Chapter 1. What's Love Got to Do With It?

by Bob Andelman

"We were in Chicago for a wedding in 1984 and just happened to be booked at the same hotel that the Chicago Bears were staying at. We rode up in the elevator with four or five of the Bears. Walter Payton was particularly outgoing and he talked to my daughter, who was about 2, and asked if he could hold her. He threw her up in the air and caught her and that was a real magic moment for me. While I'm sure Walter Payton wouldn't remember that 10 minutes after it happened, it certainly was a defining moment for me. I'll never forget it. From that moment forward whenever Walter Payton had a great day I was able to feel like he was a good friend of mine."

Dr. Rick Weinberg
Clinical psychologist
University of South Florida, Tampa

Men love a lot of things: Mom. America. Big dogs. Hardware stores.

And football.

Football puts the bite on us for four quarters and tosses us around like a terrier taunting a live catch. We're in its teeth, up in the air, on our backs. We're being shaken, not stirred. It's the ride of our lives and we haven't even left the living room couch.

Somehow, we're both Troy Aikman going back to throw the pigskin and Emmitt Smith leaping high on the 2-yard-line to catch the ball and landing in the end zone. We're doing the dance, slapping high- and low-fives.

Sometimes we're on the sidelines, playing coach, barking plays to the defense. Don't get caught deep! Look for the sneak! Don't let 'em get outside!

If a guy can't be on the field playing or coaching football, the second-best thing is to be in the stands or on the couch, watching. Our egos are so tied to sports that if we can't be playing, we want to watch. (We're like that when it comes to sex, too, if you hadn't noticed.)

Any bored and angry woman who's ever glared in futility at a man glued to a divisional playoff game knows this. Just listen to what we say: "Yes! Yes!! YES!!!" or "Aw, SHIT! GODDAMNMOTHERFRIGGIN-SONUVABITCH!DAMNITALLTOHELLICAN'TBELIEVEIT!" Or watch our body language, the way our hands instinctively reach out to snag a pass or scoop up a fumble, the way we pull at an imaginary helmet to signal a face mask violation.

We don't just watch football. We live it.

We become a part of the action, spending three hours every Sunday afternoon and Monday night on a rocket ride with the stars.

There is some envy at work here, too, because we say to each other or ourselves, "Oh, God, would I love to do that!" Or, "I could play that position as well as that guy!"

In football, we see people beat and tackled. For some of us, aggression is part of it. But it's really a matter of personal glory. We'd desperately like to do the end zone shuffle after a touchdown.

Take Roger Brummett, for example. He's vice president of marketing for a human resources management firm in Carmel, Indiana. He played ball in high school, tried out in college as a walk-on and blew out his knee. A good stake in his devotion to the Indianapolis Colts stems from his dreams of what could have been.

"It's a game that if I could have, I would have played all my life," Brummett says. "I mean, why do even bad golfers play every weekend? There's something that stirs their competitive nature. Watching those games on Sundays is an association of a dream that lets us reach out and touch a venue we would have liked to have participated in."

Psychologists talk about it in terms of transference. Players look in the stands and see fans with fingers up in the air, saying, "We're No. 1! We're No. 1!"

"There is a phrase that sometimes is used -- 'The whistle never blew'," says Dr. Robert L. Arnstein, retired chief psychiatrist of Yale University Health Services. "The implication is that the whistle never blew in a player's final game and he has gone through life playing the game over and over again. Supposedly one of the Yale football coaches once said that, 'You are going out to play Harvard in 10 minutes and never again will you ever do anything so important in your life'."

We see football differently than other sports. Football portrays us the way we are. Aggressive, action-oriented, manipulative. Baseball, on the other hand, portrays the way we think we once were or that we would like to be. Thoughtful, deliberate, patient. Boring.

"The question is not really why people like football," says Dr. Allen L. Sack, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the sports management program at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. "It is, why are men more involved in it? Men and women are involved in a wide variety of other activities but here is one that is primarily male. It is the biggest sport in the U.S. that is for men only -- little boys only. When those little boys grow up they are a built-in market for professional football.

"In terms of participation," he says, "it is little boys that are more likely to be involved or to think about football than little girls. I think that men in their 40s and mid-life can look back and remember what it was like for them to be involved in the game. They can appreciate some of the nuances that other people -- including most women -- may not."

All men come to their football obsession differently. There are at least 20 reasons spelled out in the following pages, connecting our love of the game to everything from the influence of our fathers (Chapter 3: "Cat's in the Cradle") and the need for male bonding (Chapter 9: "Every Picture Tells a Story") to military training (Chapter 8: "Achtung, Baby") and beer commercials (Chapter 20: "Bud Bowling for Dollars").

Some of us prefer the thrill of seeing the game in person (Chapter 17: "Two Tickets to Paradise"), while others content themselves with a TV, a well-stocked refrigerator and the comfort of their own home (Chapter 18: "57 Channels").

Men drive women away from football by our symbiotic link to the sport. We don't want to explain the sport, even to those females who might be actually learn it. It's the last thing on this chauvinistic planet that's still exclusively ours, damn it, ours! Women can't play it and we're not going to encourage you to start. (Chapter 21: "She's No Lady, She's My Wife.")

Not that we don't love the women in our lives. We certainly do. But sometimes a man wants to get his piece of the action in a different way. Football provides a multitude of means: hero worship (Chapter 5: "A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich"), violence (Chapter 11: "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"), skill (Chapter 12: "Fly Like An Eagle"), statistics (Chapter 14: "Odds 'n Sods"), gambling (Chapter 15: "You Better, You Bet"), escapism (Chapter 20: "The Man Who Fell to Earth").

But above all else, football is about the dreams and aspirations of boys (Chapter 2: "Boy's Life"), the way our jaws go slack in awe of spectacular feats of physical daring and courage, the way we gape in wide-eyed wonderment at seeing the best athletes strap on the pads and kick some ass.

That's why we love football.

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 2. Boy's Life

by Bob Andelman

 "When I was a young kid, the reason I had favorite teams -- the Cowboys, Raiders and 49ers -- was that I liked their colors or their helmet logo."

Kenton Blagbrough
Textbook buyer
Boston University

American boys of 7 or 8 find football everywhere they turn. Dad studies the game on TV every weekend. He shushes Mom so he can hear the scores and watch highlights on the late news. Or he's trying to coax a son into playing catch in the yard.

"Put your fingers across the laces. That's the way Jim Kelly throws those long spirals. Don't worry -- your hands will get bigger! You're going to be a quarterback when you get to high school, I just know it. Won't that be great?"

Maybe the family piles in the car to see an older brother play the game for a high school or college team. Mom and Dad wear atrociously matched school colors with hats that feature the team mascot. Young boys can't see anything but ants running back and forth, knocking each other down, but even that's hypnotic.

Away from the house, teenagers play the game in the electric utility's right-of-way field under the crackle of damp power lines. The kids scream at each other. They curse and laugh. Sometimes it looks like fun. Sometimes it looks like a fight will break out.

If the boy watches long enough or often enough, he'll be invited to play when somebody goes home or gets injured. If he's lucky, one of the older kids will take him under wing and tell him exactly what to do, not having time to explain all the things he shouldn't do. For reasons of size alone, he'll get knocked on his ass a few times, roughed up. If he paid close attention from the sidelines, he'll know not to cry when he's hurt, no matter how badly. That's the first rite of passage. Even if the tears well up, he'll need to return to the huddle. If he breaks down, his place in the neighborhood picking order will be set for the next decade.

That's one of the earliest reasons why we love football. It's part of who we are as kids, who we want to be as adults.

* * *

In North America, men are taught early on to watch and play football. It's easy to relate to the guys on the field because so many of us have played the game.

Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, a University of Maryland sport psychologist and co-author (with Brad Hatfield) of Psychology of Sports: A Social Psychological Approach, says some men may even experience a "pleasurable kinesthetic stimulation" as spectators.

A what?

"A pleasurable kinesthetic stimulation," he says. "It has to do with movement. If you perform certain movements, that is kinesthetic stimulation. The point is that men (who) know the game well have this ability to relate to the performers and as a result of when they are spectating they are likely to have this pleasurable kinesthetic stimulation."

Would this be part of the reason that most women do not share men's devotion to football?

"It is definitely part of it," Iso-Ahola says. "Fewer females obviously play this game when they are little girls and that is one factor that explains why men have more interest. For example, men who hunt and fish frequently did the same thing when they were very young. It is a carry-over effect."

Studies have shown that roughly 50 percent of the leisure activities we do as adults go back to those we learned in our early years. The other half is learned when we become adults. In that light it's easier to understand why men would be so much more into football. We play early on and never stop watching.

Men watch sports because of the identification process that takes place early in our development. Dr. John M. Silva specializes in performance enhancement and aggression. He says sports are usually the first social institution that young males -- and, more increasingly, young females -- come into contact with in which they are able to get the kind of attention that is usually reserved for adults.

"There really aren't very many other social institutions where a 7- to 10-year-old can get publicity in a local newspaper," Silva says. "They get their name mentioned on a local radio station and develop a degree of status amongst their peers, their parents, their teachers and significant others."

Early on in many a boy's life, sport becomes his primary socializer and it provides him with an anchor, a strong image with which he can identity. There is no other institution, perhaps outside religion, to provide that anchor for such a young child. Other social institutions don't have the same kind of impact that sports and religion do.

"I think that's why sometimes sport is compared to religion," Silva says. "They are both very powerful socializers and they both create very strong identities in people who affiliate with them."

A lot of youngsters succeed at a lower level of sports. It creates expectations and they tend to aspire to the higher levels of competition -- high school, collegiate and professional.

The attrition rate is not bad in the first couple of years of sport participation. It's not until the age of 11 or 12 that coaches and parents see a lot of kids dropping out. They get a good four or five years of socialization in sports and start aspiring to a higher level. They don't know whether they could even play in high school at that point but they see other people playing in high school and college and professional sports and they tend to start modeling themselves after these people. They develop a keen interest in what they do, what types of moves they have and how they play the game. An identification bond and an information-seeking takes place.

Another rite of passage comes as the levels of play become more intensely competitive. The games are still fun, but they require hard work and long hours, too. A teen realizes, "Geez, I'd like to continue playing football but I've gone from starting on my Midget team to 29th man on the junior varsity team." Some teams carry everyone who wants to play; others introduce kids to the survival of the fittest. Young men see reality gaining on them from behind in the form of bench splinters. They're not going to play on the high school varsity team, be the team captain, get a football scholarship or write a humble speech to accept the Heisman Trophy at the Downtown Athletic Club.

"I think if the disengagement is somewhat gradual and the child sees it coming, often times they will try to move into another activity," Silva says. "But they may develop an even stronger bond to the sport that they were rejected from."

Football is a club where men are always welcome.

Retired Oklahoma sportswriter Volney Meece grew up surrounded by football. He lived in a small town in northern Oklahoma and it was the big sport there. "Oklahoma, like Texas, is very into high school sports," Meece says. "Football became the thing to do and to participate in if you could. I doubt if it had anything to do with impressing women or girls. It was just a manly sport."

One of the real emotional hooks of football is that it was one way males established relationships, sometimes the main way. This is particularly true of relationships between fathers and sons.

"Watching sports, going to a game, is a way for some men to recreate some of the feelings they had as a child, going to a game or watching a game on TV with their father," says Dr. Michael Messner, a sociologist at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and author of Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Beacon Press). "For some males, doing something related to sports was the one arena in which they felt some closeness with their father consistently. That creates an emotional basis throughout the rest of their lives for some sort of connection with sports. It also creates a motivation to use sports to connect with other males, be it their own son or their male friends."

As boys and teens, males discover it is gratifying to achieve and master football skills and play the game. It is a fun game to play. Then, when they get to be older, whether they consciously recall it or not, that memory is there. You see some evidence of that when men watch a game as adults. They tend to watch the player in a position that they played as a youth. There's a little more focus, some sense of vicarious participation. They feel comfortable in being more critical of that position because they understand its mechanics. There is also some degree of vicarious re-enacting of the childhood experience of playing the game.

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at San Jose State University, says, "I think that very high on the list of reasons men watch football is to recapture and relive their early adolescent years and, through their identification and emotional participation, vicariously live out again this period of their life. For most of the men who have played football or been athletic, these sorts of vicarious satisfactions have very, very positive reward/effects."

University of Florida graduate/attorney Eric Berger and Dr. Rick Weinberg, a University of Michigan grad/clinical psychologist, link their college and college football memories very closely.

"Being at Florida was something that got in your blood," Berger says. "You can't believe, even at 34, the sense of closeness I have with a university that I haven't been to in 13 years."

"I still feel very much a part of the University of Michigan," Weinberg says. "When Michigan football games are on it helps me feel vestiges of my undergraduate days when a bunch of us would all go out and watch the games at Michigan Stadium. Watching the games again is an emotional bridge across to those old days again. It brings a lot of pleasure. There were fine friends and fine moments. A number of us will still talk to each other by phone before certain games. I had a buddy who went to another university that has a real rivalry with Michigan, so whenever Michigan plays Ohio State, he and I will call and exchange our loving insults."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 3. Cat's in the Cradle

by Bob Andelman

"I'm going to keep an open mind. I'm not going to force my sons to be Gators or Dolphins fans. But I expect they'll pick it up. I'm not going to pick their schools for them at 5 and 3 years old. I want them to go to Yale and Harvard. Unless they can play. Then I definitely want them to go to Florida."

Harold Hyman
Property manager
Tamarac, Florida

Football became an American family tradition the morning after the first quarterback tossed the first touchdown pass and a sportswriter published the play-by-play.

Few games move as aggressively from father to son and brother to brother. Seeing his son score a touchdown for the first time in a Pop Warner League game is a much more satisfying rite of passage to most fathers than potty training. (And football uniforms are entirely more manly to clean than diapers.)

Some men live their own football dreams vicariously through strangers on their favorite college or pro team. And some dads are pretty overt about proselytizing to their sons about their own football careers, usually to the point of exaggeration (and leaving out the downside such as injuries), pushing them biceps-first into football. Not a one wouldn't wish their own flesh and blood to have the agility of Jerry Rice, the strength of Reggie White or the precision of Warren Moon.

If that fails, dads will settle for a knowledgeable companion to share the game watching experience.

"My dad, when he was 10, was at the first Packers game ever played," Green Bay banker Jerry Pigeon says proudly. "You look up to your parents. He would go to the games and we wanted to go, too. My brother and I, growing up in the '60s, the Lombardi era, were brainwashed. We grew up supporting the team. Now my brother has one room in his house that's all dedicated to the Packers. He's got files or videos of every game, newspapers from every city the Packers played in. He's into it."

Unlike the Pigeon brothers, a lot of men might not know why they like football. They may reason that Dad played or older brothers played or they saw it on TV. But that is not a one-to-one relationship; not everybody's father or older brother played football. It is not an automatic thing. Therefore, football must resonate good feelings.

Sometimes it's inexplicable because it's on an unconscious level. That starts because kids are very sensitive to their parents' wishes. Dad's subtle interest in things like that, they always pick up. You might call it "psychological genetics." It sets the stage for later on, when men continue to both play the game or vicariously enjoy it. It continues to be an avenue of discharge for the aggressive drive.

There is a fairly strong body of literature in the sport sociology field that indicates that parents are incredibly significant in socializing children into particular sports. Most kids play Pee Wee football because their dads bring them down and sign them up. It's not often that a 6-year-old kid says, "Dad, I want to go to fencing school," or, "Dad, I would like to play lacrosse" -- unless dear old dad fenced or played lacrosse. Parents expose their children to different activities that they either participated in or they have an interest in. Experts says it's usually not until late adolescence when a person starts to make these selections for himself.

"This is a funny example," says Dr. Mark Unterberg, a psychiatrist and executive medical director for Green Oaks Medical City in Dallas. Unterberg is also a consultant to several NFL and NBA teams. "I played football in high school and I played one year in college. Linebacker. I got injured and after that I quit. I wanted to go to medical school and I wasn't getting bigger like the pros. As much as I can tell, I'm not one of these people who talk a lot about their football careers. Partly because I played varsity and I started and all that but I wasn't an all-conference or one of these outstanding players. There was nothing really to talk about, if you want to know the truth. As a matter of fact, I'm not even a fan. I've never been a fan. If I went to one football game a season it would be because somebody had tickets and wanted me to go. I'm not a TV watcher. If a game came on I would watch it for a little bit. My father used to watch it but I would be bored.

"Well," Unterberg says, "I have two sons and they both decided they wanted to play football. But the interesting thing is they both ended up playing linebacker -- the position I played. They actually did much better. Both made all-conference. What really caught my attention was that I talked even less about baseball because I stopped playing baseball when I was in the ninth grade. I switched to tennis. Varsity tennis and football were my two sports. Low and behold, both of my sons play catcher. Coincidence? I'm not sure on what level. Many times it just seems that kind of thing goes on."

• Ralph Weisbeck used to take his kids to Bills game when Jack Kemp was quarterback and Lou Saban was coach. He remembers those days fondly, screaming and yelling side-by-side, pulling for the Bills with his offspring. Time proved the best investment he ever made.

"My kids are all gone now but they call me up after a game," the retired tool company executive says. "They know I'm watching."

• Dr. Rick Weinberg, a clinical psychologist at the Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida in Tampa, went to Chicago Bears games with his father. "He taught me the ins and outs of why you pass on third down," Weinberg recalls. "He really enhanced my appreciation of the game. We would sit all day, Saturdays and Sundays, and get popcorn and Cokes and we'd watch together, the way that a father and son can do things and relate to one another in a very loving, father/son kind of way around sports. That was very special to me and it is the sort of thing that I want to try to duplicate with my own son. It is important to me."

Weinberg took his own son to a game for the first time in 1991, when the boy turned 6. He was more interested in the cotton candy man and the Coke vendors than he was in the game. The next year he paid more attention to the game, responding when the crowds cheered and when a player spiked the ball. The color and pageantry lent itself even to a 7-year-old's vantage point. Dad contributed to his son's seduction by buying him a University of Michigan (Weinberg's alma mater) sweatshirt, Tampa Bay Bucs hat and shirt.

An educated, intelligent man, Weinberg tries to balance the love of sports he seeks to share with his boy against the rampant aggression and violence found in games like football.

"But I have to be honest," he says. "The hitting and the hurting -- I don't pay much attention to that until there is an injury. There is such enjoyment watching the successes of your team and cheering them on that you kind of forget about that other element. The thing that helps you overlook it is they are so well protected and well padded. For the amount of physical contact they have, there doesn't seem to be as many physical injuries as you would expect."

• Harold Hyman picked up the game from a brother 14 years his senior. Hyman was 6 when his brother took him to a University of Miami Hurricanes-University of Florida Gators game in 1963 at the Orange Bowl. "Since that time," Hyman says, "I've been crazy.

"My brother was in school, always telling me about the games," he says. "It was the colors, the excitement. I always played football in the house, throwing balls. I became a Gator fan because of my brother and anti-Hurricanes. As I grew up it was more than a passion. Like a war."

• Another South Florida football fan, Coral Gables banker Shawn Cahill, also was influenced by a brother's involvement in football. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, under the sway of the Ohio State University Buckeyes and Cleveland Browns.

"My older brother played football," Cahill says. "I enjoyed watching football every Sunday with my brother and my father. Every Thanksgiving, we went to my uncle's and we made sure dinner was served between games or at halftime."

Now a father himself, Cahill isn't losing any time with his infant son's indoctrination. Kyle was given a Florida State Seminoles football shirt before his first birthday in honor of his dad's alma mater. "He's on his way," Cahill says. "I'm looking forward to it."

• Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum's son is fully grown today, but as a child, he naturally gravitated to his father's love of football. "When Larry was 2 years old," Teitelbaum says, "he saw me shaving and he wanted to shave so we got him a toy plastic razor. I'd put shaving cream on his face and he would shave along with me. When he was 8 years old and he saw me watching playoff games, he joined me in the living room, watching. That was the beginning of his interest in football."

As with many kids it became important to the younger Teitelbaum to identify not only with his local teams, the Giants and Jets, but with a winner. He delivered his youthful passion to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the super team of the 1970s. Larry got yellow and black Steelers hats, shirts and scarves.

One of the biggest touchdowns Dad Teitelbaum ever made in his son's life was when he gave a paper at a conference in New Orleans. "I was in a restaurant and at the next table was Terry Bradshaw. This was a month after a Steelers' Super Bowl victory. We talked a little in the restaurant and I brought his autograph home to my son. That was bliss. That was the best gift anyone could have gotten for him because Terry Bradshaw was his hero. That won me a lot of points at that stage in his life. As he got older and I acquired seasons tickets to the Giants and Jets games, he couldn't get enough of that. He was very hot to go to all those games and he still does."

Sharing a delight in football gave Teitelbaum and his son a unique bond the boy would not have with his mother. Whatever problems or conflict they might have in life, football will always be special between them.

"Larry doesn't live at home anymore," Teitelbaum says, "but when we talk on the phone we always talk about sports. He will say, 'Did you hear about the latest trade?' I don't have that communication with my daughter and I don't have that with my wife so it's great that I have it with my son."

• One more story about football fathers and their sons:

Banker Dave Schwarzmueller married in 1966. He and his wife loyally attended Buffalo Bills home games. Over time the couple had two children, both girls. When their third child, a boy, was born, the doctor came out to the fathers' waiting room and informed Schwarzmueller.

"I went in to see my wife," he recalls. "The first thing she said was, 'Well, it's a boy. There goes my season ticket.'"

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

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 5. A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich

by Bob Andelman

"During the late 1940s and early '50s, I peddled my bicycle 20 miles in each direction two or three times a week to watch the Los Angeles Rams practice in training camp. I was able to meet a lot of players. I wasn't an autograph seeker, though. I just liked to watch them practice, hear the grunts and groans, the hits. I'd try to do what they did. I grew up without a father around (his father died in World War II) so I had to pick that up alone and be successful at it."

Jim Runels
Retired management executive
Yorba Linda, California

As boys, we're drawn to athletes who embody all we strive to be: cunning, fast, aggressive, agile, handsome, witty, attractive to women. Guys like Johnny Unitas, Mean Joe Greene, Joe Namath, O.J. Simpson and Dan Marino never age in the eyes of idolizing youngsters. The image of the stars as hearty, full-of-life players cements in the eyes of young men, no matter how many hairs on Namath's head turn grey.

It's a different experience for grown men. Our boyhood heroes retire and fade from the game before we reach our assigned cubicles in the work place and we don't become as attached to their replacements.

Even worse, one day we wake up and they're all younger than us.

And thanks to free agency, the guy we rooted for last year joins our arch-rival for the coming season. Or our quarterback becomes more interested in chasing big bucks in greener pastures and endorsing roll-on, non-stick deodorant than leading us to victory. We blanche at his annual demand to be paid 10 times what we'll earn in a lifetime rather than just double. Or the team's general manager sours on our favorite wide receiver and trades him without warning.

Chicago sports radio personality Mike North grew up in the aura of Bears legends Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus, an era when star players mated with a team for life. He worries about the ties between a new generation of players and fans.

"It's hard to be a fan of individuals with free agency," he says. "Players used to be 'your guys.' They're no longer your guys."

Adults learn to pick their heroes more carefully than children and grudgingly realize most heroes will be short-lived. But we still indulge that boyish need to worship the gods.

Contemporary men are desperately searching for heroes in their lives. We're wanting for role models at a time when the ranks of positive male role models are fairly thin. So many athletes undeserving of our loyalty have been glorified by the press and glorified by Madison Avenue. Every little kid wants to be like Mike. Everybody wants to have their face on the Wheaties box and go to Disneyland after the big game.

Men search for an identification with a winner, a male figure who is effective, virile, potent and capable and knows how to get things done. All of the hype that goes into sports serves some need where men come up empty.

"Everybody has somebody that they look up to as a model. That personal attachment says, 'I would like to be like them,' " says Dr. Thomas A. Tutko, a clinical psychologist at San Jose State University and a director of the Institute of Athletic Motivation. "I went to a real estate office and hanging behind this guy's desk -- a very, very successful guy -- was a huge print of Joe Montana. Heroes provide hope. They provide identity. They provide an opportunity to be a step above and beyond where you are right now. It is people like Montana that give us that hope. Personally, I grew up worshipping Lou Gehrig. The 'Iron Man.' He was, to me, the greatest single athlete that existed. I loved baseball. Lou Gehrig was part Hungarian and I was part Hungarian. There were all those bizarre reasons. I identified not just with him but the traits that he represented."

Isolating a hero on a team is also good for what ails fans of lousy teams. You want to stick by your guys through thick and thin, but it sure helps if one of them stands tall even in darkest night.

* * *

Some of us eschew individuals for teams.

Palmiro "Paul" Mazzoleni came by his devotion to the Green Bay Packers when his family moved to the west side of Green Bay. Five or six players lived in the neighborhood, often inviting Mazzoleni to watch them practice. That's how, years later, he met and became acquainted with Vince Lombardi in 1959. And it helped his service station became a favorite place for Packers players and staff to fuel up.

"In those days, the Packers weren't paid until the first game of the season," Mazzoleni, now in his 80s, recalls. "I carried a lot of those guys on the books. They all remembered those days -- Bart Starr, Paul Hornung -- when old Paul carried them."

Mazzoleni's service station ("Get your gasolini from Paul Mazzoleni, who sells the best gasolini" was his radio jingle for years) stands as much a part of local football legend in Green Bay as any Bart Starr pass. That came to pass for three reasons: No. 1, Mazzoleni didn't allow anyone to say a discouraging word at his place about the Packers; No. 2, Mazz always knew where a fella could get a ticket to the game (he once redistributed 87 to a single game); and No. 3, Martha's Coffee Club.

"I always said I never wanted to hear anything negative," Mazzoleni says. "To this day, I always say, 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' I never let anybody run down the Packers. Even when Tony Mandarich was here and all the sportswriters wrote that he was a bust, I said, 'Give him a chance.'"

Martha's Coffee Club began early in the Lombardi regime and continues to this day. It took its name from Martha's, the restaurant at 515 S. Broadway, a few steps down from Paul's Standard Service (now Tom's Marathon) at 505 S. Broadway. The club meets every Monday morning at 9 a.m. for half an hour to dish dirt on the team. Everyone must be ready with a new Packer rumor. There are other strictly enforced rules as well: any member who talks business has to put 10 cents in a cup; if you take a call during a meeting, it's 50 cents.

"They're the finest Monday Morning Quarterbacks in town," Mazzoleni brags. "When the Packers don't do well, they don't run them down.

* * *

Most NFL and college towns sport at least one person everyone knows as the team's biggest fan. In Green Bay, it's Paul Mazzoleni. In Gainesville, the University of Florida Gators have "Mr. Two-Bits" ("Two-bits, four-bits, six-bits a dollar! All for the Gators, stand up and holler!"). And in Detroit, the Lions, Tigers, Redwings, Pistons and Drive all share "The Brow."

When 30 years as a mathematics teacher didn't utterly exhaust Joe Diroff, he traded in his chalk and erasers to be Detroit's best-known sports fan.

"When I retired in 1980, I thought I'd hit the rocking chair, maybe play golf, go fishing," he says. "I tried it all; I wasn't good at any of 'em. I said to myself, two years after retiring, there's only one individual in the universe who has all the answers. I said, 'God, tell me what talent I have.'

"The next night, I was at Cobo Hall in Detroit. The Pistons were playing the Boston Celtics. The one talent God gave me was a big mouth. I can really yell. I was asked to come out on the main court and give a cheer. At the end of it, I jumped up in the air. Well, I always have a lot of stuff in my shirt pockets and it flew out. Two security guys grabbed me and tried to throw me out. They didn't know I had permission to be there. Well, I resisted. The crowd booed. They did usher me out, but that's how I got started."

It didn't take long for the former teacher and retired Navy man -- who was a cheerleader at his all-boys high school and college -- to become one of the most recognized men in Detroit sports. Because in addition to his vocal enthusiasm, Joe Diroff is endowed with memorable eyebrows. One eyebrow, actually, that goes all the way across his forehead. That's why they call Joe "The Brow."

Being a cheerleader is not always fun and games. Like when the Lions go to Chicago to challenge the Bears at Soldier Field.

"All I did was have a big sign that said, 'LIONS,' " Diroff says. Three guys came down and threw me over the top row of seats. Well, I landed in the laps these young girls, which wasn't bad."

As a result of that incident, Diroff no longer goes to Lions games in Chicago. But he does still drive 300 miles to Chicago (and as far as 700 miles to Green Bay) to see the team off from the hotel to the stadium. "It's sort of a routine. I do it for the Redwings, too," he says. "I go to the hotel with half a dozen signs and put them up until the management asks me to take them down. When it comes time for the players to leave the stadium, I hold up signs as they head for the bus and give them a bon voyage. Then I hop in my car and head back to Detroit. I always get there in time to meet them afterward, at the airport.

"Oh, sure, I miss the game," The Brow says. "But I figure there's no way I, as an individual, am going to put a dent in that Chicago crowd noise. I figure, I'll go back to the airport in Detroit and meet them there."

There are pitfalls to being The Brow, but there are bonuses, too. He gets free admission and parking to Detroit sports events, although only the Lions actual provide him with a seat and meal ticket. Not that he needs it: Joe Diroff doesn't sit down.

* * *

Doctors told Barry Bradley to lie down but he wasn't ready.

The St. Petersburg business writer and editor hasn't missed watching or taping a Miami Dolphins game since the mid-1970s "even during those lean years." That includes the first week in October 1979, when he learned he had cancer.

"It was on the previous Wednesday that I found out I had to have cancer surgery," he says. "It was a fist-sized malignant tumor of my left kidney. They'd have to take out the kidney, the spleen and the adrenal gland. The doctor said I had to have it out as quickly as possible.

"They scheduled surgery for Monday morning, which meant I had to check into the hospital on Sunday morning. I said no, I can't do that, because the Dolphins are playing at 4 o'clock. I had them postpone the surgery from Monday to Tuesday. I stayed home that afternoon, watched the game and packed. I checked in after the game.

"It really happened," Bradley says. "They were amazed. I don't remember who the Dolphins were playing. But they won the game."

Was it worth it?

"Absolutely."

* * *

Each of us selects a hero or heroes based on different criteria. Strength, intelligence, sexual prowess, natural gifts and other characteristics draw us in; charisma or envy seals the pact.

There's no predicting whom a man might choose to immortalize. Y.A. Tittle and Albert Einstein could be as logical for me as Dick Butkus and Al Capone would be for you.

Some grown men even buy posters, autographed 8x10s and trading cards of their favorites. They build tchotchke shrines to athletes they'll never meet. And maybe they don't want to, wouldn't chance it to burst their bubbles. They follow athletes with a dedication that is almost mystical, although others may consider such devotion more appropriate for young boys.

Why do some men leave these things behind and others hang on forever?

"I think they still hold a very close emotional attachment with the sport," says Dr. George H. Sage, a retired professor of kinesiology and sociology at the University of Northern Colorado. Sage is the author of Power and Ideology in American Sport (Human Kinetics) and co-author (with Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen) of Sociology of North American Sport (William C. Brown). "There is this somebody who can perform the skills at such an incredibly high level that there is an attachment and fascination."

A lot of it, unfortunately, is programmed and packaged, a direct result of the way Madison Avenue markets today's athletes. Few sports heroes develop naturally; they're prepped, styled and propagandized. Athletic superstars are sold just like any other commodity, through advertising. Sportscasters speak in well-modulated, admiring tones about how wonderful, how great, how incredible, how terrific an athlete is.

"I think all of that feeds into what is already there in the mind of somebody who admires a particular athlete," Sage says.

Dr. Gregory B. Collins advises men to pick their heroes wisely. "One of the best comments I ever heard about this," he says, "was from an athlete who cautioned young people about worshipping athletes. He said,'Your heroes really should be your parents and you shouldn't look to athletes to fill that need for you.' I think that is good advice."

Phoenix Suns basketball star Charles Barkley said it bluntly in a 1993 commercial for Nike: "I am not a role model. I don't get paid to be a role model."

There are personalities that attract attention by virtue of being good at their jobs, remaining humble about their talents and generally likeable. You can build loyalty to players who stick around like Walter Payton, who was with the Bears for 13 seasons.

"The Bears were always the team for me," Larry Mayer says. "I looked up to Payton. He joined the team when I was nine years old. You grow up to follow the players and know the team. I liked Larry Csonka -- maybe it was because he had the same first name as I did."

Nobody said this hero thing was scientific.

Sticking with Chicago icons, former Bears coach Mike Ditka won legions of fans because he comes across as such a common man, a kick-ass-and-take-names guy, even though he owns restaurants and appears in TV and print ads for myriad products. He still exudes a blue-collar, down-to-earth persona that people can relate to; they feel like they're a friend of his.

We revere people who can make $43-million in six years for throwing a football. Many men and boys would like to be like that.

Kids especially need heroes. If they latch on to a Lawrence Taylor or Phil Simms, when those guys perform well, the kid feels like a million bucks. It's a way of borrowing some identity from an athlete who is performing well. If a boy wears a jersey with Taylor's number on his back there is a part of the child that feels he is sharing in L.T.'s performance.

There's a downside to forming such attachments, too. Careers don't last forever. And winning streaks are usually followed by losing streaks.

"Our players are our heroes as long as they do well," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says, "but when they start to falter, when they decline, they hear it loud and clear from the fans. The fans are expressing the disappointment that their heroes are not playing up to par because not only does it affect what happens to the team but it affects how I feel about myself. If I'm identifying with you as a star player and I need to connect with you, I need to have you do well so I feel good about me."

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie helped with a 1984 Miller Lite study of fans in America. Some of the conclusions chilled him.

"I think it is scary when you think how important heroes can be," the San Jose State University professor of psychology says. "But when fans were asked for the most important role models for their children, boys and girls, they said athletic heroes. That, to me, as a clinical psychologist, makes an eloquent statement about our society and its values and the sort of noble heroes we reinforce. I was really saddened that these were the primary models for youth."

Ogilvie's own heroes represented a different era, external to sports -- Mahatma Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt, for example. Figures of great sociological significance.

"When I was young," he says, "I thought I might head toward medicine. I was astounded that sports fans had an entirely different orientation. I was genuinely saddened. I thought it made a statement about something that was going on in our society. But I said, 'Who in the hell am I to judge?' People find their heroes wherever they can. Perhaps I was being a little bit idealistic. I was hoping they would mention some figures out of history."

Is it better to have football heroes than no heroes at all?

"Yes, of course," Ogilvie says. "We all have to be standing on our toes reaching for something beyond ourselves or we don't achieve. We don't move forward and unfortunately we don't contribute in any way. I think you have to reach."

* * *

Hero worship is weird for the players, too. Some don't know how to deal with the adulation and attention. Many deflect the imposition of responsibility that society saddles them with as "role models" for our youth. We want our heroes to be perfect in every way, but we also want to know that they are human and that they have frailties and flaws like us. It's a crazy relationship.

"It bends the player's perception of reality," Dr. Gregory B. Collins says. "How important they are, how they fit into things and a total team organizational concept. It can really distort their perspective about relationships, money and self-importance. It can be so rewarding in the short run that they really don't look at anything beyond it. There is a lot of desire not to have the party end. People just don't plan for when it will."

It's not that these guys don't deserve our worship but that they are human beings just like we are. Earning a million bucks for smashing quarterbacks doesn't make a college junior into a sensitive and loving role model. But somehow we elevate them into positions that are difficult, if not impossible, for them to maintain. There's a terrific amount of pressure for high-profile, elite athletes to sustain their image in the public but the gods have clay feet. They are human beings and we forget that. Their troubles -- and it seems all runners eventually stumble -- satisfy some kind of desire that people have to see their heroes fail.

Men look for models, people they can hold in high esteem. A lot of us go to an extreme, putting our heroes in a box where they are doomed to fail. There are very few heroes who can live up to our extraordinary expectations.

"Even a person like Larry Bird," Dr. John M. Silva says. "Boston had as much of a love affair with him as anybody and he still got booed. The expectations are so high and people want them to be met. It's part of an opportunity to have something as close to perfection as possible, as if this person never makes mistakes. 'This person always hits the big shot for us. This is something I can depend on. There aren't many things in life I can depend on but I can depend on Larry.' "

It just doesn't last. Larry Byrd misses shots. Wade Boggs fools around. Art Schlichter gambles. Len Bias snorts coke. Dexter Manley tests positive for pot four times. Michael Jordan lays odds on his golf game.

Of course, we're no more reliable than our heroes. We fair-weather fans abandon our team if it looks like they won't make the playoffs and choose an alternative team. And when we turn on favorite players and teams, look out.

"The fans who keep their loyalties to the players the longest really turn with vindictiveness," Silva says. "We saw it in 1992 with the New Orleans Saints. The fans were 500 percent behind them during the season. Sellout, frenzied crowds that loved their team all the way up to the playoffs. Then the team lost for the second year in a row in the first game of the playoffs. The fans were ready to hang Bobby Ebert. He had a rough game and he made some decisions that contributed to the team's loss, but he was singled out and taken to task quite heavily. The talk shows there were relentless, lambasting Ebert."

Fans will stay loyal the longest to players, choosing to point the fickle finger of blame at officials, owners and coaches, in that order. Once we do turn on the players, we attack . It's a way of trying to resolve our dissidence. "I rooted so hard for this team! I told so many people how great they were and I bought all this stuff!" How do you reconcile that? How do you balance that psychic investment? Am I going to have to blame officiating or coaching? Am I going to blame the players?

I certainly am not going to take the blame.

Might as well knock yesterday's hero off his pedestal. He was precariously perched, anyhow.

"Fans scratch away at the clay feet to expose the ordinary man," Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says. "These people gain not security but an artificial form of self-assurance -- 'Oh, well, even the heroes are not that great,' and so on. These people shift their loyalties just as quickly as you can snap your finger."

Ogilvie says people who can transfer their allegiances so quickly, who won't hesitate to turn last week's hero into this week's goat, have some real problems of their own.

"There would have to be some serious inadequacies in people who derive their satisfaction out of seeing heroes fall," he says, "whether they are their own or other fans' heroes. It's like the people who seem to get a vicarious charge out of seeing someone hurt. The quarterback gets knocked out of the game and they are enraptured by this. It borders on sadism. A psychological sadism. They are tickled to death, shouting, 'Bring in the meat wagon!'" 

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 6. Play the Game

by Bob Andelman

"I played one year of football in junior college. I played for the same coach that I had in high school. When he went to the single wing, I was a 'blocking back.' When he went to a split-T there was nothing for me except the line. I went through one spring practice on the line and figured that was enough of this football stuff for me. Then I was a sportswriter for 41 years."

Volney Meece
Executive Director
Football Writers Association of America

There are a number of things in life that every man is expected to do:

Drink beer.

Talk about sex.

Dream about sports cars.

Play football.

The great thing about the last expectation on the list is that we can play the game at any level and easily relate to guys who play it at higher levels. It's a joyous -- and jarring -- shared experience that men come back to our entire lives.

"Football is the single most attractive sport we have," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "Baseball is too slow. Basketball is too fast. Hockey and soccer are too confusing. But football stops just enough so we can analyze it and think about it."

Football also exploits many American values. Hard work, competition, territoriality. It represents, in a symbolic way, all of the tough things in America that we look upon as high values.

"At some point in their lives, guys either play football or know guys who do. It's the All-American experience," former Chicago Bears offensive tackle Dan Jiggetts says. "That shared experience is something that draws people back."

"It's a sport I grew up playing and still play every Sunday morning." Larry Mayer says. "We play two-hand touch, but it gets pretty rough. These are guys I've played with since the seventh grade."

Even Bill Evans, a marketing manager for Compuserve in Columbus, Ohio, returned to the sport, despite rocky beginnings as a participant. "I played two weeks of Pee Wee football and gave it up," he says. "The coaches were blue-collar, ex-high school linemen who took out their anger on kids. It was terrible what they put us through. Just a bunch of washed-up people reliving their youth."

No matter what the quality of their individual experience, men who have played the game enjoy a bond, even if they never played in the same game or at the same level. A stockbroker who played flag football in phys ed class knows the joy of catching a game-winning touchdown or third-down conversion pass as well as his auto mechanic who played ball at a Division III college.

A lot of men watch football because they played it. They've been involved in it as a sport themselves on a sandlot or on an organized level. They reach a point where it is hard to participate anymore so they become fans. They develop a fascination for it as an athletic event or as a form of entertainment.

Men gravitate back to the sports and activities they enjoyed as youths. Football provides a bonus: There is little or no possibility of women being involved with football because it is the last truly male bastion of strength, violence and speed. That's important because much as men love women, they love their time away from them, too.

Many men are former school and college athletes who seek to recapture the echoes of their youth by watching the sports they used to play. They connect to yesterday -- no responsibilities, no debt, no obligations, no shaving -- by watching others play sports they still love. It's kind of a Walter Mitty thing of seeing themselves out there, dashing across the chalk lines, being heroic, athletic, drawing a crowd, being admired.

Of course, along with all that is our eternal fascination with standing in awe of the skills of the best. On TV we see those who have the tools we lack. There is an envy, a fascination with the Heisman Trophy winner, just like there is when an average musician stands in awe of the best musicians.

And between those who never played the game and those who did, there will always be an invisible wall.

"If you are in a group of men where one or two have played the game and the others have not," Dr. Michael Messner says, "the ones who have played the game will have a sense of having knowledge that the others don't. Depending on how secure or insecure they are, they use that or not. There is always that thing that until you have been out there and felt the blows and had the blood on you and sweated and cried with your teammates, you can't understand the game. People say that about war, about football, about whatever."

The game appeals to us because it's so neat and tidy, leaving few loose ends.

Men play football in high school in deference to their aggressive drive, the ability to express that in a sublimated, safe way. "Nothing happens at the end of a game," Dr. Mark Unterberg says. "Only one team wins and the other loses and everybody goes off to take a shower and goes home. It becomes a safe way for one group of men to kill another group and become victorious. Sometimes the image of the old Roman Coliseum or Roman Empire analogy and the gladiators may not be too far off."

What about able-bodied young men who didn't play the game? Dr. Allen L. Sack is dubious that there are any.

"It is pretty hard to avoid," the sociologist says. "They probably tried out for a team or were involved very closely with males who were involved in it. Somewhere along the line, even if you hated it, you were probably pressured into playing it. I don't know if that is true of all social classes but it is certainly true of the working class. It's tough. If you go to school in a place like Odessa, Texas (made famous by H.G. Bissinger's 1990 book Friday Night Lights {Addison-Wesley}) it's very difficult to envision a young man, even those who despise and loathe the very nature of the game, not in some way or other feeling pressure to be involved. Even if that was coming out for practice and trying out for the team and not liking it, walking off and having a negative attitude toward it. In the years that follow, when those really rotten memories start to go away, you start romanticizing what it was like. You still have some experience with the game."

Part of the mystery of football is the great divergence between those who play and those who watch. Baseball fans commonly participate in adult softball leagues and bar leagues. But there aren't many amateur adult football leagues.

The downside of becoming a fan without having experienced football, or only being exposed to it on television, is that you don't appreciate the athleticism. TV better captures a basketball court or boxing ring, but a football field is 100 yards long. The close-up is adequate, but it doesn't put the game in perspective.

"That is why it's difficult for women to learn football from watching it on TV," says Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sport Psychiatry. "And that's one of the reasons women can't get into it. They can't learn it from watching on TV. You have to have played it."

The difference could be in who you know. Certainly there are disabled men who become great and learned fans of the game without ever taking to the field. There are scores of people who did not necessarily participate but maybe had a parent or an uncle who participated so they had some vicarious exposure to it early on and developed an attraction to and interest in the sport.

* * *

Men associate with the aggressiveness of football and the violence. Yet we see a lot of people at games in wheelchairs. Some may have played the game before being disabled; some may have been disabled by football. Many of these men will never have that experience on a football field and yet they still associate with the game.

"It gets back to identifications," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says. "There is a pull, identifying with those who can run when you yourself can't. I have a friend who was paralyzed in childhood from polio. His greatest love became watching the ballet. It's the same phenomenon of being able to watch others who can glide gracefully or who can run and do the things you can't do. For some people that is very painful, but for others it becomes a way of identifying with the players and seeing yourself in them."

* * *

David Johnson is a special case. The Chula Vista, California, fan of the San Diego Chargers is about the same size as your average defensive tackle. In high school, the football coaches couldn't wait to get him on the playing field. And he wanted to play. But in the 10th grade, Johnson developed spinal meningitis. Since then, he's spent a lifetime wondering "What if?"

"The main reason I love pro football is I never had the opportunity to play it," he says. "I'm one of the biggest fans you'll ever find. I absolutely love football. I marvel at these people, how the quarterback can complete a 60-yard bomb to a receiver running down the field, hoping to hit him with pinpoint accuracy!"

(Silva empathizes with Johnson's plight. "When the ability to participate is taken away," he says, "particularly if it is not taken in a traumatic fashion, a lot of people will yearn for those things that they can't have.")

Johnson, an unemployed truck driver, relocated to Southern California from Indiana after a Navy stint in San Diego. He came to the Chargers' attention several years ago because everywhere they went, so did he. This superfan leaves the mobile home he shares with his parents 10 miles from the Mexican border and drives his '69 Chevy to daily training camp workouts, mini-camps and regular season practices. He's always positive and encouraging to his team.

"I give the guys a hand, a good round of applause. I appreciate the athletic ability of these people. They can do things I could never do in high school," he says.

One of the Chargers coaches took note of Johnson and "adopted" him, making sure a ticket is always available for him at Chargers home games.

Among Johnson's heroes of the game are the grand old man, George Blanda, and Dick Butkus. "Butkus exemplified the ferocity and violence that is football," Johnson says. "Seeing somebody tackle like him is a way to let out your frustrations from the week. When you've been unemployed as long as I have, you need something."

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 8. Achtung, Baby

by Bob Andelman

"I enjoyed the military. It was precise. It was teamwork. Maybe I like football for the same reason. Football is fairly macho; it brings out the macho in guys that other sports don't bring out. It was something we watched in Viet Nam when I was there. If we could get near a TV and football was on, we'd watch it."

Frank Bryant
Former Army helicopter pilot
Long Beach, California

The blitz.

The bomb.

Down in the trenches.

Aerial assault.

Field generals.

Quick strike.

If you haven't noticed how football is steeped in military terminology and strategy, you haven't been paying attention.

"Sports ought to be the substitute for war," Dr. William J. Beausay says. "When you listen to sportscasters and coaches, the war metaphors that they use to describe the game just go on and on. You could write a dictionary of the war metaphors that are used to describe athletic contests. That is not an accident. I think that the same genetic drive in the human being is being acted out and in this case it is sports instead of the battlefield."

Nobody promotes an NFL game by saying it's gonna be a party. They say, "It's gonna be a war!"

More proof:

Team names are almost all war-like: Vikings, Patriots, Chiefs, Seahawks, Buccaneers, Raiders, Chargers, Cowboys. Even the animals teams choose to represent are aggressive by nature: Rams, Falcons, Eagles, Bengals, Broncos, Lions, Bears.

The cities they represent? Ancient clans and tribes on missions to take and defend territory. They stand up for their community honor. They put forth a bruising, total effort.

Military games have a lot of appeal. They involve strategy and calculation: the manipulation of varied components to accomplish a common goal, outsmarting, outwitting, outplaying and outfighting an opponent. Your army exists to battle and win, to achieve its goal it fights both offensively and defensively. Football is a military game with military correlates. It appeals on that basis.

The game's war cry? "Take no prisoners." "No one here gets out alive."

After a Big 7 Conference game in Kansas City, Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson was seen reading a book about General Rommel and the fighting in North Africa during World War II. Questioned by sportswriter Volney Meece about his choice in reading material, Wilkinson said, "With the tanks and everything they were planning to outflank the enemy, to fool them about which direction they were going to go. Desert warfare is exactly like planning a football game."

Football represents the epitome of 19th century engineer Frederick Taylor's belief that the most efficient organization would be one where the workers don't make many decisions. To win in football you have to use the very same concepts: Division of labor, very rigid rules and regulations, highly scientific training procedures and, more than anything else, you have to rationalize. You have to eliminate anything that is ad hoc. It has to be 11 human beings working as a machine. The entire organization must be geared toward producing these highly efficient machines. Just like industry.

But Dr. Allen L. Sack, a Taylor proponent, wonders if football may be out of synch with late 20th century life.

"Taylor believed that the best organization would be more and more management with management making all the decisions, where the workers shut up and were compensated fairly with monetary rewards. They were not meant to think," Sack says. "But the newest movements in management thought emphasize employee involvement. Total quality management puts the emphasis on the workers who are closest to the action being involved and discussing how to improve and become more efficient. The Japanese mauled us because we were late in realizing this. IBM has had problems because of this -- centralization, lack of involvement of the work force. It seems the whole world is now discovering that maybe it's more efficient and effective to treat workers or athletes as valuable human resources whose ideas and opinions about running things should be taken into consideration.

"Maybe football is only a preparation for military life, for winning wars or going into the front lines," Sack says. "Maybe it's no longer the best preparation for a life in a modern corporation where you have to be able to listen and to take the lower echelon's opinion into consideration."

The current coaching philosophy of football and some other sports came out of World War II and the Korean War. Many coaches are products of those wars. They believe the best approach to winning in football is the same as winning in the military and that proves true in most cases.

Are military skills and the way we look at the world psychologically the best tools for performance and success in a modern approach to industrial society? As another generation passes without being sent to a full-scale, multinational war, Sack suggests football will become more important as a military-style outlet.

"It's necessary that we have that kind of exposure because it's a reality that there are times when people do fight to the death," he says. "In those times you probably don't need democratic institutions. It's not like you take a vote (to go to war). There are places where the most effective organizational tools are probably Tayloristic principles and the football approach. But I think there are fewer and fewer areas of regular life where that really fits."

* * *

Teamwork is another way football parallels the military. Without teamwork, the 49ers and Cowboys are lost. Without its multinational allies, Operation Desert Storm would have been a disaster for the U.S. armed forces.

Teamwork is the essence of football.

Young men learn the value of teamwork through football. How to work together. On a great football team you can see that and appreciate it.

"Baseball is an individual game," says Pat Harmon, historian of the College Football Hall of Fame at Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati. "The batter is there and what he does, he does himself. Football is a team game. You have to have the performance of all the people on the team to make a team successful."

We use the example of "pulling together as a team," "conquering our problems as a team" and "only together can we win." If everyone does their specific task then goals will be accomplished. That fits with bureaucracies, too. Football is a rigidly timed game and we are a time-oriented society.

We each have a certain role and to the extent that all of us can do our roles well and we mesh and complement one another, we will be successful in life as in football. "That part hits home for me," Dr. Rick Weinberg says, "and in fact in my work with groups very often I use the metaphor of a professional sports team as a way to build a sense of teamwork."

Teamwork is instilled in children from the earliest days of their education. It's a concept that we very much want to teach our kids. The whole idea of teamwork at that level of development is very useful to get kids involved in sports and watching sports and participating in sports as a way of on-line learning about the value of teamwork. Once you have that as a kid it stays with you as a meaningful adult value.

But the concept of the team runs smack into the treasured American spirit of individualism and individual achievement, doesn't it?

"It is a contradiction, I think," Sack says. "On the one hand, as Americans, we like to think that these are individuals who are succeeding on their own individual efforts. We love heroes. We are a hero-oriented society. We value individualists, so we delude ourselves into thinking that a football team is 11 individuals."

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no game in the United States where the individual is more subservient to the group.

"When I think of football, I think of a pinball machine," Sack says. "The little receivers are running back and forth and the ball is going up and down and being hit; football players are like the little arms that are flicking and there is a coach in back of all that who is pushing the buttons. There is all kinds of action, lights flashing and there's ringers and buzzers. The players themselves are like little parts within the pinball machine. Every one of their movements is perfectly planned and timed. They are being dominated and synchronized and told exactly what to do at certain moments.

"What is it that we like about watching that?" Sack asks. "We like to watch the quarterback, the hero, because it gives us empathy in terms of individualism. Do we identify with the tackles and the guards in the same way? Probably not. I think we are probably most amazed by the tremendous coordination of all this working together."

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!

Chapter 10. Are We Not Men?

by Bob Andelman

"I recall a game, the Jets against Miami. The field was wet and awful. I remember being home by myself and hyperventilating over that game. The room was spinning; I wasn't drinking. I remember A.J. Duhe deflecting a Richard Todd pass and running it in for a touchdown. I was screaming and pacing. Pretty embarrassing. I was glad nobody else was there."

Jim Luttrell
Newspaper editor
Louisville, Kentucky

Competition makes men clever, cunning and devious. It makes us mean. And sometimes it makes us pretty funny, too.

Before the Miami Dolphins moved to Joe Robbie Stadium, South Florida resident Joe DiRaffaele took the following sign to a game at the Orange Bowl:

Go Dolphins! (And Take the Cubans with You!) 

"I used to be kind of wild," he says, laughing. "I think about it now -- it was a terrible sign to bring. But, yeah, I did that. Today I would take a sign that said, 'Go Dolphins and Take the Heat with You!' "

Image via Wikipedia

(That recalls another Miami joke, one that circulated after the region was awarded an NHL expansion franchise in late 1992. Pundits suggested the team be named the "Humidity," as in: "If you thought the Heat was bad, wait till you see the Humidity!")

DiRaffaele is relentless as a competitor, especially when it comes to hating the Dolphins. "Don Shula cheats!" he swears. "I think it's a conflict that he gets to be on the scheduling committee and the referee committee. When he plays a cold-weather team, it's a team that plays indoors!"

As for his Jets, DiRaffaele is a true believer. "To me, it's not over till the Jets are mathematically eliminated. There's always hope. Every Sunday, there's hope."

That's the fun side of competition. The serious side is another part of what draws men to football. We get great satisfaction out of putting our best 11 guys against your best 11 guys and scraping and brawling until the best team wins (or more guys from one team than the other are left standing).

Men are, by nature, competitive. Women are not, according to Dr. William J. Beausay.

"Now that doesn't mean that a female here and there cannot be taught to be competitive, because they can," he hastens to add. "Look at female tennis players. Obviously they are competitive. But even there, they lack the fire men have. If you compare feminine sexuality to male sexuality you'll discover that the female in our species is the life-bearer and men don't know anything about that at all. We are out in the woods, hunting and competing for food and the female is at home having babies. I know the women don't like to believe that is where they are happiest, but they are, whether they like it or not. I know there is a heavy emphasis in America on women's liberation but they are not as liberated as they would like to believe. The most liberated female is the one who does not fight her anatomy but who goes along with it. This does not mean she is not into athletics or sports; she can be but, by nature, she does not have the fire and the highly motivated competitive spirit that men do. All you have to do is watch them. They just lack it. They don't have what men do. I'm not saying that is good. I'm not sure it's good for men; probably we pay a price for that. We are men and we compete with one another. We have been doing it for a million years. We compete for available food and for the best women and we compete in football games."

Beausay says that when he looks at sports, he can easily see a million years of compressed male evolution represented.

"For example," he says, "the quarterback and his offensive team are a perfect model of a lion and his pride. There are about 50 points of connection between the dominant male lion and the pride and the quarterback and a football team. You can see the genetic drives from way, way back are playing a role in competitive sports. One of the things you learn when you study animals is that the territorial instinct is a heavy one. When you get into football and basketball, that territorial drive is very important. Keep the enemy out of your territory. Years ago, it was keep them away from your females. In sports today, it's keep the aggressor out of your end of the football field."

The onset of civilization frustrated the genetic drive in all men to hunt and feed. Men still hunt, but it's primarily symbolic. We still stake out our own little territory but we do it down at City Hall and we don't have to defend our caves as we used to. So football, among other sports, provides an outlet for this primal need.

A short course, then, on man's evolution: Hunter . . . Player . . . Spectator.

Men have a territorial instinct and drive for supremacy. There is always a dominant male who plays to win and be No.1. It's there with the animals and it's there with us.

But we can't give in to that instinct as we live in planned developments with 6-foot fences, fire hydrants and utility poles between every wired-for-cable cave. So we pay $25 and go to a football game to experience the modern equivalent of the hunt and kill simply by identifying with the players on the football field.

"Men have a tremendous advantage from a competitive standpoint because we know how to compete," Dan Jiggetts says. "We've been allowed to do it for years."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 11. Hit Me With Your Best Shot

by Bob Andelman

"At the height of the game, if a player is injured -- I hate to admit it -- but my first thought is, 'Goddammit, we're going to waste five minutes while they take this guy off the field!' "

Jim Melvin
Newspaper editor
St. Petersburg, Florida

The only guys who don't get some cheap thrill out of the violent nature of football are the ones who don't watch it. For most men -- the same guys who clench their own fists during a boxing match and bob and weave in their seats -- a cathartic release occurs by watching a defensive back as he snares a wide receiver in mid-air and slams him back down to earth.

• "I like contact sports," Buffalo fan Ralph Weisbeck says. "I'm built light and was never good at sports but I like the bit of mayhem you see on a Sunday afternoon."

Snap!

• "The violence is a part of the game," financial accountant Larry Selvin says. "It's a brutal, vicious sport. But fans aren't bothered by it."

Crackle!

• "It's just human nature that we go to a hockey match and we want to see blood and guts and fights," Volney Meece says. "It's a Catch-22 thing. I think the average fan wants to see a helluva hit. You see those highlight films on ESPN and on the networks, the great shots where a guy gets cartwheeled up in the air and slammed into the turf. Or when somebody breaks their leg like Joe Theisman did and the bone was sticking out at a 45-degree angle. They show that over and over."

Pop!

• "I hesitate to say the violence is why I watch," Louisville Courier-Journal copy chief Jim Luttrell says. "Maybe the raw power of the game. The grunting. I get a kick out of watching NFL films with the sound of the hits."

As hard to swallow as those comments may be for some people, experts acknowledge that violence is exactly why men love football.

"Sports have been around since the caves, or at least at that part of man's evolution when he started to increasingly sublimate his aggressive drive, to channel his pride in a productive way," Dr. Mark Unterberg says. "It may have started out as preparatory for the hunt or defense or a play-type situation for acting out what would be the real thing later on. For example, lacrosse is a definite offshoot of an Indian game that tribes would play with each other instead of going to battle."

Unterberg says the Indian sport, like lacrosse, could turn bloody. Do fans really want blood?



"No. It's a metaphor," Unterberg says. "At some level it gratifies the need for that. Maybe the ultimate demise of the opponent. Conquering the adversary."

We want violence. In conscious and unconscious ways, it makes us feel more alive to see some stranger on a football field get trashed. The sounds of crashing pads, of bones popping. But that's the short-term view. As soon as the blood-lust is satisfied, we want the victim to come to his feet and hobble off the field to a round of polite applause.

"You know the truth? It's a violent game. And I'm not a violent guy. But I am a trial lawyer. By nature, I'm a competitive guy. I played sports all my life," attorney Peter Hendricks says.

It doesn't have to be football. Driven by a good car crash lately? You can't go past a wreck without looking. "Oh, how horrible," but hmmm, were there any bodies? Anybody badly mangled?

"That's an Aristotelian paradox I don't quite understand," says Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry. "All I know is that when we try to organize a game among football coaches, ex-players and team doctors, we have a real hard time getting more than 12 people for a game once or twice a year. It's practically impossible -- and these are people who love football. Football coaches at the college level, for recreation, do not play football. They play basketball, handball or racquetball."

Even so, Begel doesn't think football is a violent game.

"It may be harder for people to control themselves in a football game than in a basketball game," he says. "It's a great pleasure to play a football game in which people are just enjoying the game and loving the competition. But recreational football seems to slip very easily into displays of aggression. It may be uncomfortable for people. People may not be able to handle it, but I do not think violence is intrinsic to the game. I think football is aggressive, but played fairly. I'm not sure -- well, I guess it is violent if there is contact. I think of violence as doing harm to people. I don't think there is anything harmful about a good tackle."

And there's nothing wrong with wanting to watch a good, clean tackle being made, either.

"There is a mistaken notion held by a lot of people in football that it is such a violent game," Begel says. "I think of violence as harmful activity. I think of violence as the person who is cutting someone off at the knees to try to injure them. I think of violence as someone like the defensive back who builds his reputation as a big hitter but is always just a little bit late. I think of that as a violent person. I do not think of the great linebacker who is all over the field and makes crushing tackles as necessarily a violent person. A strong and an aggressive person and a competitive person but not necessarily violent. It may just be a semantic distinction. That's not to say that the fan isn't looking for violence. I think that if the main motivation was the thirst for violence they would all be at hockey games."

There are 22 positions on an NFL football field. Some require skill, some containment, some -- like quarterback -- require leadership. Some positions are just aggressive death-and-mayhem positions like defensive linemen and linebackers.

"I think as people watch the game they'll be critical or applauding the aggressiveness or violence or enthusiasm of the player depending on what they think is required or whether he is getting the job done or not," Dr. Gregory B. Collins says. "Most people, if they played the game, have been knocked around so they know what it's like. They know how to dish it out and they know how it feels to be on the receiving end. I think there is identification both ways. When the player is knocked out cold on the field, people clap when he gets up. On the other hand, if it's a heckuva hit, people clap when he goes down. There is identification on both sides of that issue."

No one sitting in Veterans Stadium or in his living room in New Orleans wants to see Saints quarterback Steve Walsh get seriously hurt by a bad hit. But there is an undeniable thrill that runs up and down the spine when a Reggie White breaks through the line and puts Walsh flat on his ass.

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

Only Walsh, his offensive line and the coaches are crying, "No! No! No!"



What's so appealing about that? Fans of any age and size can vicariously play the game through the Monsters of the Midway without getting themselves beaten black and blue. "The violence is attractive," Shawn Cahill says. "When you see the highlights or bloopers, it's usually a big hit."

Is this attachment to vicarious violence healthy?

"I don't think there is any harm in it," Dr. Robert B. Cialdini says, "especially if it lets off certain kinds of steam that modern society doesn't typically let men find outlets for their physical energies."

The United States is a very competitive society, Cialdini says, possibly the most violent society of all of the major industrialized nations. Football fits easily into such a place where young males are socialized and raised with the expectation of being powerful and aggressive.

"It is an aggressive sport," says Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen, a psychology professor at Colorado State University and co-author (with Dr. George H. Sage) of Sociology of North American Sport (Wm. C. Brown). Eitzen is also a past-president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sports. "It is where you hit people. You move people. More than any other sport, boys play football. They have participated in it and it's kind of a male masculinity rite to play football and be tough and act like you like being tough even though you may not. To brag about hitting. I played football too and I can remember people saying, 'I can't wait until we start hitting in scrimmage.' The whole coaching fraternity asks us to be hitters and to deliver a blow. We are an aggressive society."

Men like to feel in control. That can be achieved not only by personal performance and personal accomplishments but to a significant degree by vicarious experiences. It's this vicarious experience that a lot of spectators need.

"There is data that has shown that people, depending on how much stress and tension they feel in their work, do the opposite in their release activities," says Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, a University of Maryland professor of sport psychology. "If you do the type of work that doesn't cause stress and tension, you will seek that in your leisure. If your work is too stressful, you want a tranquil, quiet and peaceful leisure type of activity."

Football provides an excellent opportunity for balancing these needs and the need for stress in a socially acceptable way. Pleasant stress. There is pleasant stress that is controllable by the person engaged in it. The heart rate of spectators goes up significantly during football games, more than other events. That shows that they are drawn not only by vicarious stresses and experiences but also by real stress of participation in the crowds.

"Everybody gets into it," Iso-Ahola says. "In Europe, what people value and appreciate is the skill. But in America that is less important than the fighting aspect. It supports the idea that American males love violence in sports.

"I suppose some people would say it goes all the way back to gunslinging and the Wild West syndrome," he says. "But you are really stretching explanations if you go that far in modern times. I don't think that anybody would be able to present any arguments that there is something genetically different about American men. There is not any data to support that, so therefore what you have left is the social environment in which we are living. We get exposed to maybe more violent models than they do in other cultures. That may be part of it."

* * *

American sports evolved in the early 1900s from a participation activity to a major form of entertainment, setting them apart from sports in other industrialized countries. Dr. Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, is the author of Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (Moseby-Yearbook). He says that sports in England, for example, were always emphasized as participatory activities rather than entertainment or spectator activities.

"In England," Coakley says, "when sports emerged in the old private schools, there was a sense that the games were so important from a participant perspective that nobody should be excluded. If a sport was worth playing it was worth playing even badly because it was important for the people who participated. In the United States, we believe that if a sport is worth playing it is worth playing well and, in fact, trying to be the absolute best at it."

Coakley himself went to college on an athletic scholarship. He notes that Great Britain continues to emphasize participation while the United States leans toward an elitist participation of only the best playing sports in high school and college. A British college might have seven soccer teams. "You can say you play on the sixth side. Games were arranged between your sixth side and the sixth side from some other school," Coakley says. "The whole notion of one football team representing a university of 50,000 students is completely inconsistent with how the British look at intercollegiate sports."

There are other subtle cultural differences among industrial societies that lead sports to take different forms. Because sports are defined as a form of entertainment in American culture, we present them unlike any other culture. Some cultures want to emulate the commercialism of our sports but it scares the hell out of others because they think it is going to destroy the "purity" of their sports.

* * *

Isn't there something seriously missing in the lives of men who need to experience such violence?

Probably.

The second-hand pleasure we get when we witness any physical event, even within the context of a movie, satisfies a deep-seeded need. For whatever reason, as long as civilization has been around, men have been interested in the whole experience of being spectators, whether it's theater or athletics or some other art form. Men enjoy being fans as much as they enjoy being participants.

Dr. Daniel M. Glick describes a pent-up need in the psyche of contemporary American men. "A lot of men I see in my practice and that I know in the community are very, very frustrated. I think sports and athletics sometimes offer a vicarious vent for their own frustrated hostility and aggression," he says. "I think there is something primal and something cathartic in it. In all types of various cultures there have been spectator sports where there have been battles between individuals or groups in the name of sport and sometimes the stakes of the game literally meant life and death. That is a phenomenon that existed long before anybody even discovered football. There is something in the psyche, something primal, where people enjoy the spectator aspect of seeing people in battle."

Is violence good for the system? Is it bad? The answer might depend on whether you talk to a physician treating an injury, a psychologist or a sociologist. Then there are the specific issues of behavior modification, pleasure and pain, punishment and reward. When your team wins, it is a reward and so you modify your behavior and identification to reflect that.

"The deal is, kill the other team," Volney Meece says. "But I don't think they mean kill. They mean good hits."

Part of the sting of seeing men bash each other for three hours at a time on the gridiron is cushioned by the sight of their big, beefy frames insulated by pounds of padding.



"I'm not a big fan of the violence," Bill Evans says. "It's a violent sport but it doesn't seem that many people get hurt."

 

Padding and helmets keep the action from appearing too painful to the casual viewer. So do rules intended to protect the quarterback from late hits. And when someone does get hit hard -- the crowd, after all, cries for blood -- fans come to their feet and snort their approval like wild beasts.

"A pro football player said to me once, 'Football is not a contact sport. it is a collision sport,' " Glick says. "It's crazy. When those guys get out there to play they are taking some major risks. A colleague who works with disabled people told me that the average pro football player comes out of professional football after a very brief career and most of them carry a 30 percent physical disability from knees or backs or elbows or shoulders or whatever. They don't walk away from football unscathed."

But for the fan, there is an allure of collision sports that has to do with power, control and dominance.

You know your boss is being manipulative. You know a person at your work place is trying to be dominant toward you. But these things are oftentimes very subtle and veiled. One thing that people are attracted to sports is that the play is right there in front of them. It's not disguised in doublespeak or technobabble. A power struggle takes place on the field and the players understand that the moment they step out on to the turf. It's going to be brought forth with much more clarity than in virtually any other social setting because there aren't that many situations in which we allow contact and physical collisions in which two individuals or two groups are competing for some goal.

* * *

If you sell widgets for 60 hours a week it takes a lot of pride and energy out of you. All of us, to some extent, are cogs in the occupational/professional hierarchy. For some men, watching football is a way to vicariously experience physical empowerment.

We don't have to be the one hitting the other guy but we can really feel good about watching our hero and cheering him on for making a great tackle or a great block. Boxing is probably an even more extreme identification with violence. "Punch that guy! Get him! Knock him on his ass!" It's what we'd like to do to a boss or an enemy. The feeling is that we are, in a limited way, satisfying our own need through this figure we're watching on the tube.

The football field -- and the stands around it, to a certain degree -- are places where men are allowed, even encouraged, to act out their aggressions. It's a setting in which the contestants have agreed to allow certain actions to take place that are forbidden in any other social setting. There is nothing like football in this way. Duplicate what the defensive lineman did on the field to a complete stranger in the parking lot after the game and it's illegal. If you try to get out of the boss' office and he tackles you to the floor, you are going to charge him with assault.

"A lot of times we have to restrain these actions," says Dr. John M. Silva, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sport psychologist. (Silva once played tight end for the University of Connecticut Huskies.) "In collision sports there is a lot of release of restraint. Sometimes you might want to do something physical but you cannot do that. We're socialized in a civilized society most of the time to restrain those actions and sport allows us to exhibit some of those, within control."

Most experts argue that football provides a healthy catharsis to most men and even some women. Go ahead, scream, yell, jump up and down. Blow off steam. It's good medicine.

But football does not provide any psychological solution to the cause of your physical tension. You are still going back to your job on Monday morning, and if your boss was manipulative at 5 p.m., Friday, he or she will still be a manipulative bastard or bitch when you return.

Football fans fall into a cycle where tensions build all week. Football allows us to blow off steam for a few hours, but a day later the pot is whistling again. We haven't changed the actual source of our tension so the dynamics repeat.

"It is a sad commentary," Silva says. "Football is almost like an opiate for the masses. That is why a lot of people just can't wait till Wednesday -- Hump Day. One or two more days and they live for the weekend to get their little drug, their little release, and then they go back into the work place. They haven't really developed any better skills for dealing with their communication problems and the conflicts that exist at work."



In this way, Silva sees television as a cheap drug. Men think watching football makes them feel better because it provides a little release, but it may not necessarily be time well-invested.

Football is a distraction, Silva says, not a solution.

Through catharsis, men feel relief if they watch people hit each other. But an opposing theory suggests that seeing violent acts exacerbates a man's need to see or commit violence. At the end of the game we are even more hyped to clobber somebody. Sometimes it occurs because a guy's team wins, rather than loses. Need an example? How about the January 1993 riots in downtown Dallas that greeted the Super Bowl champion Cowboys? Fans were so worked up they overturned cars and broke through storefronts to vent their glee. The same thing happened a few months later in Montreal when the Canadiens won the NHL Stanley Cup, and in Chicago after that, when the Bulls won their third straight NBA championship.

"Aggression begets aggression," Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says. "There isn't a spilling away or draining away. What there is, is a laying of groundwork or bedrock to the aggressive or angry man. It certainly frees him from the basic human being that he is. He is an inadequate, insecure asshole. They can 'act out' this way but it doesn't translate into any constructive use of self-assertion in real life."

Do we really have a need to watch people hit each other?

"TV depicts violence -- the number of people that get in car wrecks, punching people out, the physical atrocities. Gangs are shooting at one another. If you watch the news you really are talking about reality," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "They dictate the violence. Sport reflects what goes on out there.Whether sport promotes it is another question. It's the chicken and egg routine, and I'm not sure which caused which."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 12. Fly Like An Eagle

by Bob Andelman

"I enjoy seeing the best of anything. And professional sports provide the best athletes in the world. My wife and I go to the ballet. We like to see the best ballerinas in the world. It's exciting. And in professional sports, you get to see the best athletes every week."

Dick Williams
President, The Derrick Club
Houston Oilers Fan Club

Not every man is turned on by the violence in football. Many are drawn in by other elements. The pitchers of beer, video replays, the synthetic fibers straining to contain the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders . . . and the bona fide grace of the athletes.

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The challenge of a football player pushing his way against a formidable obstacle -- the other team -- involves skills of instant acceleration, pinpoint passing (that's why we call it "threading the needle") and delicate agility. You can see great moves, strength against strength. The bomb, the quick strike. That's the stuff that makes many men scream in ecstasy.

"I'm not animalistic or anything," Miami Dolphins fan Shawn Cahill says. "I might go, 'Oooh' or 'Yeaaah!' But I don't see football as an outlet for violence. I much prefer seeing a great pass or run or catch. A great hit is not what I look for in a football game. I'd rather see a deep bomb or a catch over the middle. Because everything's got to be perfect for it to happen. You've got to have good protection, the receiver has to get open and catch the ball. A great hit -- many times it's a defensive lapse or the quarterback is hit on the blind side. More and more people are getting hurt; it's not good for the game when the stars are out."

Most people think of basketball when they think of grace in the big four men's sports. But more than a few guys stick by football's aerial displays and majestic strategy. Seeing a classic 60-yard Hail Mary pass spiral leave Joe Montana's cocked arm as a defender takes him down, watching the football majestically arch high above Candlestick Park before slipping perfectly into a zigzagging Jerry Rice's cradled arms at the moment he leaps across the goal line cannot be compared to mere sex. It's bigger that that.

It's a combination of intensity and finesse. Passing is a kind of weird science, seemingly understood only by the game's best-looking, more articulate philosopher-kings. It's a cauldron of magicks that Merlin could but stand by and admire.

Speed, elusiveness, cunning, strategy, teamwork and organization as well as raw athletic skills like jumping, catching, throwing, kicking and running are what make football irresistible to men with a distaste for the hitting, crunching and bone-grinding that also makes up the sport. Beauty to these guys is watching an O.J. Simpson, Herschel Walker, Emmitt Smith or Deion Sanders fly down field, stepping left, stepping right, hurdling over would-be antagonists to gain yards and score touchdowns.

"I watch the ball," Volney Meece says. "I've heard for 50 years that you ought to watch the pulling guards and the center and all that technical stuff but I just can't do it. I watch the ball and I watch the quarterback. Oklahoma, for so many years, ran the wishbone and split-T formation -- you had to watch the quarterback to find out what was going on. There is nothing more beautiful than when the quarterback comes down the line, fakes the pitch and the end takes the fake out with the running back and the quarterback cuts down field and it's just wide open. To me, that is the beautiful play in football."

To Meece, there is no greater poetry in the world.

"I have seen enough football," he says, "that I am aware of what's going on and how many people they flank out and what the backfield formation is when they come to the line of scrimmage and things like that. I don't try to think about it till it hurts my head but I do try to get into the strategy of the game."

Conversely, if your favorite team -- or the one you happen to be watching -- features a player like Billy Sims, Barry Sanders or Thurman Thomas, you're going to watch the halfback and see where he's going. Because when that man gets the ball, it's showtime.

The real glory in the game goes to those who avoid getting hit, thanks to natural talents, speed, peripheral vision and fast thinking.

It's easier for men to talk about how the Bills were last weekend or how mean the Dawgs are in the trenches in Cleveland than to acknowledge that the sport, played at a very high level in certain positions, is very, very skilled and almost ballet-like. The greatest players in the game are phenomenal athletes. They are very gifted at what they do and everybody appreciates it. Some may appreciate it on a conscious level and be able to talk about it. Men don't particularly talk about the grace and beauty because that isn't the kind of conversations men have. Men allow themselves to talk about how tough their team is but they really don't talk about what a terrific athlete, or how graceful Jerry Rice might be, even though he exhibits the kind of athleticism that an ice skater or a gymnast has. Men don't talk about stuff that way.

"The grace of these athletes amazes me," Dr. Daniel M. Glick says. "These guys are wearing 20 to 30 pounds of equipment and yet they go out and make leaping catches, jumping and rolling over people. Look at defensive linebackers and defensive players like Lawrence Taylor. I don't know what the stats are on him but he has got to be somewhere close to 275 pounds. He does the 40-yard dash in 4.3 seconds and he moves around people like they aren't even there. The man is a giant, and at the same time, extremely graceful. He doesn't get the kind of publicity that an acrobat might get when they jump up into the middle of three defensive backs and pull down some passes from a quarterback on a Hail Mary."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 14. Odds 'n' Sods

by Bob Andelman

"I pride myself on being a trivia expert. I challenge my friends. If they can beat me, I'll take them to lunch. I know basically every number for every Bears player. The most obscure the player, the more I remember. I guess it helped me get my job and I guess it helps me do my job better. It's weird because I don't otherwise have a good memory. My sister remembers things from childhood. I don't."

Larry Mayer
Managing editor
Chicago Bear Report

If there's one thing sure to drive a non-football fan batty it's the ever increasing treasure trove of statistics. Thanks to computers and new information gathering techniques, fans of numbers can track virtually any aspect of the game.

Under the category of passing alone, we follow attempts, completions, completion percentage, yards, touchdowns, touchdown percentage, longest touchdown pass, interceptions, interception percentage, average gain and overall rating.

What about kicking? For punting alone there's number of kicks, total yards, longest kick, gross average, touchbacks, kicks inside the 20-yard-line, blocked kicks, number of kicks returned by opposing teams and the total and average returns. Field-goal accuracy typically breaks down into distance: 1-19 yards, 20-29 yards, 30-39 yards, 40-49 yards and the very thinly populated 50 yards or more.

Let's assume the point is made and skip defensive examples.

"I love sports because of the numbers and the statistics," financial accountant Larry Selvin says. "As I grew up, I won arithmetic contests. I have like a photographic memory for numbers and dates. I can tell you every Super Bowl off the top of my head -- who was in it, what was the score, who won the MVP, where they played the game."



Stats are a way of dealing with one's mastery of the game and not just as a passive participant. Keeping statistics -- on paper, in our heads -- is a form of activity.

 
It's a form of competitiveness -- knowing more stats than the next person. Sometimes obsessive behavior becomes a way to deal with affective emotions. Sometimes it's a way for an underachiever to finally become an overachiever. Maybe part of the person fears that if they don't do statistics they might get too excited over the game. They understand what is going on. It's their way of being active and showing that they are really part of the game.

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie calls it exhibitionism, legitimized by what comes into our living rooms via the TV.

"I think that would be a terribly neurotic thing to do," he says, "to quest for some exaggerated attention. 'Hey, look at me, dad!' It's an incredible need to become involved in something that has some meaning for them, that has some influence in the way they feel about themselves and sometimes the way they feel about the world. These are spectators to life. All they get is whatever they can abstract from what is going on out there. That becomes living for them. That goes to such extremes when you talk about the couch potato. What a termination of life."

"Pathetic, isn't it?" Dr. Daniel Begel scoffs. "Hanging out through the TV with football or anything else."





Sometimes people do things unconsciously. Deep down they may believe the more they memorize Thurman Thomas's stats, the more they know him. The more some guys know about Thomas, the more they can identify with him or enjoy what he does on the field.

There are so many facets of football. A guy can be master in one segment but not the other. Some people, their whole life is tailgate parties. They drink champagne, they crank up the car tunes. Some of them don't even go in until the game has started and even then they follow the action on portable TVs.

Trivia buffs create games within games. They envision themselves as part of the game because they are game historians. They remember the details.

"Some people like that. Kind of an obsessive-compulsive behavior," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "There is a place for those individuals as well. The memories that come up provide an emotional charge in some way. Good play. The great hit. All of it gets relived because it fulfills a need inside them."

Bill Price teaches statistics at Niagara University but he, for one, has had enough of the growing statistical obsession among fans, sportscasters and the NFL itself.

"I think they're overdone," Price says. "I've seen players get good numbers but they play lousy."

William J. Winslow, president of the Institute of Athletic Motivation, blames stat-mania on ego-involvement. "I've often said to myself that if these people could put the same attention to their careers as they do to memorizing football numbers, they'd be more successful. They spend evenings gathering stats and reading newspapers instead of reading journals.

"Take kids," he says. "They remember batting averages but can't put 2 + 2 together in school. You get minority athletes who can't get passing grades in school but memorize whole playbooks. If you're memorizing something you like, it's no longer a chore, it's something you like."

That's it, exactly.



Players stats are something that a guy can easily consume with a modicum of interest because in a man's life, he knows sports trivia or trivia dressed up as information will always pass for conversation with other men. It's something we can relate to others and groups who share our same interest. That serves our self-esteem.

The more knowledgeable we supposedly are about this game -- it doesn't matter whatever else we do. The knowledge is ego-boosting and self-esteem boosting. Men know what their guys did and how they played. It's another twist on basking in reflected glory phenomena. We can boost our ego and self-esteem not by performance itself but by being knowledgeable about it.

* * *

Aaron Vaughn, a copy editor at the Valley Daily News in Kent, Washington, didn't pay much attention to football until his late teens. Then he couldn't get enough: he needed NFL, college, even high school games to slake his thirst.

As the years went by and he neared his 30th birthday, Vaughn's interest deepened. He stopped going to pro games in person because he didn't care for the Seattle Seahawks and all he ever got were lousy seats. But at work, he started hanging around sportswriters and editors who honed his technical understanding of football.

Now he's more interested in the annual college draft than the game itself.

"Every year, I buy three draft guides," he says. "I study players and who the teams need. It's something I find fascinating, how they make their decisions. I really am a behind-the-scenes guy."



The first player Vaughn followed was University of Oregon quarterback Chris Miller, researching his background and plotting his prospects. He became an Atlanta Falcons fan when they drafted his man. After that, Vaughn was hooked. He conducts his own mock drafts. He videotapes the draft on ESPN, watching it over and over again, comparing and critiquing his selections for the NFL teams with their actual choices.

"I try not to hold it against teams that don't pick a guy," Vaughn says. "It's technical and boring to a lot of my friends. But it's a lot of fun."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 15. You Better, You Bet

by Bob Andelman

"We need something to gamble on. And since you've got money on football, you might as well watch it."

Bruce Kessler
Warehouseman
North Brunswick, N.J.

The gambling aspect of football is huge. It cannot be ignored. Go to college or pro games -- or sports bars, even -- you'll see people lined up at pay phones to call in their bets. And if it's not so widespread, why do the sports sections of most major dailies print Las Vegas-style betting odds for football games?

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Football is the nation's most popular sport. The best reason for gambling on it is that's it's a regularly scheduled, weekly event with fewer games than any other major professional sport. Take the 162-game baseball season and divide by 1/10. The amount of money bet on baseball might then be equal to football, but it's unlikely.

Scoring rules the line. Whereas baseball is a low-scoring sport in which games commonly end 4-2, 2-1, a relative football score would be 28-14 or 14-3. The way points are counted also makes football a little more attuned to gambling.

"People make a lot of the 'line,' " Chicago Bear Report managing editor Larry Mayer says. "Even people who aren't bettors, it's a nice thing to be able to toss around, 'Do you think they'll cover?' "

Mike North became interested in football because he gambled. A lot.

"My opinion is, if there was no gambling , football would be America's third sport, behind baseball and basketball," he says. "There's billions of dollars gambled annually on football. You go to any sports book and they're packed on Saturdays and Sundays. Look at office pools. Billions!"




It's easy to understand the appeal: unlike horse racing, bettors start with a 50/50 chance. You can then complicate a bet with over/under point spreads. In the Super Bowl, you can bet anything -- even the coin toss.

North, a Chicago radio personality at WSCR, describes himself as a "Kool-aid drinking, Jim Jones Bears fan." He doesn't place wagers on gridiron games anymore. But it was fun while it lasted.

"I quit when I got the job here. It's a federal offense; there's no sense jeopardizing your job for it," he says. "I love the game for the hitting, the violence, the spread. I don't enjoy the game as much as I did when I bet on it. I started gambling on football when I was 17. It's illegal in Chicago but there's a bookie on every other corner. Monday Night Football still draws a major audience because people have money on it. Otherwise, it would have gone the way of My Mother the Car."

In North's experience, if he's watching a game with six guys, at least three of them have money riding on the outcome.

Gambling may be something that heightens pleasure for men. Lots of people do extreme things to heighten sexuality and orgasms. Sometimes gambling becomes the main thing for men, not football.

"I can remember going to a game in Kansas City," Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen says. "Kansas City was way ahead and all of a sudden, late in the game, somebody was punting and people started booing. I didn't catch on. It had to do with the point spread. Instead of punting they should have tried to go for the first down because they could have kicked a field goal later on that would have affected the spread."

Gambling is endemic to football. Contrary to what some may say, "everybody" isn't betting on games, but far more men do it than talk about it.

"Why do I bet on football? I'm a gambler by nature," Joe DiRaffaele says. "I go to Vegas occasionally. I bet basketball games. But I don't bet on football to increase the excitement of the game. It's strictly for profit or loss. It's not some driven need. I bet on football because sometimes I can't believe how some of the oddsmakers will set a line and favor a team. I will bet occasionally on a football game. But I only bet on my 'lock' picks. I do have rules. I won't bet Dolphins games because I don't bet with my heart -- I only bet with my head. I will occasionally bet on the Jets. But, you know something? I'm great at picking them -- up to the Super Bowl. Then I get annihilated. I actually picked Buffalo in '93 -- I said, 'Hey, they've got a chance!'"

The appeal of gambling on football is easy to pinpoint. The odds are easy, in a sense, because you're picking one team over the other, not one in eight at the track or jai-alai. (Betting the spread will complicate your day.) And the game is unpredictable.

You're never certain of the outcome until the game is well under way. The suspense turns men on and makes it easy for sports to be linked to gambling -- the element of uncertainty and the seeming attempt by people to predict an outcome. The business of predicting the unpredictable and seeing whether it will come true is fun. Watching the drama unfold to see what will be the outcome is very gripping and suspense-filled. If you care about the teams that are involved it will hold your attention.

Larry Selvin bets one game a year -- the Super Bowl. "And I usually do well at it," he says. "There's been 27 Super Bowls and I've won nearly every time."

There is an addictive element to football gambling, not unlike drugs or alcohol. Some people, like Selvin, can do it once a year and move on. Others get started and can't stop.

"There may be a classification of people called 'addictive personalities'," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "It may very well be inherited, biological or genetic but they do find that there are people that have this adrenalin rush from betting money and getting the results. There becomes a point where you can't control it. You just get carried away by it."

Tutko says gamblers and football fans fall in that category.

"I would suspect with the true gambler, however, it's the gambling that is far more important than the game because they are so addicted that football simply becomes the medium for their betting," he says.



It gets back to feeling special and feeling you know how to pick 'em or you know better than the other guy. It gives some men the feeling of being more involved in the game.

"You have a bigger stake," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says. "No pun intended. You feel more a part of it. It's illegal but zillions of people seem to find a way to do it and they enjoy it."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 16. I Don't Like Mondays

by Bob Andelman

"There is validity in what some people say, because sometimes the coaches don't have a clue. I've seen high school games where my mother could call better plays."

Larry Mayer
Managing editor
Chicago Bear Report

Everybody knows better than the coach whose team lost the big one on Sunday. Come Monday, it's crystal clear to the world that the Chargers should have gone for it on fourth down and inches, with 4:02 remaining in the fourth quarter.

Men develop an unshakable sense that they know better. It's fourth and inches and we're calling out the plays in our living rooms, praying Bill Parcells hears us through the miles and wires. If the coach calls a different play and it doesn't work, 9 out of 10 times we're cursing him for not doing it our way. "We would have gotten the first down and scored.







Sportswriters and sports talk show hosts from coast to coast devote barrels of ink and hours of air time to dissecting wrong choices, "what if" and "if only" strategies straight through till late Wednesday, when they start previewing the next game.

"I remember a friend of mine who was one of the greatest fans of Oklahoma football," Volney Meece says. "He was a fanatic but also a pure fan. In 1957, when Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak was snapped by Notre Dame, 7-0 at Norman, my friend walked out of the stadium behind a guy who was really getting on Bud Wilkinson for losing that game. The guy said, 'Don't you think maybe Bud Wilkinson's spending too much time on his TV show and we're not getting the coaching we used to?' Wilkinson won 47 straight and lost one and the guy wants to get on him!"

God love the Monday morning quarterback. Tolerate him, anyway.

When we know the players, study the depth charts or just listen to endless hours of analysis and debate over the relative merits and potential of certain players, men feel empowered. Knowledge builds kings, but it creates a good number of sports idiot savants, too.

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The popularity of sports radio call-in shows, which give fans a forum for sounding off, encouraged many newspapers to establish separate letters to the editor columns in their sports pages. Meece hates them. "You get nothing but the lunatic fringe writing in," he says. "Coaches have enough problems nowadays with kids having changed so much individually. You have enough discipline problems without having some fan write in and say that the coach isn't doing a good job."

Fans might question whether Meece, a retired sportswriter, isn't just protecting his turf; until recently, the only guys with a forum to blast coaches were sportswriters.

Sometimes the only joy a fan gets out of seeing his team lose is getting mad at the coach and second-guessing him. It's fun, a sport in and of itself.






"When your team loses," Larry Mayer says, "the first thing people complain about is the play-calling. That's the one thing everybody has an opinion about."

Because the game's action is frequently interrupted, fans -- like coaches -- have several moments to plot the team's next play or series. In that way, men can fantasize about being involved in the game. They can call the play and, if they're right, take great satisfaction in being geniuses. Or morons, if the opposition intercepts, forces a fumble or shuts the offense down some other way.

Monday morning quarterbacking is one of the major gratifications of football. In hockey and soccer the action is continuous. Strategies evolve during games, but fans don't feel the same involvement. It deny us a chance to participate. In football, the clock and action stops on every play.


* * *
An interesting phenomena: the fan whose team can do no wrong. The players, anyway. The coaches earn no loyalty; they're all idiots. Management? Where did those guys ever play ball? And team owners draw more derision than anybody short of game officials. The guys at the top of the 28 NFL franchises are usually the most disliked figures in town. Spoiled brats who earned their money and teams the old-fashioned way: They inherited it.

It's easier to direct resentment toward management, coaches and the owners because they are the ones who are supposed to be putting the team together. They're supposed to be getting the best available material. It's also the "American Way" to be able to second guess, to question and say, "I know better. Why did you make that move? What did you hire this coach for?"







* * *
There's no denying that some fans might actually know more than the coaches or the owners. There are guys who consume every magazine, newspaper article, book, TV and radio show on football. Coaches have their hands full just keeping up with their own team's day-to-day operations. But the fans study for drafts as if the teams might actually be call late one night to ask their learned recommendations. Fantasy football leaguers do draft players, so they probably do know a thing or two.

"I tend to critique the coach non-stop about play-calling and personnel decisions," Jeff Spear says. "I love watching the draft and thinking about where my team is going to pick. It's a whole separate strategy. What are their weaknesses? Long range goals are important; you have to be thinking a few years down the road. The thinking process that you can put on the game attracts me to it. I'm a baseball fan. People say that's the thinking man's game. I see football that way also."

Game strategy is an important lure for men who put themselves above the violence and aggression that's commonplace in football. Can the offense anticipate the defense? Or can the D throw the offense off?

Proponents insist football is more than three yards and a cloud of dust. There is strategy and a certain appreciation of thinking in the planning and the organization behind the game. It leads to very different views.

• "I like the well-placed defensive schemes, the well-executed plays," Andrew Spear -- Jeff's brother -- says. "One year, the Redskins kept repeating the same play to the left. When it came down to it against the Giants late in the season, they ran it to the right. For me, it's not the hits, it's the aesthetics. The well-executed offensive or defensive play, as opposed to one guy taking somebody's head off -- I enjoy that as much as anybody, but I enjoy the beauty of the game much more."

• "I don't know the buzz words," hospitality management consultant Mark von Dwingelo says. "I can talk about pulling guards and off-tackles, bombs and screens. I also like 290-pound guys who run the 100 in nine seconds. It's become more of a science. The play-action pass? Joe Montana used to do that. He'd feint the hand-off, throw the defense off and throw the other way."

• "When I go to Tampa Stadium," Dr. Rick Weinberg says, "I don't like to sit on the 20-, 30-, 40- or 50-yard line. I sit in the end zone with my son and bring a pair of binoculars. We can see the defensive scheme and the offensive scheme. I certainly can appreciate the different plays and how the defensive backs cover the receivers as they go out. The play starts and you see the quarterback going on a pass-play. In the binoculars you can see the ends or the wide receivers go out and criss-cross or do their various patterns. It all comes together in that picture like clockwork. I find our end zone view really adds to the appeal of the game."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 17. Two Tickets to Paradise

by Bob Andelman

"I don't go to sporting events unless I get good seats. It's a waste of money if you don't. If you're an avid fan, it's worth the money."

Larry Selvin
Financial accountant
West Roxbury, Massachusetts

Jerry DeForest Jr. is a superfan.

The 1992-93 season marked his fourth consecutive year of traveling from city to city with his cherished New York Giants. Wherever they go, he goes.

"It's my hobby," he says. "I love seeing other cities."

Understand that DeForest, who played football at New York's Niagara University, also journeys to the Kentucky Derby, NCAA Final Four and World Series. (He doesn't miss Niagara games, home or away, either.)

His mega-devotion began innocently in 1981 when a Giants-Jets clash wasn't broadcast in Buffalo so DeForest and a college classmate hitchhiked to Schenectady. One year he road-tripped to Dallas and his picture appeared in the Dallas Morning News. Seems he painted his head to resemble a Giants helmet. In 1986, he and a pal flew to Pasadena and dropped $325 apiece on game day for Super Bowl tickets.

His special football fixation centers on the pre-game festivities. "I love to tailgate," DeForest says. For a 1 p.m. game, he'll be in the stadium parking lot at 8:30 a.m. He can always be counted on to organize and cater the tailgate parties, endearing him to 80 friends and family members each week. His legendary tailgate parties attract the families of Giants players as well as the beat reporters who cover the Giants for New York metro area newspapers.

DeForest loves to tailgate so much, he name his Staten Island bar "The Tailgate." The bar's red, white and blue decor doubles as a shrine to the Giants.

And he doesn't just tailgate the easy way, during Giants home games at the New Jersey Meadowlands. Noooooo. DeForest organizes moveable feasts. On Saturday nights before away games, he organizes out-of-town cocktail parties which always draw a handful of Giants players.

"I just love football. Everything about football," he says. "Even when the Giants were conservative, that didn't bother me. Running is the same as throwing to me. I'm more of a Giants fan than a football fan. When I'm at a Giants game, I don't care that I'm missing nine hours of football on TV. All I care about is the Giants. The rest of the NFL -- I could care less."

Don't get the idea that Jerry DeForest Jr.'s devotion to the Giants comes at the expense of other things in his life that might fall on the same Sunday the Giants are playing.

Why, one Thanksgiving, when the Giants were scheduled to play the Cowboys in Dallas, DeForest stayed home in Staten Island, closed The Tailgate to the public and feted his family to a holiday dinner -- while watching the game on a 60-inch TV.

And he actually missed one away game in recent years because it conflicted with his cousin's wedding.

Well, to be honest, he didn't really miss that game.

The wedding ceremony was scheduled for 3:30 p.m.; the game started at 4. Obviously, DeForest couldn't be in Los Angeles for the kickoff, but he couldn't face missing the game, either. He compromised by skipping the ceremony and catching up with the bride and groom at their reception -- just after 7 p.m.

"Unless I'm in the wedding party, I'm not missing the game," he says. "My family knows how I am. By not going to L.A., they took it as a sacrifice."

* * *
It costs a lot of money to see a pro football game in person. Tickets start at $25 in most cities. If you're a really big fan, it's not worth buying single game tickets because the best seats go to season ticketholders. Now the cost is up to a couple hundred bucks to reserve a seat for all eight home games.

But you don't go alone, do you?

Taking a son, a wife, a daughter or a buddy doubles the admission cost. Maybe the company will pay for the seats, though, and occasionally you'll take a client to legitimize it as a business expense.

Parking costs $5 to $10 per game. And food. Gotta eat. Consume mass quantities. Can't bring your own. League rules. Once inside, it wouldn't be football without beer, chili dogs and nachos, would it?

If you've gone this far, might as well go the rest of the way: team sweatshirts and hats for chilly days, neon ponchos for rainy days, and a team license plate or plate holder for the car so everyone knows your team.


 

Then there's the time factor. You could stay home, watch the game on TV and keep your commitment to a mere three hours. But as Atlanta Falcons fan Mark von Dwingelo says, "It's a pain in the neck to watch TV because there's so many commercials."

von Dwingelo obviously never invested the time, money and self-esteem to see the Tampa Bay Bucs play a 1 p.m. game at sweltering Tampa Stadium. Only a real (desperate) man can bear that.

Allowing 45 minutes to traverse either crosstown or bridge traffic, plus stadium gridlock, won't you need at least 90 minutes to two hours before kickoff to properly tailgate? And because beer is only borrowed and there are no trees to duck behind for relief in the parking lot, you'll have to be in the stadium to queue up at the rest rooms at least 20 minutes before 1 p.m.

What about the weather? By November, it sucks in most every NFL city save those in Florida and Southern California.

The game itself will be over by 4 p.m. If you've invested this much time and money already, you must also expect your team could win, something that keeps you in your seat until the last tick of the game clock. If they win, everybody else will stick around, so it'll be impossible to leave the parking lot in a hurry and who would want to? There's a few light beers and a stale bag of open chips in the car, let's celebrate victory for a few hours alongside a couple thousand of our closest pals!




Some people would find all this enough reason to stay home and watch football in front of a TV, just a few paces off the kitchen and toilet. But to many men being there is everything.

"Here in the San Francisco Bay area, with the 49ers," William J. Winslow says, "anybody who goes to the game, everybody else is going to know about it the next day. Tickets are hard to get. It's not so much who they're going to rub elbows with but that they were there. Where the action is. That elevates them."

In cities like San Francisco and Denver or New Jersey's Meadowlands the situation is static. Season ticketholders rule the stadiums, making a fan's presence an issue of status, not cross-strata camaraderie.

"It is a status symbol," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says. "Any time there is a waiting list to get tickets for anything, once you get to be on the top of that list, you are getting something that a lot of people are not getting. The status is not often spelled out but there is that feeling of, 'Hey, I went to the game!' and that may count for something in office conversation.

"I have season tickets to both the Giants and the Jets games," he says. "They are sold out so a lot of people watch the games on TV by default. They would love to go to the stadium but they don't have tickets and they can't get them. There is a long waiting list. I don't know what it is like in other cities where there may not be sell-outs. Here, people generally love to go the games. I think for most guys it is more exhilarating to be out there and feel closer to the field and closer to the action and you tend to get into it more."

• "We tailgate with a group of 17 people, or we go out to breakfast before the game and back to someone's house afterward," Dave Schwarzmueller says. "But their season tickets are all under my name. They say, 'Don't die, Dave!' but I took care of that. I gave my older daughter the names of the people who have the right to a ticket. She's the executor of my estate. She and my lawyer will make sure everybody continues to get their tickets. The teams are really strict about these things. The tickets will still come to me, in my name. All we have to do is a change of address."

• "I don't care where I sit; I sit in the end zone," Bill Price says. "I like to get there at least 90 minutes ahead of the game, watch them practice, soak up the whole thing. It's electric. There's nothing like being there. You can't get that on television."

* * *
New York Giants fan Jim Luttrell journeyed to Pasadena in 1987 for Super Bowl XXI. It was a quick trip; he flew out Saturday morning, watched his Giants stomp the Denver Broncos 39-20 and left on Monday morning.

Image via Wikipedia

"That was a big moment," Luttrell recalls. "And having them win made it more special. But just being there was one of my biggest highlights as a sports fan. We had champagne in the parking lot afterward. That was when we found out that the trunk of a Cutlass Cierra holds water. We didn't have a cooler; Some store owner gave us a cardboard box of ice."

Here's another almost priceless Super Bowl story:

Christmas, 1992. Bill Price visits his daughter in the West Indies, where she's a Peace Corps volunteer. Wading into the ocean, a wave abruptly flips Price over and lands him on his head, breaking several vertebrae. The accident puts him in an upper-body cast for months.

As fate would have it, Price's beloved Buffalo Bills earn an invitation to Super Bowl XXVII a month after his accident and Price acquires two tickets. He tells his doctor that he has to take a plane trip and needs some extra medication; he just doesn't tell him where. Despite the body cast, he and his son go to Pasadena and sit in the Rose Bowl.

"I said to my son, 'Even though we lost, I'm glad to be here,' " Price recalls. "I think this tells you I am a loyal Bills fan: I would do it again."

Buying a $30 football game ticket apparently gives some of us license to have out-of-body experiences.

All week long, men are expected to report to work, be on time, keep our mouths shut and produce, produce, produce. At the stadium, we get to turn that around. Buy a ticket and rearrange the order of the universe. Now the workers bark the demands. And sometimes we can be pretty demanding. Especially standing elbow-to-elbow, brews flowing, hands cupped to mouths and screaming together for what we want: blood.




"It's an ego need," Dr. William J. Beausay says. "The need to be powerful, to be successful, to achieve, to be the king, even if for one week or one day or one hour. These people work every day. They have to answer to a boss. They have to answer to a wife. They have to get the job done. They have bills to pay and everybody is on their ass, so to speak, so for one moment for one day they can buy a ticket and suddenly, they are in charge. They are the coach, the owner and that's why you have the right to get mad and swear and threaten and get mad at the referees too. When you buy that ticket you buy the right to be angry at your team and demand changes and this and that."

It goes back to group crowd psychology. Our ego becomes submerged into the group ego and it's a different set of rules that we go by. Much more aggressiveness is tolerated than would be individually. Many more demands. "I want what I want and if I don't get it, by God, I'm going to let you know!"

There are few restraints upon crowds. With less restraint, fans can do more damage. They can tear down goalposts, throw bottles, get into fights. In crowds, more interpersonal stimulation develops. When people go to a football game they almost have to talk to the person next to them. They rally and encourage each other and the people all around them, railing against a common foe.

"What will happen," Beausay says, "is if the direction of the emotional tone is positive, the fans go sky high. But if the direction of the emotional tone is negative, it can get ugly and very destructive in very short order. Crowd psychology is a peculiar, interesting phenomenon."

Alone, in the stands, most men would be quiet and restrained. But in the company of our friends and family, we become much more vocal.

It's a social experience where we pick up cues from the people we're with. Human beings in a crowd pick up cues as to what is appropriate. To stand up and cheer -- you wouldn't do that at a church service or a poetry reading but at a football game, the norms say it is okay to do certain things, to scream and swear or whatever you wouldn't ordinarily do. When we're alone we wouldn't get up and swear but if we're with somebody we might because it's expected. The other person does it and it seems normal.

The people who go to the games might even be a little bit different than the people who are at home. They have taken the extra effort to go. They dress in special ways that identify them with their team colors. A "psyching" action takes place. They may have been drinking for a while, which also changes the scope of things.

"A friend of mine from Chicago said it is really an experience to go to a hockey game there," Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen says. "For one thing, the social class is different. These tend to be more working class people than what you would find at a Chicago Bears football game. The women that go to the Blackhawks games are differently dressed. In fact, many of them are called 'hockey whores.' They are not whores but they dress in cheap, garish ways. It is part of the culture that has arisen out of hockey. If people go to the game expecting that people are going to be this way, expecting people to behave in these ways, expecting violent things to occur on the field, they are ready at a psychological level that they wouldn't be at home. At home they turn the clicker on and they haven't gone through all of the kind of levels of preparedness that you would going to a game."

What the fan sees before him on the field or around him in the stands -- fights, verbal aggression, spilled beer and thrown food -- make him tense, angry, ready. That doesn't happen in his living room.

Some people would argue that it's a release of pent-up emotions. But Eitzen refutes that.

"The research actually shows that when you leave these games, no matter whether your team won or lost, your level of aggression is higher than when you entered the stadium," the sociologist says. "It is not like you were released of these pent-up emotions. It actually builds these emotions. I think what is happening, and one of the attractions, is we live, for the most part, in kind of a boring world, routine, hum-drum, day-to-day, and we look forward to these things because they bring excitement to an otherwise unexciting life."

* * *
Football games promote social interaction. NFL Sundays mean celebration, food and good times.

The atmosphere and the energy generated in the middle of a stadium, bar or living room crowded with fans is stimulating. It spills over. There is hardly any way men can sit still or be impartial, whether our team is winning or losing, because of the incessant overload and overcharge of energy that is coming from around us. It's almost physical. We can feel it. If you put electrodes on the entire audience the feedback it would be incredible. They're the ones winning and losing, experiencing the thrill.

Dr. William J. Beausay, in his sport psychology research, found that for adults, the amount of stimulation and projection onto football teams is greater in an enclosed arena than in an open stadium. Fewer brawls break out in an open arena. That suggests one reason hockey fans are notorious: They scrunch together in small arenas, literally on top of each other and the players. Their interaction skyrockets, especially in games where there is a lot of personal body contact.

"There is a factor in hockey called 'continuous process,' " Beausay says. "Football is a 'fragmented process' because you run a play and everybody quits and rests and relaxes, then you run another play. Of course there will be brawls and breakouts between plays, but they are the exception to the rule. However, in games like hockey or auto racing the action is continuous. In soccer it keeps going and the soccer fans are known for their violence. When you go and sit for an hour, enduring the constant pressure of the ball going back and forth without a rest, it builds up a tremendous amount of energy. In the end, if their team loses, the fans destroy the stadium or kill people on the other side. That happens all the time."

Former Chicago Bears offensive tackle Dan Jiggetts recalls leaving Soldier Field after games and seeing fans more frenzied than his teammates. "Some people, that's their outlet for the week. They're satisfied. Other people are jacked up, looking for trouble. But the guys leaving the locker rooms are worn out," he says.




Knowing this, more restrained fans may wonder why stadiums don't increase security to reign in the rowdies.

"There has been the question of what happens when there is obviously the presence of a show of force," Beausay says. "For example, at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, they actually brought horsemen in from the Philadelphia Police Department. The question is, does that antagonize or arouse? We did some research on that and found that the presence of force makes people feel a little more secure but if the officers have helmets on or have horses or officers stand around with a police dog, it will actually antagonize fans."

Somehow the presence of peace officers ties in to the natural anger and hostility we have for our opponent. We see security as part of the opponent and it creates trouble. Security tries to blend in as best a person with a gun can, not wanting to trigger or incite the mindset that has been created all week long in rabid fans who come to conquer, not to be vanquished. Any little thing could trigger or tip us off.

* * *
Stadiums establish another sociological curiosity: for three shining hours, they put all men on the same level. People at a lower social strata in the business world get to rub shoulders with people they wouldn't otherwise meet. (Really rich -- or lucky -- folks in secluded, luxury skyboxes are exempt from this phenomenon.)

"You are relating indirectly to 70,000 other people who are cheering and booing and ooohing and aaahing along with you," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says. "Even though you don't even know them you are in some very strange, vague way connecting with them through this common interest."

The stands offer a cross-representation of American culture in most cities, although as ticket prices rise ahead of the rate of inflation, lower-income fans are being squeezed out. The average family of four cannot afford season tickets. One game a season is a special treat as today's outrageous ticket prices and attendant costs keep the wealthy in the stands and the rest of America on the couch.

"When I first became active in the early 1960s, it was very much a blue-collar fan group that was at the games," Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says. "Within a decade it became sort of an elitist fan group, stylish, and I'm sure industry reinforced that by making sections of seats available and buying booths and so on. Football gained increasingly more status in terms of the attendees."

When we go to the game in person we likely will not know the guy/jerk we sit next to. It could be anyone. But because we probably root for the same gang on the field, we could connect with somebody that we'd otherwise never meet.

Sometimes we find ourselves seated beside the enemy, or deep in enemy territory. Going out of town to cheer your team on foreign turf is akin to wearing a "Kick Me" sign. No book of etiquette governs these forays. Nobody wants to act as your host. Stick to the rules of the jungle: Scorn or be scorn. Kill or be killed.

Sitting next to someone who is cheering for the other team tests men in ways that cliff divers and rock climbers understand. Each word, each gesture begs confrontation, verbally or physically. A man can't be expected to sit idly by while his boys are attacked. It's an opportunity to get out your teasing, bantering, hostile side.

For instance, a Buc fan visiting Joe Robbie Stadium might say this to a Dolphin supporter:

"Piss off, you low-life, blowfish-worshipping boatlift refugee!"

To which the Dolphin might answer:

"Loser!"

At which point the Buc fan would shrug, buy another beer and pout about being so effectively dissed with a single word.

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Appendix: Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

by Bob Andelman

Here's a roster of men and women interviewed during research for Why Men Love Football: A Report From the Couch:

Dr. Robert L. Arnstein, retired chief psychiatrist of Yale University Health Services, lives in Hamden, Connecticut

Dr. William J. Beausay, a psychologist in Columbus, Ohio, is founder of the Academy of Sport Psychology International and a consultant to athletes in pro sports such as baseball, football, basketball, hockey and motor racing

Dr. Daniel Begel, a psychiatrist in Milwaukee, is a founder of the International Society for Sport Psychiatry

Eric L. Berger, a personal injury defense attorney for insurance companies in Sunrise, Florida

Ed Berry, a former Marine and retired gardener for the City of San Diego, lives in El Cajon, California

Kenton Blagbrough, a textbook buyer at Boston University

Barry Bradley, senior editor of the Maddux Report, a business magazine in St. Petersburg, Florida

Roger W. Brummett, a vice president of marketing for a human resources management firm in Carmel, Indiana, is founder and president of the Baltimore Colts' Thundering Herd Fan Club

Frank Bryant, a former Army helicopter pilot, is a property developer in Long Beach, California

Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University in Tempe

John Cimasko, a route salesman for Pepsi-Cola in Carmel, Indiana, and charter member of the Baltimore Colts' Thundering Herd Fan Club

Dr. Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, is the author of Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (Moseby-Yearbook)

Dr. Gregory B. Collins, a psychiatrist, is section head of the Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio and is a consultant to NFL teams

Jerry DeForest Jr., owns The Tailgate Sports Bar in Staten Island, New York

Joe DiRaffaele, owns Labor World, a chain of temporary help services based in Coconut Creek, Florida

Joe Diroff, a retired Navy man and former mathematics teacher, lives in Detroit

Barry Dreayer, a salesman/consultant for computer software and voice mail systems, taught a course for sports novices called "TeachMeSports" in Atlanta

Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen, a professor of sociology at Colorado State University at Fort Collins is a past-president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport and co-author (with Dr. George H. Sage) of Sociology of North American Sport (William C. Brown)

Bill Evans, a marketing manager with Compuserve in Columbus, Ohio

Keith Farber, a courier in Buena Park, California

Richard M. "Rick" Georges, an attorney in St. Petersburg, Florida

Dr. Daniel M. Glick, a psychiatrist in Scottsdale, Arizona

Pat Harmon, an historian for the College Football Hall of Fame in Kings Island, Ohio

Peter Hendricks, an attorney in New Brunswick, N.J.

Dr. Edward R. Hirt, professor of psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington

Harold Hyman, a property manager in Tamarac, Florida

Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, a sport psychologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, is the co-author (with Brad Hatfield) of Psychology of Sports: A Social Psychological Approach (Wm. C. Brown)

Dan Jiggetts, a former offensive tackle with the Chicago Bears, is a sportscaster with WSCR Radio and WBBM-TV in Chicago (partner of Mike North at WSCR)

David Johnson, a truck driver, lives in Chula Vista, California

Bruce Kessler, a warehouseman in North Brunswick, New Jersey, taught the author of Why Men Love Football how to play football

Jim Luttrell, a copy chief with the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky

Palmiro "Paul" Mazzoleni, a retired service station owner and founder of Martha's Coffee Club in Green Bay, Wisconsin

Larry Mayer, managing editor of the Chicago Bear Report, lives in Palatine, Illinois

Volney Meece, a retired sportswriter of 41 years experience, is executive director of the Football Writers Association of America in Edmond, Oklahoma

Jim Melvin, a health and fitness writer and copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida

Dr. Michael A. Messner, a sociologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is the author Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Beacon Press) and co-editor (with Dr. Don Sabo) of Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Human Kinetics Publishers)

Mike North, a sports radio personality at WSCR-Radio in Chicago (partner of Dan Jiggetts)

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at San Jose State University, is a director of the Institute of Athletic Motivation

Jerry Pigeon, a banker in Green Bay, Wisconsin

William E. "Bill" Price, an associate professor of mathematics at Niagara University in New York

Jim Runels, a retired Nabisco Brands sales management executive, lives in Yorba Linda, California

Dr. Don Sabo, a sociologist at D'Youville University in Amherst, N.Y., is author of Jock: Sports and Male Identity (Prentice Hall), co-editor (with Dr. Michael Messner) of Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Human Kinetics Publishers) and one-time football captain at the State University of New York at Buffalo

Dr. Allen L. Sack, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the sports management program at the University of New Haven, Connecticut, played defensive end for the University of Notre Dame's 1966 championship football team

Dr. George H. Sage, a retired professor of kinesiology and sociology at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, is the author of Power and Ideology in American Sport (Human Kinetics) and co-author (with Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen) of Sociology of North American Sport (Wm. C. Brown)

Dave Schwarzmueller, a banker in West Seneca, New York

Larry Selvin, a financial accountant in West Roxbury, Mass.

Dr. John M. Silva, a professor of sport psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a co-editor of Psychological Foundations of Sport (Human Kinetics)

Andrew L. Spear, a music sales representative in San Francisco (and Jeff's brother)

Jeff Spear, a comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in Los Angeles (and Andrew's brother)

Joe Surdi, a barber in St. Petersburg, Florida

Michele Szynal, a communications manager for the North Atlantic Group of The Gillette Company in Boston

Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum, a clinical psychologist in New York City

Dr. Thomas A. Tutko, a clinical psychologist at San Jose State University and a director of the Institute of Athletic Motivation.

Dr. Mark Unterberg, a psychiatrist and executive medical director of Green Oaks Medical City in Dallas, is a consultant to NFL and NBA teams

Aaron Vaughn, a copy editor at the Valley Daily News in Kent, Washington

Mark H. von Dwingelo, a hospitality industry management consultant in Atlanta

Dr. Rick Weinberg, a clinical psychologist at the University of South Florida's Florida Mental Health Institute in Tampa

Neil Wiesenfeld, owner of a promotional advertising company in Atlanta

Ralph Weisbeck, a retired executive of a tool manufacturing company, lives in Williamsville, New York

H. R. "Dick" Williams, a retired cleaning services contractor and founder of the Houston Oilers fan organization, The Derrick Club, in Sugar Land, Texas

Ann Winkler, advertising manager for Apple Computer

William J. Winslow, president of the Institute of Athletic Motivation in Redwood City, California

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 18. 57 Channels

by Bob Andelman

"I typically watch games by myself. Particularly while I'm watching the Giants. I'm not too receptive to other people's comments, particularly if they don't like the Giants. I get a little intense. I'm fixated on the TV. When the Giants were in Super Bowl XXV in Tampa, I watched it with my wife, my mother-in-law and her husband. I kept turning up the TV every time they started a conversation. My mother-in-law was undaunted. She kept reminding everyone that Buffalo was making a comeback. I about threw her out the window."

Mark von Dwingelo
Management consultant
Atlanta

Football became America's darling in the late 1960s and early '70s when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle made television a partner in his sport. Little did Rozelle imagine what would happen two decades later when remote control clickers, cable and home satellite receivers joined the fray.

The vast majority of football fans these days prefer to watch their teams charge on to fields of glory from the comfort of their living rooms. The explosion of televised games broadened some geographic boundaries and erased others, creating legions of fans whose loyalty knows no state lines.




Millions more watch football on TV (or listen on radio) than could possibly fit into all the college and pro stadiums ever built in the United States. And even if there were enough seats to accommodate them there are plenty of other limitations -- distance and cost, to name two. People who live in the middle of Nebraska, South Dakota or Wyoming can't get to many pro football games in person. However, they, like transplanted New Yorkers living in Miami, can still catch most of the Jets and Giants games, while Bostonians are at ease praying for the fortunes of the Cowboys and Oilers.

Football, far and away, is the sport that translates best to television. The slow stop-and-go grind works wonderfully on the home screen. Hockey must be the worst for TV, because the puck moves so fast and suddenly the camera fails to accurately follow it.

• "I like watching on TV because you get to watch more than one game at a time," Eric Berger, a lawyer in Sunrise, Florida, says. "I'm a remote-control madman. In Fort Lauderdale, my cable company carries the NBC and CBS affiliates from both Miami and West Palm Beach. Sometimes the affiliates show different games. It's so enjoyable. Doing it as long and as much as I have -- with the benefit of instant-replay -- you can watch all that without missing any important parts of the game. And yes, it drives my wife crazy."

• Browns fan Bill Evans grew up in Cleveland and lives in Columbus today. "I watch football on TV; I've been to very few games in my life," he says. "Even if I lived in Cleveland, I wouldn't go to every game. The weather is crappy. On TV, I can watch other things, I can watch two or three games and get replays."

• In college, Andrew Spear found it impossible to get tickets to see the Denver Broncos. It was much easier -- and cheaper -- to watch the games on television. It turned into a ritual; now living in San Francisco, he watches up to four pro games a week.

"I don't watch every game on television," Spear says. "But I do set aside time to watch the teams I follow: the Broncos, 49ers and the Vikings. In that order. I watch with close friends or alone. The best is when I'm with somebody, but it has to be somebody who pays attention to the game."




A brilliantly choreographed 1993 commercial featured Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith complaining that football moves so fast he never gets to meet anybody new. With Smith as our guide, we see the football field through his eyes: Speeding down field, he introduces himself to opposing players while streaking past them. "Hi, I'm Emmitt . . . Hi, I'm Emmitt . . . "

TV games differ significantly from the ones ticket buyers see while wedged in the stands at the Metrodome or the L.A. Coliseum. Multiple cameras and angles -- overhead, on the sidelines, in the end zones and even strapped to the helmets of players -- bring the game to the home viewer from every possible point of view.

"I'd much prefer to watch a game on TV where I can see replays and not have to catch a bus to the stadium and back," Larry Mayer, managing editor of the Chicago Bear Report, says "I had season tickets for 10 years until I got this job. Maybe it was my seats; I used to tape the games, rush home and see what I missed."

Mayer's got nothing on Bill Price, however.

When the Buffalo Bills are on the road, the season ticketholder sets his VCR to record the game on television and goes out to a movie. He finds that watching the games live on TV makes him too tense. Radio is even worse. When he returns from the movie, he'll catch the end of the game, listen to post-game commentary and reaction, then rewind to the beginning and watch the whole thing.

"People find that odd," Price says, "but I'd rather find out the result all at once and watch the game slowly. Even if they lose, I watch it." In fact, he also tapes home games and rushes home from Bills Stadium to watch the whole thing over again instead of watching a second game. "It's very enjoyable to watch your team win, I'll tell you that," he says.

Another Bills fan, retired tool company executive Ralph Weisbeck, appreciates guys like Price who buy enough tickets to ensure sell-outs of Buffalo home games so Weisbeck can watch them from the comfort of his easy chair. "You get better seats at home," he says.

* * *
Why do men sit glued to the tube every fall, watching hour after hour of football, cheerfully excluding everything around them? Hint: It ain't the shoes, Spike.

One of the things that happens with football -- and this is probably true of other sports as well -- is that we don't continually lose and we don't continually win. We may be in the middle, where we win more than we lose, or vice versa, but it's the concept of partial reinforcement. What that means is that our team wins just enough so that the hook is set and we're going to be interested in it. Even if our guys didn't win today, there were a whole series of great passes, great hits, good defense and good offense. We get enough within the game to build hope.

Part of the repeated viewing is a man's identification with his team. He becomes very possessive of "his" Colts or "his" Chargers. That's a positive identification. There is also negative identification, when a person is against the other team, as in "I'm for whoever plays Minnesota."

"There is also a third kind of identification," Tutko says. "These are people who just love the game. They could go to a high school game and not even know who the two teams are and still enjoy the game."

That description would fit Harold Hyman: "Oh, man," Hyman says. "Saturday, all day, and Sunday, it's the same. I watch bits and pieces of whatever's on. I don't know if I'd watch three hours of Oregon-Oregon State, but if it's on TV, the game is on in our house. Monday night, I'm doing other things, but the game is on."

Dr. Thomas A. Tutko believes that this form of ultrafans, the ones who live to watch NFL, college, Canadian Football League and Arena Football League games, may be overdoing it.

"It can become an incredible escape," he says. "There are some people who are absolute sports buffs. It is a retreat from reality. It's identification outside their jobs. They're hunting for other places that they can have some kind of tie or emotion. Thoreau said men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think that is true for a number of people. The sport allows them an adrenalin rush, a bit of excitement."

Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry, agrees. He calls football "an antidote for despair."

* * *
Just as an entire tailgating culture developed around seeing football games in person, so do rituals take place for those who watch on television.

"I won't schedule things for Sunday afternoons," Boston's Kenton Blagbrough says. "Sunday afternoon is for football games. I plan prior to the 12:30 pre-game show to make sure I've eaten lunch so I'm not making noise and miss anything. I make sure whatever has to get done gets done so I have uninterrupted viewing pleasure. I reserve 12:30- 7 p.m. for watching football."

That's what most of us do: Buy some chips and beer and invite the guys over to watch the game on a 30-inch set, preferably one with picture-in-picture so we can monitor a second game. Or show up three hours before kickoff to secure our favorite table at the neighborhood sports bar, the one with the 6-foot screen and smaller TVs everywhere you turn.

Dan Jiggetts says there is even a certain etiquette to be followed when the guys come over to watch a game: "If they're over your house and eating your chow, chances are they want to be for your team," he says.

* * *
Another reason football is such a hit on television is that it is finite in terms of the time commitment each game requires. An NFL game takes three hours. Set your clock by it, unless the contest goes into overtime. College games last almost as long. It isn't hard to plan a day knowing that from 1-4 p.m. or 4-7 p.m., you're going to be in the living room, watching the Dolphins-Bills game. Try scheduling your day around a baseball game. It's impossible because the games can be as short as 2-1/2 hours or as long as 4 hours.

That element of predictability appeals to us. Rules and parameters exist to control what can and can't happen. We take comfort in knowing what the limits are. A script determines the number of acts and duration but at the same time we bow to the excitement of not knowing how it's going to be played out. In that respect football resembles soap opera.

Drama lures many men to the game. While it may be an overstatement to suggest that on any Sunday, any team could beat any other team, miracles do occur. And sometimes the best contests occur when not just the best teams go head-to-head but when the worst slug it out.

No matter who plays, the final score of a football game isn't a certainty till the fourth quarter gun is fired. Suspense and the ever-present specter of a comeback are what keep the games fresh.

"Every game is like a new story, an individual drama being played out," Harold Hyman says. "I've sat in games being a Gator or Dolphins fan thinking there's no way they can win, and yet they do."

That drama is what keeps the real fans' butts glued to the seats of their La-Z-Boys. But the real appeal for the stay-at-home set is their interaction with the TV.

• "Yes, I do scream at the TV set. Occasionally," Eric Berger says. "Whether it be a bad call or a bonehead play or just a great play by the team I'm not rooting for. It's been ingrained in us since we were young kids to scream at the TV like it's going to have some affect. It doesn't of course."

Berger does not yell at the television for anything other than sports. He says.

• Bill Evans says that of all the televised sports, football best fits his lifestyle.

"Because of the way the game is structured -- action/time-out/action -- it fits what I do on a Sunday," he says. "I can do dishes, I can look away if I have to, as opposed to basketball, which constantly demands your attention."

Some guys are not big TV fans, but they will watch football all day long. Dave Schwarzmueller is one of them.

"I pound the hell out of chairs," he says. "I have an easy chair and I have a tendency to pound the armrests when I get mad. I'll swear when the Bills blow an easy play."

* * *
Baseball, which Dr. Allen L. Sack refers to as a "pastoral game" is more consistent with the values of an earlier, slower-paced America, a country of expansive green fields and grazing cattle.

"Baseball resonated quite well with that kind of life, just before or after the Civil War," Sack says. "But our society has gotten increasingly bureaucratized and industrialized. We have gone from a task-orientation where people worked at a craft and were not preoccupied with assembly line production, to a time-orientation where people work in industries."

Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management theory, wrote and influenced managerial thought in the early 20th century. Taylor felt industry could achieve greater productivity by studying workers very closely. He instituted time and motion studies to eliminate waste.

"Football is more consistent than baseball with Taylor's highly rationalized approach to life, business and society," Sack says. "Whereas baseball is of a slower pace, football fits better with modern industrial values. Especially in notions of time and the passing of time and the tremendous importance we place on every minute that is wasted by inefficiency. First and 10 -- you've got 10 yards and 4 downs and everything is very rationalized. You've got a field laid out in grids. You've got time-outs and sometimes they don't even go into a huddle. The quarterback goes right to the line of scrimmage. It gets faster and faster and the action is constant. It's not the subtlety and the grace and the slowness of movement that you find in a baseball game. You don't have to be particularly subtle to understand and to enjoy football. You can enjoy it without subtlety because every couple of seconds there is another really devastating tackle or shrieks from the crowd or halftime or firecrackers or pageantry or a player being hurt and carried off the field or a fight."

This leads into another major theory of why men love football: instant gratification.

Men long for action. Women provide action. So does gambling. But the easiest, cheapest way to action requires a TV.

For quick stimulation, football beats other sports, cleats down. Hockey and soccer can go whole periods without a score. But in football, you can have an explosive play any minute. And instant replays. Over and over again. Americans prefer action over defense.

"The reason I like football is the excitement," Larry Mayer says. "It mixes a lot of variables: strategy, violence, great athleticism. It's not scripted. You don't know what's going to happen. Anything can happen. In basketball, the game doesn't matter until the last few minutes. In football, teams can come back. "

Football looks like human pinball on the video screen, especially the way young men surf from channel to channel with their remote controls looking for the next big hit. They drive the older guys crazy, punching buttons faster than Dad and Uncle Morty can focus on the last image. They only stop on action.

Adults appreciate slow intrigue but that's not what the kids stop on. They stop on the first murder they see or someone doing a ninja drop-kick on somebody and knocking their lights out. Or they stop on a football or basketball game. It doesn't take much patience to enjoy that. They're not going to stop on baseball because a pitcher is standing on the mound, rubbing a ball or a conference is taking place or, more likely, just endless pitch after pitch and nothing happening. Kids pull away from that.

"Football, because it gives you rapid and instant gratification in terms of seeing action, is far better than other sports," Sack says.

Chapter 19. Bud Bowling for Dollars

by Bob Andelman

"Why do men watch football? Because they're bored with their lives. And wives. And it's a bonding thing. And one more thing -- it's because we love beer."

Joe Surdi
Barber
St. Petersburg, Florida

In the 1970's, the corporate underpinnings and ramifications of football exploded, accelerating development of the sports industry itself. Sports as a marketing vehicle became increasingly more apparent to corporations and they seized the moment and the opportunity.

Symbiotic relationships developed between sports and corporate America and between sports and the mass media that created the media-moneyed monster of late 20th century football. The mass-marketing, spectacularization and mediaization of the football spectacle fed the game in a reciprocal relationship.

The NFL worked hand-in-glove with the major television networks to use TV as a means of not only socializing the American people into the role of football spectator but also to associate football with the consumption of products through commercials. Later, the NFL turned its marketing inside out to generate new products from its primary product, spinning off an unbelievably sophisticated system of licensed goods associated with NFL teams. All sports do this now, but the NFL was the first.

Which raises another marketing/consumption issue: Why do we wear or advertise our team on our clothing?

"Americans have been duped into wearing corporate labels as signs of status," says Dr. Jay Coakley, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. "We pay $15.00 extra for a shirt that advertises Ralph Lauren or Adidas or Nike -- the person who designed it or made it or promoted it or whatever. The wearing of team insignias and licensed things are simply done to express your connection with a local group of people and a local symbol. It is significant on a collective level because it provides a rallying point for people. It provides a social access to others. If somebody has a Broncos hat on, you know that in addition to saying hello, you can also say one other thing and know that you'll have conversational access to that person."

Advertising messages on hats and clothes telegraph our interests, offering a way to connect with perfect strangers, like pinning a name tag on your lapel at an Elks convention. It may not lead to intimate connections but it can provide access to an urban environment otherwise characterized impersonally.

TV commercials during football games seek to reaffirm ideas about meritocracy and masculinity.

Advertisers on football games promote products where men make most of the consumption decisions, such as beer. Other advertisers include investments and insurance companies, especially insurance companies that sell policies to men who are the sole or major wage earners within their families and discover that their families are dependent on them. Isn't it up to them -- as responsible human beings -- to have at least a million dollars worth of life insurance?

Luxury cars fit into these notions of meritocracy, class relations, achievement and upward social mobility as being absolutely essential to a man's identity. Investment opportunities, luxury vacations and even tires are products for which men make the major family consumption decisions and they are products which are related to dominant definitions in masculinity and to the ideology of meritocracy. They are successful men's products.

Madison Avenue's message to football fans: If you buy these products you will be successful or if you already buy these products you must be successful.

"From what I know about advertising," Coakley says, "most advertisers don't think consumers are so gullible as to conclude that, 'If I buy this I'm going to be successful.' What they want to do is associate their stuff with the whole ideology of success so that people who become successful feel that they have to have these things to prove it."

There are, of course, different definitions of success for different men. Might Old Milwaukee's luscious Swedish Bikini Team drop in on my tailgate party because we happen to be drinking OM beer? Worth keeping an extra six on ice -- just in case. The Gillette theme runs through my head when I'm buying a new razor. Gee, that quarterback in their commercial -- the one surrounded by luscious babes -- looked a lot better groomed than I usually do. Maybe I'll get a better shave with a Gillette. Better something, anyway.

Football is unique because dominant definitions of masculinity are such that they make men very insecure. It leads men to compete with each other often in a cut-throat way.

"When you focus in on football," Coakley says, "you are seeing and listening to commentary that emphasizes that these people are the epitome of masculinity. People wouldn't play this game unless they were true men. This is what manhood is all about -- physical domination is crucial and a pecking order between men is very obvious. These people on the field are better because they can physically and effectively dominate another human being.




"So there is this notion on the one hand," he says, "that football is celebrating the power and privilege of men as a whole but it is also creating an ideology that leads men to compete with one another and, in a sense, to see their status in terms of how much they can dominate one another. It makes men very insecure about who they are as individuals. It makes them insecure in terms of how desirable they may be to women or how attractive they may be in the eyes of women. So when you get men liking football, you've got a bunch of people who are emotionally ready to hear messages that they can then take and turn into consumption patterns that will make them even more attractive or more manly."

Certainly corporate America uses football to peddle its wares. Apple launched its Macintosh computers during Super Bowl XVIII in 1984. The advertising campaign received almost as much attention as the revolutionary new product.

"I can't consider anything that doesn't deliver," says Ann Winkler, advertising manager for Apple Computer. "I'd say it's best to be involved in something like football that people are involved with. Of course, I'm a football fan. I'd put anything on a Redskins game."

Gillette introduced men to its Sensor razor in 1991 during Super Bowl XXV. Sensor went on to become -- according to Gillette -- the most successful new shaving product ever introduced. Two years later, it debuted a line of men's toiletries as Dallas pummelled Buffalo in Super Bowl XXVII.

And who could forget the sudsy annual Bud Bowl, pitting the computer-generated beer teams of Budweiser and Bud Lite?

Why do corporations find football to be such an effective tool?

"Fans are loyal to products that support the things they enjoy," Winkler says.
* * * There are 75 million men watching football every weekend. There are only 250 million in the entire U.S. population. More than a quarter of the population attends football games or watches them on TV. And if they miss the game, they'll read about it in the newspaper the next day or catch the late news for highlights and scores. Many men do all of the above: attend the game, videotape it for later viewing, watch the late sports news and read about it the next day.

Corporations know this and also know that they are going to get a bigger audience advertising during football games than anywhere else. Those that can't buy TV spots buy radio. Or they spend big for stadium signs that will appear in the background during TV coverage. They sponsor replays on stadium video screens, put their names on blimps that fly over outdoor stadiums, buy advertising in programs and generally make their presence felt.

"We have a men's product," says Michele Szynal, a communications manager for Gillette in Boston. "On Super Bowl Sunday, the audience is men, men 15 and over, men who shave. Super Bowl has become the premium male sporting event. It delivers. We want to reach these guys and they're there, watching that game. Maybe there's a greater percentage of men who don't watch sports. But since there's a great percentage who do, we go with sports."

The next obvious question: Why is this advertising effective with men?

"The need to be important, successful, powerful, the need to win," says Dr. William J. Beausay, a Columbus, Ohio-based psychologist. "Advertisers are championing their products. If you look at all the beer commercials, they are going straight at the men. It's all macho. Anything you can do, I can do better. Whether it's cars or beer or successful people who are drinking their beer."

Football and alcohol go together like Mom, apple pie and baseball in the minds of many fans.

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says the video wallpapering of beer commercials and advertisements during football games acts as reinforcement to the inclined beer drinker. "It is like a great tapestry that they weave and it includes sucking on a can or bottle of beer while eating popcorn," he says. "It is almost out of character now if you don't merge with the projected scene of what a fan should be."
* * * Barry Dreayer believes in football as a business tool.

"Football is a tremendous asset in business," says the Atlanta-based computer software and voice mail salesman. "When you're trying to establish a rapport with somebody, when trust is a hurdle to get over, there's no better rapport-builder than sports. If somebody buys a new car, what are you going to talk about? Their passion. I sell products over the phone; most of my clients are out of town. If I've got a client in Manhattan, Kansas, I can virtually assume he's a big fan of Kansas State football and basketball."

Here's an example of Dreayer doing his thing:

"'Bob, how are you doing? This is Barry Dreayer with Front Row Systems . . . I notice you're in the Dallas area. Is the town still going crazy over the Super Bowl? . . . Yeah? . . . Well, I went to the University of Florida -- Emmitt Smith is in my will now. . . '

"Once you break the ice," Dreayer says, "the barrier is broken. If the guy in Dallas loves Emmitt Smith -- which he should -- we've got something in common."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!