 you actually feel you are part of No. 1. The same might apply to individual players or stars that people might follow.

"When I first came to Chicago," former Bears offensive tackle turned sportscaster Dan Jiggetts says, "the Bears had struggled for a decade. In 1976 and '77, we turned around. There was an uplifting of the spirits of people in the city. It's a civic thing. If you're winning, you've got a lot of teammates. In Chicago, they may not like the way the team is going, but they're so supportive."

The Spear brothers, Andrew and Jeff, spent their formative years in Denver developing a love-hate relationship with the Broncos.

"Denver is soooo caught up in Bronco-mania," Andrew says. "You have to get swept away with it. Other markets have other pro teams. Denver fans are more loyal; until the Rockies came along, they didn't have as many choices. Losing all those Super Bowls, the loyalty is still there. I stood by them. And I always will."

"I'm a diehard Denver Broncos fan," Jeff says. "So I know pain. I can't tell you what it's like to root for a winner."

* * *

No. 2 just isn't good enough for frustrated Bronco fans. Buffalo Bills fans know that feeling, but they hesitate to disparage the only game in town.

Football is very important, economically and otherwise, in places like Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. While the natives deny the winters in Buffalo are as bad as you've heard, there's no denying that endless weeks and months of snow make for some long days in the dead of winter. The Bills provide relief; a winning season can carry the community into late January and buoy its spirits clear through to spring.

Buffalo is an interesting case, as blue-collar as you can get. The people are hard-working, family-oriented, with strong loyalties. The Bills represent the only game in town to many people. And it's not like New Orleans or Philadelphia, Boston or New York where there are a lot of entertainment options. Buffs hunger for any type of national exposure, anything that says, "Buffalo is a big league city." Cleveland is another city that really wants to be recognized. Tampa is also going through that. Professional athletics have a lot to do with it. In a town like New York, people can afford to be fickle and very demanding of their athletes because there are a lot of choices. In Buffalo, you have a much closer relationship between the team and the community.

William E. "Bill" Price, an associate professor of mathematics at Niagara University, was at the first Bills game ever played back in 1960. He's been a fan ever since, rarely missing a game.

"We have hockey, but football was here first, like a first son," Price says. "Buffalo is a nice city, but it's not glamorous. Other cities have other things to be proud of. We need football. When we're on a roll, you can see half the people in town wearing Bills stuff."

That's why his city can hold its collective head high even when the Bills pile up three successive winning seasons only to fall flat in three straight Super Bowls. It matters, but then again it doesn't. "To make it is a tremendous achievement," Price says. "The long season, all the wins -- I'll take it. Those who don't think so are missing the boat. You had all the enjoyment of those playoff wins. Just being in the Super Bowl is really something. The Bills are our gateway to national recognition. One game is overrated. Second place doesn't get the credit it deserves."

Fellow fan Buff Ralph Weisbeck agrees.

"If we lose a game, I may be down for an hour or two, but I think, 'We'll do better next year'," he says. "Even when we lose the Super Bowl I think, hey, we got there! We had some great games to watch. That team doesn't owe us a bit."

Some years ago, when Price feared Buffalo might lose its team, the college professor did his part to show support. He bought an extra season ticket and ran a newspaper ad offering rides to the games.

* * *

In Green Bay, in the fall of the year, even though a man might go hunting or fishing on game day, he'll always carry a radio with him, tuned to the Packers.

"Financially, nationally, the Packers put little Green Bay on the map," Green Bay banker Jerry Pigeon says. "If we ever lost the team, I think we could survive, but it wouldn't be the same. There's a lot of Packer in me."

As a kid, Pigeon and his buddies used to scale the fence at old City Stadium and sneak into Green Bay games. "They'd walk you out and then you'd jump back over the fence and come back," he says. He used to wait on Packers coach Vince Lombardi when he was a teller at the bank where he's now an officer. And he went to the same high school as Vince Jr.

"It's different being in Green Bay," Pigeon says. "It's the only game in town. That's instilled in us. If I was raised in Chicago or Dallas, I might not have the same interest in the Bears or Cowboys. You'd have to experience it to understand it."

* * *

Larry Mayer says the love of football in Chicago isn't that different than in Green Bay. Chicago is a Bears town, he swears, no matter how many championships Michael Jordan and the Bulls win. People mark the seasons there by Red Grange, George Halas and Mike Ditka. They pass season tickets along in their wills.

"When Mike Ditka got fired," the Chicago Bear Report managing editor says, "you would have thought the president had been killed. The fans were mad at everybody. They said unprintable things about (team owner) Michael McCaskey. A lot of these people, I think, take it too seriously. The 'superfans' are people who live and die with Ditka. He epitomized the city, the work ethic. He was one of us, even though he makes tons of money. It crushed people when he got fired. I know a guy, 6-4, he pulled off the side of the road when he heard Ditka got fired and cried."

* * *

The day H.R. "Dick" Williams relocated his retirement home from ritzy, sleepy Palm Beach, Florida, to Houston, Texas, he says, "I went nuts. In Palm Beach, we had spring training. When I got to Houston, I got season tickets to all three professional sports -- baseball, football and basketball."

A superfan of his own making, Williams created The Derrick Club for Oilers fans. "I won't say I'm the biggest Oiler fan, because some guys paint their faces blue before the games, but I'd say I'm in the top five." It gets him invited by the team to be a guest on road trips and created the enviable opportunity to befriend most of the coaches and players. Getting to know them personally makes all the difference in his enjoyment of the games they play: "It's more than sports; it's your friends out there."

The '60s song lyric that went "You've gotta love the one you're with" couldn't be applied more aptly than to Williams. The former cleaning services contractor lived in Denver and was true to Bronco blue before retiring to Palm Beach. Now that he's in Houston, the Denver loyalties are long forgotten.

"Because I had lived in Denver, my friends there got seats for my wife and I on the 50-yard-line for a Broncos-Oilers game," Williams says. "We (the Oilers) were winning by a tremendous margin. But in the last 16 seconds, John Elway pulled it out for the Broncos and I wound up wearing a Broncos tie to dinner. Very humiliating."

It's easy to switch allegiances when you live in the city where a team plays. "I can't understand people who live in Houston who root for the Cowboys. That's impossible for me to comprehend," Williams says.

* * *

Human resources executive Roger W. Brummett was born to be a Colts fan. As a kid in Indiana, he got a white football helmet and painted a blue stripe in the middle and a horseshoe on each side. When he played football in the yard, house rules were you could only wear the helmet on offense, so you could be Johnny Unitas.

"When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up," Brummett recalls, "I said I wanted to be quarterback for the Baltimore Colts."

This is all the more significant because Brummett grew up in Indiana, not Baltimore. He chose the Colts as his team long before Bob Irsay ever dreamed of relocating the franchise to Indianapolis.

The year Irsay did shock the football world by moving out of Baltimore in the middle of the night and unloading the trucks at the Hoosierdome, Brummett founded the Thundering Herd fan club. The club hosts tailgate parties, travels to away games, sponsors an annual banquet for players and awards a $1,000 scholarship to a high school football player who is injured and cannot complete a season due to injury.

In 1988, the team recognized Brummett's contributions by presenting him with a jersey that had his name and the number 12, for the "12th man." The jersey was even from a Baltimore Colts uniform, he notes with relish, "so I really got my wish."

The Colts' real impact on Indianapolis is only just being felt in the 1990s as the first generation of area youth grows up with an NFL team. "I think it's taken some time for the community to embrace a professional sports team," Brummett says. Meanwhile, the team has a positive social and economic effect on a blighted area around the Hoosierdome.

"They have contributed to civic pride," the Indianapolis superfan says. "We're one of 28 cities fortunate enough to be part of the NFL. In 10 or 15 years, we can be lucky enough to be like a Green Bay or Buffalo."

* * *

At least one guy relocated to Indianapolis because the Colts moved there.

John Cimasko was raised in Northern New Jersey and, like Brummett, became fascinated with Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts from afar during the '60s. When the team moved to Indiana in '84, Cimasko's interest was oddly rekindled. He and his brother became charter members of the Thundering Herd Fan Club.

On a lark, the brothers Cimasko packed suitcases and went to see the Colts in person at the Dome. It was just short of a religious experience for John. Just before getting on the plane to go home, he picked up a real estate magazine and stuck it in his luggage.

"My wife Maryanne started looking at the homes," he says. "I used to kid about moving to Indianapolis and she called my bluff."

It took some time, but Cimasko caught on with Pepsi-Cola's Indianapolis operation as a route salesman and lived out a fantasy in 1990 by moving his family to the Hoosier State. "This is my place," he says proudly.

That's just the beginning of Cimasko's story, however.

WNDE, the Colts flagship radio station, broadcasts a live, weekly Colts-oriented program from Union Station in Indianapolis. During an open mike segment, audience members can step up and speak their mind. Every week, Cimasko did exactly that. The station quickly recognized this was no ordinary NFL fan from Jersey and soon they looked for him each week. Now Cimasko enjoys his very own segment during the off-season.

"New York is big -- what are your chances of getting a radio thing?" Cimasko says. "That doesn't happen to the common man. And we went to Bob Irsay's mansion! How many people get to talk to the team's general manager about the draft? It's great."

Maryanne Cimasko, the woman who dared her husband to relocate, didn't know what she was setting off.

"She thinks it's a little wacky," Cimasko says.

* * *

There are only 28 NFL franchises, but hundreds of college teams, so far more people have college football loyalties around the country. These folks may live in a college town, but the school's support is spread farthest and widest by students who pass through to pick up a degree on their way to greater glory.

• Attorney Peter Hendricks, on the other hand, is one of those guys who went to Rutgers University and never left New Brunswick, New Jersey.

"I'm in the Scarlet R, the 12th man club," he says. "We have meetings with the coaches to go over prospects. We have a countdown on our calendars to kickoff. Our law firm has had occasion to represent some of the players in a legal capacity. We yell and cheer and scream. It hurts when they lose. I've adopted the same attitude of the coaches and players. You hate to lose but you move on, hoping that the next week is going to bring victory."

• Dr. Robert L. Arnstein, retired chief psychiatrist of Yale University Health Services, is the son of a Yalie who took him to his first game, Yale at Army, in 1927.

"The cadets marched and that was colorful," he recalls. "I saw two or three games that season. I can still remember some of the things that happened. If you asked me what happened yesterday, I'm not so good. I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't gone to Yale College. That might have made a difference."

There's no shaking Arnstein's loyalty.

"It has something to do with my feeling that the team embodies a kind of abstract ideal," he says. "I sour on a team if I think that they are not really living up to my idea of what the ideal should be."

* * *

For some men, allegiances can also be made without deference to geography.

These guys typically spend their whole lives in the same city without ever seeing it through the eyes of a visitor, like the New Yorker who's never been to the Statute of Liberty or the top of the Empire State Building. They associate with Dallas or San Francisco or Miami because they're more glamorous, more colorful, or more successful than the locals.

"We used to go to Tampa," former Chicago Bears offensive tackle Dan Jiggetts recalls, "and we'd get cheered more than the Bucs. We thought, what is this, a home game?"

• "I tend not to like the local team," says Larry Selvin, a West Roxbury, Mass., financial accountant. "The local reporting is so biased, I tend to rebel against that. I've always liked Dallas. And I like San Francisco a lot; my brothers are in San Francisco."

• Boston textbook buyer Kenton Blagbrough feels equally strong about four favorite teams. "It's not just the home team I'm rooting for," he says. "Although when the Patriots were on their drive to Super Bowl XX, I was in seventh heaven. That was just awesome."

• Joe DiRaffaele owns a chain of temporary help services, Labor World, based in Coconut Creek, Florida. He got hooked on Notre Dame without ever being a student of the school or traveling to South Bend. Because New York City, DiRaffaele's hometown, doesn't have a high-profile college team, local television stations would broadcast Notre Dame games. It didn't hurt that the Irish played a couple of high-profile games at Yankee Stadium in the '60s.

• Hospitality industry management consultant Mark von Dwingelo also began a love affair with his team by accident. When Yankee Stadium was being refurbished in the mid-70s, the Giants temporarily relocated to von Dwingelo's home state, Connecticut, playing home games in the Yale Bowl. "I was able to go to some games and it was instant attraction," he recalls.

• Banker Shawn Cahill went to Florida State University from 1977-80. He was in school when coach Bobby Bowden took the Seminoles to their first major bowl game; "It was my classmates playing," Cahill says. "You're rooting for guys you know and it continues after you leave school. When these guys go to the professional ranks, you follow them. I still root for guys like Deion Sanders, who was good at Florida State."

* * *

Keith Farber, a Buena Park, California, courier and native of the city, loves any team if its name starts with the words "Los Angeles." He views the games as a social outlet, making friends through the Rambassadors fan club and relying on the Raiders, Rams, Lakers, Kings and Dodgers for contributions to his own self-esteem.

"I was a short, pudgy kid," he says. "I wasn't an athlete when I was young because I didn't grow out of it until I was 14."

There are some things some guys never grow out of, though. The shoelaces on his tennis shoes are blue-gold. He wears a Rams watch and Rams pendant every day. He dons team sweats to the games. And he has, on several occasions, painted his face in Rams colors.

"When my team wins, I win," Farber says.

* * *

One of the most revealing studies of sports and community identity was overseen by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. He confirmed through research that, as a general tendency, fans prefer to associate themselves publicly with winners and to distance themselves in the eyes of any audience from losers.

Cialdini even coined the phrase that describes this phenomena: "basking in reflected glory" to describe the phenomena.

Winning and losing teams influence the morale of a region, a city or a college campus. The community may actually have clinical features of depression when its team loses. People become blue for several days, disoriented and non-productive, whereas if they win, they are pumped up and active.

For example, after the home team wins a football game on Saturday, scores of university students at seven major NCAA schools systematically chose to wear apparel to class on Monday that announced their school affiliation. They wore sweatshirts, T-shirts and team jackets with insignias and emblems that designated them as part of the university after the team won in far greater numbers than after it lost. The larger the victory margin, the stronger the tendency to show off.

"There is a great tendency on the part of the fans to literally dress themselves in the success of their team," Cialdini says. "The other thing that we have found is that this doesn't just apply to such things as the way people dress themselves. It also has to do with the way that they associate themselves and the pronouns that they use to describe a victory or defeat of the home team. We find, for example, that college students here at Arizona State University were significantly more likely to use the term 'we' to describe the outcome of a game that the football team had won but to use the term 'they' to describe the outcome of a game that the team had lost. Again there is a tendency to incorporate victors within the concept of the self and a tendency to distance losers from that concept."

The tendency to use "we" to describe victories and "they" to describe defeats was by far more powerful among those people who had recently experienced a personal failure.

"People who have experienced some sort of recent setback were people who have a sense of low self-worth because they carry around this sense of themselves as losers," Cialdini says. "Especially likely to fall into this category are people who choose to bask in reflective glory but avoid the shadow of another's defeat. Those are the fair weather fans. We're not saying that people who support their teams and get behind their teams and like to associate themselves with their team are people with low self-concept. We are saying that fair weather fans are people with low self-concept. They are the ones who jump on the opportunity to connect themselves to a victor but then bury their connections with a loser."

There is another feature to Cialdini's study worth noting. Apparently the reason people bask in reflective glory and distance themselves from the shadow of failure is to boost their image in the eyes of others. They believe other people will see them as more positive if they are associated with positive things, even though they didn't cause the positive things.

In the apparel study, Cialdini's researchers found that the effect was just as strong for away games as it was for home games, even when the fan played no conceivable role in the success of the team. They weren't in the stands cheering the team on, but they still wore more home team apparel when the team won.

"We think it is a desire to connect themselves with victorious others so the audience will see the fans more positively," Cialdini says.

When there is a victory, fans feel as though they shared in the glory of the team. That has to do with the sedentary quality of modern life. American men rarely battle or do combat. (Urban guerilla warfare and 26-mile marathons not withstanding.) We use physical sports as proxies for the lost challenge of the physical environment, indeed, against one another. We get a vicarious, second-hand charge from watching people engaged in physical contests where they can identify with one side or another. It's primitive but we can do it without getting hurt or messing up our designer jeans. We can turn on the tube and watch our favorite gladiators fight on our behalf and if we feel as though our honor is somehow at stake, victory will be all the more rewarding.

Fans want to associate themselves with victorious teams in order to enhance their self-esteem and personal prestige.

Studies have shown that they do that if they have recently had some kind of damage done to their own esteem. If students perform poorly in their exams, when they are given an opportunity to bask in reflective glory they are more likely to do it when they have had recent damage to their esteem than when it has not happened.

Dr. Edward R. Hirt, an Indiana University social psychologist, conducted his own study of the basking in reflected glory phenomena. He used college basketball fans to determine how the outcomes of a game featuring their team affected them personally.

People flock when their team is doing really well. But when the team hits on a big losing streak or a bad couple of years, attendance and general interest falls off. Nobody cares about them. Hirt's study concerned itself with the people who stick with their team through thick and thin, enduring the losses to one day, again, relish victory. The hardcore fans don't disassociate themselves from their team when the waters turn choppy. They believe they have to suffer through those tough times because they are true fans of the team.

In brief, Hirt's methodology was to organize loyal fans into groups of six to eight and have them watch away games of their favorite college basketball team. They were asked to rate the performance of players and the teams. They also had to assess their mood and their feelings of self-esteem.

"Our assumption," Hirt says, "was that people's moods were going to be very much affected by the team's outcome, but also that it might carry over and affect their self-esteem as well."

Subjects were also put through what they were told was an unrelated study. They did tasks ostensibly designed to estimate various abilities from a motor-skills test (mini-basketball free throws) and solving anagrams to a simulated dating scenario where they were shown slides of the opposite sex, pre-rated for attractiveness, and asked how likely it was the person in the slide would go out with them.

"Under winning conditions, we found you did get some elevations and people's estimates on all these tasks," Hirt says. "But in the loss condition, we saw lowering on their motor skills, social skills and their mental abilities to solve problems. Then we had them actually do the task and we didn't find any differences. So this is all a perception of your own ability rather than actually influencing your ability to do things.

"The bottom line," he says, "was that there does seem to be this connection of the fan with the team so that the team's outcome does have effects on the fan's perception of themselves. But they didn't seem to carry over to affect performance per se, just their outlook and sense of self."

The one puzzler in the results was that the effects of the loss seem to be stronger than the win.

"I have two explanations for that and I don't know which one is right," Hirt says. "The first one -- the more boring one -- is that college students are already so optimistic about their own abilities that there is not a lot of room on the scale to go up. There is a lot more room to go down. They already believe that they are well above average. It may just be a scaling effect there that wins really do affect people in the same way losses do but we couldn't see it based on the kinds of scales we were using and the kinds of tasks we had.

"The second thing," he says, "could be -- and I think this may hold some water -- that for many fans, and especially here at Indiana, any win is expected and any loss is devastating. In that situation a win is good and what you expect but you don't get as up for it. In fact, people can be pretty critical even of wins. 'You should have won by more' or 'We didn't really play that well but we won the game.' The losses are uniformly all bad regardless of how badly you lose."

The most avid followers of a team really startled Hirt. They watched every game to the point where it was a major part of their lives. It was an obsession to the point where they would arrange their schedule around a game.

"I have no reason to believe that the results that we found with basketball are any different than football," Hirt says."I am not sure that this helps necessarily explain why people watch the stuff. Why would they want to put themselves through that?"

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 7. There's No Need to Fear, Underdog is Here

by Bob Andelman

"The team I'm rooting for becomes an extension of me. It is me. When there's an undeserved penalty, it's almost as if it's against me. It makes me mad, like almost missing a red light when you're in a hurry."

Jim Melvin
Newspaper editor
St. Petersburg, Florida

Meet Jim Melvin. He's a health and fitness writer and copy editor for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Jim's got a good job, two daughters he loves and a standard poodle named Bogie. Guys like to hang out with Jim because he's bright, witty and interested in manly things like sports and checking out beautiful women.

Maybe you know somebody like him.

When it comes to football, though, few men are as emotionally attached to their team as Jim is to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Bucs don't know him from any other fan, but to him, they're family. If the team lost all its fans, coach Sam Wyche could still count on Jim to buy him a beer.

"I've always had this theory that you become more attached to a losing team than a winning team," Jim says. "I get much angrier when the Bucs lose than I get happy when they win. If the Bucs were to go 12-4 and win the Super Bowl, I'd go through the roof. Would a 49ers fan feel the same way? They're P.O.'d if the 49ers don't make the playoffs. Me, I'd be happy with 8-8.

"At the height of my attraction to the Bucs, when I sit down at 1 for a game to start, I'm an emotional wreck. My heart races, my hands sweat. I can't eat. I try to eat a brunch before the game. Because there is no way, at 1 p.m., I can sit down and eat. I'm way too happy, excited, positive.

"Then," he says, "you know what happens.

"Typically, 10 minutes into a Bucs game, more bad things have happened to us than in one entire game for any other team. I've been anticipating three hours of pure pleasure and now, after 10 minutes, I'm angry. Ten minutes into the game, anyone around me would no longer want to be around me. I develop a different personality. You wouldn't want to ask me a favor, you wouldn't want to discuss a pleasant thing. And if you don't like profanity, you wouldn't want to be around me."

Jim's first exposure to football came during the NFL's 1966 championship game. It was fourth and 1, frozen conditions. Bart Starr scored on a quarterback sneak.

"I was so excited, jumping around. That's when I got the bug." The Green Bay Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys, 34-21.

Before he became enamored with the Bucs -- and before Tampa Bay ever bowed its head and admitted possession of the Bucs -- Jim was a fan of the Atlanta Braves. Hank Aaron was the toast of the team in those days, not that he had much competition for attention. "He was great; they were terrible," Jim recalls. "That's when I first felt angry, that I was being personally wronged by a team." 

He also recalls crying at a high school basketball game when his team won on a last-second shot.

Geography rules Jim's allegiances. The closer the team is, the more he like them. Jim's choices tend to reflect the sports landscape of the Southeastern United States in the '60s, when he was a teenager: the Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Hawks and Florida State University. The Bucs came along in 1976.

Sure, he loves football. He's fascinated by the offensive and defensive strategies, the power and speed of the players. But it goes beyond that, into an emotional realm, see-sawing between heated anger and brief moments of pleasure.

"I don't like to lose," he says. "Any time that my team loses, I feel there was something more than the team's play. Officials, bad luck or the weather turned against them. But you have to look at this in the context of the team I root for. Probably the worst team in professional football, an unbelievable string of losing seasons. Every Sunday, I'm let down. But I feel like I've invested so much energy in them, it's too late to back down now.

"I think of it in terms of waiting in a real long line. You've waited in it two hours, maybe you're going to wait another hour, but by God you're not going to get out of it now. And you have a short memory. You remember the three or four good plays and forget the bad ones. By the following Sunday, you're ready to go again. And occasionally," he says, "there's a win in there."

Very occasionally.

When the Bucs are reduced to losers by halftime, Jim turns the television off and tries to find something else to occupy his mind. But he'll turn it on again later for a few seconds to make sure there wasn't a miraculous rally. When you consider that the Bucs are one of the losingest teams in NFL history, those early blow-outs actually save Jim hours of heartache.

Of course, the more typical game puts his beloved franchise ahead or within two or three points going into the last seconds of the fourth quarter. Then, having suckered Jim into believing this time it's really going to happen, they lose. Miserably. Painfully. Like being used for tackling practice by the Monsters of the Midway.

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"If it goes down to the wire and they lose, I'll be depressed about it until mid-Tuesday," Jim says. Lots of opposing players have vanquished Bucs hopes over the years, but Jim recalls one especially painful Sunday when Detroit Lions quarterback Rodney Peete stepped up as designated spoiler.

"I dangled my feet in the shallow end of the pool, facing the deep end. I didn't move for half an hour."

That's Jim's post-game show. During the Buc games -- which he watches alone because no friends or family members can endure his misery and tantrums -- Jim transforms.

He's never physically attacked anyone. But objects have potential. The Soloflex is supposed to be indestructible. Jim says it's not. He got so angry during one game because of a Bucs touchdown being called back by a holding penalty that he broke the exercise unit's bench by pounding on it with his fists. Another time he wrecked a coffee table. He hit it so hard that the metal frame bent. "I get so angry that I almost take on super-human strength," he says.

"When things go well, I run around the house, dancing, jumping. Once I somersaulted into the pool, only to be cursing 10 minutes later because the other team ran a kickoff in for a touchdown.

"My (ex-wife) did not like it. She thought it was stupid, silly. It scared the kids, the animals. And she was right. I would waste three hours on a Sunday afternoon for something that would make me mad. But your love of a sports team goes beyond your ability to control that. It's very intense. She'd leave the house. She'd go by herself and I'd have the kids. I would get real angry and when I'd come out of my rage, they would be in a corner standing behind a chair. They weren't scared of me, they thought it was funny. And if something good happened, they'd scream and leap around with me. Beth Ann even made up a board game: 'Act like a dog . . . Act like a cat . . . Act like dad when he gets mad at football games.' "

* * *

Dr. William J. Beausay, a Columbus, Ohio, psychologist and founder of the Academy of Sport Psychology International, understands the Jim Melvins of the world.

"I'm a clinical psychologist," Beausay says, "and I have often said that people, rather than going to a psychologist and paying $90 to $100 an hour, would find it so much cheaper to buy a football ticket for $10 to $15, get fabulous psychotherapy in two and a half hours and solve all their problems if their team wins. It's better than going to see a psychologist."

On the other hand, if their team loses and they really strongly identify with it -- and fanatics do project themselves onto their teams -- then they get double trouble. But they only have to wait three or four days until the prospect of recovering or righting a wrong begins to present itself. "It's worth all the time that you have to wait and the money you have to spend," Beausay says.

Guys like Jim Melvin lack other sources of positive reinforcement in their lives, according to the experts. Football provides a temporary reinforcement -- a sense of security and a sense of meaningfulness.

Men, because they are competitive, have to test themselves to see if we are, "acceptable," "very good" or "Number One." That's what matters to men; that's the nature of men. Women don't have to do this. "If you put a bunch of little girls together in a sandbox," Beausay says, "they'll start to work and function together. You put little boys together and soon they are throwing sand at each other. It starts very early on."

Men have to test themselves to find out if they are good enough or just adequate. Psychologists call that the male ego. They are just testing their own identity. "Am I lovable?" "Am I acceptable?"

We project ourselves into their football team and that test is then performed by proxy. If a man's team wins that means he is No. 1. For one small moment he is a Master of the Universe and it was worth that $25 admission price or three hours invested in front of a television. He has met the need to test himself through his team. If his team wins, the guy will mouth off all week long about how tough "we" were, how great "we" were. "Did you see that play?" A man needs to be heard and known. He is going to let everybody know the Seahawks are his team.

"The general spectator is a middle class to lower middle class individual," says Dr. John M. Silva, a professor of sport psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Given the socialization of that class of individuals, where they feel that they often have to succeed against difficult odds, it is a pretty natural social phenomenon that they are going to identify with an underdog team and hope that underdog team can succeed in spite of the odds. The other team is stacked and they have all the ability. They have the high-paid players; their management bought the best team possible. I think it is a very natural thing to make analogies between the fan's everyday life and the situations and obstacles that they have to overcome being in the particular social strata that they are in and what is being symbolized on the TV screen for them."

You don't have to root for a loser to feel lost and adrift, though.

The Denver Broncos and Buffalo Bills enjoy winning records year in and year out. They regularly appear in post-season play, carrying ecstatic fans all the way to the Super Bowl three times apiece by 1993 -- for a combined record of six losses, no wins. The Bills pulled that stunt three years in a row.

Despite going to many NFL championships, many fans of both teams feel like losers.

"There was a big debate," Broncos fan Jeff Spear says. "Do you want them to go to the Super Bowl again, knowing that they are going to lose? Do you want to see this again? You know what is going to happen. You know the pain associated with getting so close and just getting killed. It's traumatic because you go from such a high to such a low. There is no middle ground.

"Before the Broncos played the 49ers (Super Bowl XXIV, 1990) I knew they were going to get crushed, but I was still excited that they were there. You can always think something great is going to happen and wow, maybe this time it's going to be different, but the odds are against you. It's part of the struggle that attracts you to that team and the game. Just maybe, one time, a miracle will happen and they'll do it. But there is a voice in the back of your head saying, 'Look out.' "

Spear, a comedy writer for Tonight Show with Jay Leno, lived in the Denver area for a dozen years until leaving in 1989. He is still a Broncos fan, although he thinks of himself as rooting for the underdog.

"There is a huge stigma attached to the team," Spear says. "I see myself following the Broncos as much as I can for as long as I can. I have always felt that when and if they ever do win the Super Bowl I might go on to something else. It's something that they obviously need to accomplish. It's the only thing left. Maybe I'll give them one more shot. Lose it once more. I'll stick with them until they win it all."

* * *

It's one thing to be so involved in sports but quite another to be so attached to a loser. Is there something seriously lacking in the lives of such men?

"It gets harder to explain how you would get attached to a loser," says Dr. Edward R. Hirt, an Indiana University social psychologist.

A lot of people in Hirt's part of the country bring up Cubs fans as a counter-example. The Cubs break hearts every year. It seems like they will win. In August, they may be in first place, but they will inevitably choke. Talk about summer traditions! Yet their fans are incredibly loyal and stick with them through all that. In some ways, they pride themselves as being real fans because they stick by the team. They are true fans.

Thick-and-thin fans develop a charming elitism by sticking to teams like bubblegum on the bottom of $100 running shoes. They scoff at the people who come out of the woodwork only when the team wins. Career fans waggle a cynical finger and snub their noses at late arrivals who rejoice in the team's Cinderella comebacks. Where were you when . . . ? The diehards feel that only they have the right to enjoy the long-awaited successes, whereas these other people just jumped on the bandwagon.

"It would be real interesting for me to understand how these people cope," Hirt says. "I can't imagine that they sit there and just let themselves be miserable. I'm sure they have to funnel their energies toward more constructive things. Maybe people do that by playing the armchair coach and quarterback, talking about what their team needs to do. They call the sports talk shows or talk to their buddies and friends about what the team needs to do and how to turn it around."

Naturally, there are men who just happen to gravitate to underdogs. Nobody questions their psychological underpinnings or wonders if their elevator goes all the way to the top. They pick long shots because it's more rewarding if they pull out a miracle and win it all. What a thrill to be one of the few people who saw it coming.

They set themselves up as being unique. We all like the underdog to come through. Think of the NCAA. People just love the Cinderella teams coming out of nowhere and knocking off one of the big guys in the Final Four. There is something indescribably delicious about seeing the underdog come through.

* * *

Back to Jim Melvin. He and John Cimasko could be brothers. As obsessed as Melvin is with the Bucs, Cimasko is only a notch away in his total devotion to the Indianapolis Colts.

"I get pretty wound up," Cimasko says. "I don't watch the away games with anybody. My wife doesn't let anybody come over. If the Colts are having a real bad day, my wife will tell the kids (Jack and Jill -- really) to go downstairs. I don't sit. My legs are flying, my arms are flying. Or, if it's third and inches, I'm on my knees in front of the TV. I don't throw anything at the TV that might break it. My wife laughs. It'll be the first few minutes, the other team's first possession, and I'll say, 'It's the most important play of the game!'"

Cimasko's father-in-law is a quiet and reserved man, so Cimasko usually tones down around him. Ten minutes into a game, he once said to John, "You live and die on every play, don't you?" Later in the same game, the Colts scored a touchdown and Cimasko leaped out of his chair and nearly hit his head on the ceiling. His father-in-law's eyes popped out.

"My feeling is, anybody can root for a good team," Cimasko says. "Back in '86 and '90, New York Giants fans came out of the woodwork. I think it's more impressive if you root for a team that stinks. When the Colts were 0 and 13 people used to call me up and say, 'Are you going to hang yourself?' If you're loyal, it has to be whether they're good or bad. When they win, maybe I had something to do with it when I stirred the crowd up on third down. Who knows? My loyalty is unconditional. I'll tell you what, one win makes up for 20 losses. As long as they try 100 percent, I'm behind them 100 percent."

He makes a point of seeing the Colts off at the airport when they leave for away games and welcomes them back on their return. "There have been times when they come home from a loss and I'll be the only one there. It'll be a Sunday night in December, snowing, I'm on the way to the airport and I feel like the last, lonely Colts fan."

Cimasko was 10 years old in 1965 when the bug bit him. That was the year the Colts lost a playoff game 13-10 in overtime. He wrote Johnny Unitas a letter wishing him luck. It was the first time he uttered those infamous words: "Wait till next year!"

"To me, football is more than a game and the Colts are more than a football team," Cimasko says. "I've lost interest in so many things growing up and changed my opinions on so many things. But down at the Hoosierdome, I'm 10 years old. There's nothing like seeing a horseshoe on the side of a helmet. I get so excited."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 9. Every Picture Tells a Story

by Bob Andelman

"What's the first thing you think of somebody who doesn't follow football? Someone you don't have a lot in common with. Especially in the South, where it's not a sport, it's religion."

Barry Dreayer
Computer software salesman/consultant
Atlanta

God bless football, for without it, men might have nothing to talk about.

Given the feeblest of openings, we'll wax rhapsodic about last night's game, last year's Super Bowl or a life-changing play vaguely recalled from childhood. And if we ever played the game, stand by for a moment-by-moment recreation of how we won a crucial high school game against a sworn blood enemy.

We can talk players, coaches, trainers, owners, contracts, incentive clauses and free agency. There's the annual college draft, an endless vein of player, team, conference and league stats. Some guys can even tell you the best routes to far-away stadiums.

Not all men love football as voraciously as these superfans. The vast majority of us know enough to be conversational, understanding the mechanics and keeping up with the basics in the sports pages. Gotta take the family jalopy in for a tune-up? Check the weekend scores so you can make conversation with the mechanic. Live in a college town? You'll become a football fan through a form of mass psychosis/osmosis.

"It's amazing how much it carries over," Volney Meece says. "In Oklahoma, for instance, a Saturday night game might last three hours but it's talked about until the next Saturday game one way or the other, win or lose. I used to work on an afternoon paper. You'd be surprised how many secretaries would call in early Monday morning to get the scores by quarters for all the company pots. It's big."

You can't go anywhere in the United States on a Monday or Sunday from August through the Super Bowl in January without talking about a game or hearing people talking about it.

In many college and NFL football cities, very little business is transacted on Monday mornings until employees get the football talk out of the way. And even then, it's a convenient conversational topic and icebreaker on the phone all day.

Women do lunch and what do men do? They play football. And they talk football. Society permits it.

"It's great for relatives," says Barry Dreayer, a computer software and voice mail salesman/consultant in Atlanta. Dreayer used to teach a course for novices called "TeachMeSports." "I had lost touch with a cousin of mine. One day I was on a national sports talk radio show. He heard me in another state. The next day, he called. To this day, we keep in touch because of this shared passion."

You get a friend or two over, you're pulling for your team, talking about football, work, the wife, whatever. It's a release from the pressure of the week. "I used to have a tense job," retired tool company executive Ralph Weisbeck says. "Football is still a release for me."

If two guys, total strangers, are stuck with each other's company for whatever reasons, business or pleasure, they can count on football to break the ice. Or drive a wedge between them.

"Is that a Florida Gator pin on your lapel?"

"Yup! You a Gator, too?"

"Nope, Seminole, you asshole. You guys cheat!"

"Screw you, ya Criminole!"

See how easy it is?

Sports is easily the No. 1 topic of conversation for young men, rivaled and interrupted only when one guy pokes the other in the ribs and says, "Ey, check her out."

"And if you happen to have the same allegiance," Broncos fan Jeff Spear says, "or if you happen to just be a fan of the game, you can watch just for the sake of enjoying the sport and you can find someone to talk to on that level. You can find fans on all kinds of levels and it's something that you could easily relate to."

Football is just transparent enough so that anyone can know something about it. Every fan is a coach.

Some people have observed that women tend to communicate more freely over a vast range of topics, including emotions. Men tend to be more limited in their communication. Sports, particularly football, gives us something to discuss.

"One of the reasons men love to watch football," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says, "is because the next morning, on the job, they can talk about the game. It gives a man an opportunity to have something more to communicate about with his peers -- other men. They can communicate with a limited degree of intimacy and a limited amount of emotional connection, which I think for many men is the preferred state of relating."

* * *

A lot of us get married and wake up one day to find that we've somehow become cut off from all our male friends. Or, as our wives refer to them, "Those idiots." Priorities change, relationships fade, wives steer husbands away from single guys they see as bad influences . . . But sports bring us back together.

"Male bonding" is a cliche, but everyone understands what it means. It's one of the few ways we can still hang out in an acceptable way, outside the shackles of maturity and responsibility.

"It's a good feeling to be able to do that with the guys," Teitelbaum says. "I also think of bonding as a way for many men to get away from the world of adult responsibilities. It's kind of escaping into a less responsible mode -- which we need to do. If you have the responsibilities that most people have as they move into their late 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, you have a need to get away. Watching football presents an opportunity to escape into a less responsible mode and to recapture the boyhood exuberance and enthusiasm of rooting for your home team with the other guys."

Teitelbaum knows from personal experience the release of being able to talk football with another guy -- his son.

"You can get into what is going on in different levels of the game than you probably could with your wife," he says. "When I go to the games with my grown son, it is a very different experience than when I take my wife. If I take my wife it's fun but I have to explain so much more of what is going on. My son will see something that I don't see, or I'll see something that he doesn't see. We know the gist of what is going on much beyond the surface of the play. There is something that men feel they get in sharing football together with other men which is above and beyond what they usually feel in sharing it with their women."

"Doing things with guys is very important to me," psychologist Rick Weinberg says. "I spend most of my life around a woman -- my wife -- and so I think football is a great way for men to relate to one another around a game with beer, popcorn and chips."

* * *

No doubt, there are men who hate or don't understand football. There's nothing unmanly about them. Not much, anyhow. But more than likely they keep their disdain private, avoiding the game whenever possible, putting on an enduring poker face when socially required to watch or talk pigskin.

"If you were at Harvard," Dr. John M. Silva says, "I don't think there would be too much pressure to follow Harvard basketball. If you did, fine. If you didn't, no big deal. But if you are at Notre Dame or North Carolina and you weren't following basketball, you would be abnormal. I think a lot of it has to do with the norms that exist in the environment that you are in. When I was a kid growing up just outside Boston, I followed the Celtics. You could never get away with wearing a Knicks or a '76ers shirt. You'd be lynched. I am sure the same thing operated in New York City, particularly when there were fewer teams and the rivalries were greater. If some kid walked into the Bronx with a Celtics shirt on, I don't think the kid would have gotten out of there alive. A lot of it has to do with the group that you are involved with and what the norms of that group are. At some schools I don't think athletics are that important. You can go to a Yale football game -- the Yale Bowl holds 80,000 people -- and you are lucky if they have 20,000 people in there."

Peer pressure forces some men -- and women -- to learn enough about the game to get by. Barry Dreayer, the Atlanta salesman, sensing an opportunity to make a few convert and a few bucks, offered a class for several years called "TeachMeSports." It gained local and national media coverage, but when the TV cameras came to class, embarrassed men refused to be photographed.

"It's a macho thing," Dreayer says. "It's the most non-threatening way to make small talk, the ideal icebreaker for doing business. And I think it helps solidify relationships."

* * *

Football provides many of us with a conversational confidence, especially young men. Conversational competence depends on knowing what's going on, and many conversations in an office or on a job site or in social situations pivot around sports. It starts with discussion of a particular team or a league or a player. If you can't join in and have something to say, you're left out. Being in the know about league leaders, hot streaks, slumps and playoff prospects is valuable for interpersonal relationships. It's not rocket science, but it does have value.

Football has status; it's always in vogue to be a football fan. Some people will claim to be fans when, in their hearts, they're not. But they want to be included in Monday Night Football gatherings and conversations. They want to play a part in whatever the crowd is into. Football today, rocket science tomorrow.

"When you go back to work on Monday," Dan Jiggetts says, "you want to have seen everything that everybody else saw. The reason people watch the highlights shows is they don't want to miss a thing."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!