The Revolt of the Fans
The British sociologist Ernest Cashmore suggests that the festive behavior was encouraged by elites—stadium and team owners—as a peaceable alternative to hooliganism. “They were pacified,” he says of the hooligans, “by replica shirts, videos, logo-plastered bedsheets, face painting and a miscellany of commodities derived from a sport that realized that the only way to prosper was to re-invent itself.”34 Whether they did so to “pacify” the fans or not, the stadium owners quickly seized on and amplified many of the new forms of fan behavior: In the United States, they installed “Cheer Meters” in the stadiums so that the fans could measure the noise they contributed, along with message boards on video screens to exhort the fans to cheer louder or commence the wave. They added fireworks, sexily clad cheerleaders, more kinds of mascots, loud recorded music, and live music from pipe organs.35 They encouraged costuming, “often asking the fans to wear a certain color. Indeed, the sale of such items is an important part of total revenue.”36 A woman attending a 1999 game reported, with some relief, that American football had at last become entertaining.
I came prepared to hate the game—but turns out it was really just a flashy, well-staged show. Football was kinda the extra added attraction. There were fantastic scoreboards at each end of the field with slick video productions, rock music, and a light screen that told the crowd when to do the wave—football fans not being smart enough to figure it out on their own.37
But the commercial exploitation of various forms of fan behavior—by face paint purveyors or by team owners trying to attract demographic groups, like women, who had not previously been fans—tells us nothing about the initial urge to paint and costume and sing and do the wave. “These ritual displays are impressive,” Morris observed of English soccer-fan behavior in the 1970s, “because they have grown naturally from within the ranks of the fans themselves.”38 A few individual innovators deserve some credit: There is Claudio Ribeiro, or “Cotton Bud,” in São Paulo, a veteran of brutal poverty, who made a name for himself as “the hyperactive, drumming lunatic with the ever-expanding Afro that TV pictures always hone in on during Brazil’s World Cup games.”39 There is Edward Anzalone, a New York City firefighter, who rides into games on his brother’s shoulders, wearing a green and white fire helmet and leading a Jets chant.40 Or we might consider Josh Rosenberg, the founder of the Oakland A’s Drummers, a group of five young men who drum loudly, if somewhat chaotically, from their favorite spot in the left-field bleachers.41
One might, rather innocently, hypothesize that festive forms of fan behavior simply represent an intensified loyalty to the sports teams, but it is hard to see why such loyalty should have been increasing at a time when the teams were showing less and less loyalty to their fans. In the United States anyway, the late twentieth century saw a fairly heartless degree of commercialization, with whole teams being sold off to distant cities at their owners’ whims. As Sports Illustrated observed, with some perplexity, in 1992:
Sports have become so desentimentalized that it’s hard to believe anyone can even root for the same team from one year to the next. Neither players nor owners seem to acknowledge the fans’ loyalty, much less repay it. And yet every time you walk into a ballpark or flip on ESPN, there seem to be more and more superfans, megafans, uberfans: fans who yell louder, dress louder, spend more, suffer more, exult more and even seem to care more.42
Besides, fan loyalty could be expressed in many less festive ways—with closer attention to the game itself, for example, rather than with actions like the wave that are known to annoy the players.
Whatever their degree of team loyalty, the fact is that the fans were choosing to express it in ways that drew attention away from the game and to themselves. As Susan Faludi observes of the Cleveland Browns’ blue-collar fans, the “Dawgs”: “Rabid fans increasingly became focused not on helping the players perform but on cultivating their own performances. The show in the stands began to conflict with, even undermine, the drama on the gridiron.”43 Or as the reporter—and ardent soccer fan—Alex Bellos reflects on the São Paulo fan organization called the Hawks of the Faithful: “It strikes me that the football experience has come full circle. With the Hawks, the football [soccer] fan is no longer a spectator. He is the spectacle. The Hawks are the football fans that have their own fans.”44
At least part of the explanation for the fans’ new insistence on being part of the show must be television. Sports had been televised almost since the invention of the medium, but in the United States it was only in the 1970s that they broke into prime time—with ABC’s Monday Night Football leading the way. One of the immediate effects of television, as Guttmann notes, was to change the demographics of the crowd in the stadium. Since older fans could now enjoy the game at home, without the discomforts of hard seats and inclement weather, the stadium crowds got younger.45 We might generalize, and speculate that television allowed the elimination, from the stadium, of any fan who did not seek the stadium experience; if it was only the game that interested you, you could watch it at home or in a bar. So by a process of natural selection, the people who actually attended the games tended to be those who sought the thrill of the crowd.
There is no doubt that television encourages exhibitionist fan behavior, in at least two ways. First, it offers some of the more exuberant fans—those willing, for example, to dress and paint themselves outlandishly or strip to the waist in freezing weather—the chance to achieve a tiny measure of fame. “Rock ‘n’ Rollen” Stewart, for example, eagerly sought the cameras’ attention and was finally rewarded with a part in a Budweiser commercial. In her analysis of Cleveland Browns fans, Faludi observes: “The battle now, the one that fans and players alike were caught up in, was really for the camera’s attention. The show of hard hats, of dog suits, of toughing it out in the rain and the snow, in the end, became exactly that—a show, a beauty contest of sorts, where the object was to attract the camera with bizarre caricatures of working stiffs.”46 The second, and more significant, effect of television is of course to spread exhibitionist—or perhaps we should say, less judgmentally, spectacular—forms of fan behavior from country to country and sport to sport. If it’s almost impossible to pin down the origins of particular kinds of behavior, like face painting or doing the wave, this is because they are picked up by fans in other places almost as soon as they are invented.
Another outside force affecting fan behavior starting in the 1970s was rock ‘n’ roll. South Americans had long enjoyed danceable music at their soccer matches, generally provided by drumming fans and accompanied by dancing in the bleachers. In the United States, games had traditionally been fairly music-free except for the singing of the national anthem and the marching music provided by drill teams during halftime or other breaks. The exception, until the 1950s, were the games of segregated, all-black sports leagues, which were enlivened by blues or jazz bands and much dancing in the stands. Only in the 1970s did rock’n’ roll find a place in the pageantry of major league American sports, bringing with it some of rock’s rebellious spirit, or at least a desire to get up out of the seats and become part of the show.
American sports and rock music did not at first seem to be likely partners. “The ’60s were about youth culture, and sports weren’t peddled as part of that culture,” according to a Rolling Stone editor in 1999. “Rock-and-roll sort of defined itself in opposition to the NFL.”47 Or as Bob Weir, who had played football in high school before becoming a member of the Grateful Dead, put it: “In the ’60s, music and sports were worlds apart. People who were into sports were generally a little more accepting of a regimented life and basically lived like soldiers … Musicians—if something didn’t suit us, we’d make a little stink or just not obey orders.”48
But by the early 1970s, some of the college marching bands that played at breaks were abandoning military music for rock tunes, perhaps in response to the antiwar mood on campuses. Recorded rock music began showing up at professional games
in the latter part of the decade, a development that Time attributes to the emergence of a newly hip mood among America’s corporate executives, the group that supplies most team owners: “Corporate America shed its square image and began incorporating antiestablishment themes into advertising,”49 and from that it was apparently a short step to incorporating rock into sports events. But the innovation would never have survived if the fans had rejected it, and, increasingly, sports fans themselves were likely to be veterans of rock concerts, perhaps held in the same stadium as the game, and brought with them a certain impatience with the spectator’s appointed role as a seat warmer. Besides, if rock could be found in commercials, in elevator Muzac, at weddings—why not at the big game?
However unlikely their original union, rock and American sports were soon as tightly mated as baseball and beer. By 1994, commentators were even talking about a potential merger of sports and rock music: “The distinctions between the two industries [sports and music] are fading, becoming just another facet of the mammoth entertainment industry.”50 Stadium managers now employ music staffs of up to ten people to determine the playlist that will go with the game; music companies have come to view professional sports franchises as an outlet on the same scale as radio stations.51
The result is a kind of event that a blind person, wandering into the stadium, would have difficulty distinguishing from a rock concert, with music at breaks, after significant plays, when a new player comes up to bat, and to celebrate victory at the end. Not any song will do; a special genre of rock—“jock rock”—has been adapted to service the sports industry, including generally well-known hits such as Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” as well as songs, like the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out,” made famous largely through sports venues. Jock rock, collections of which can be purchased on CDs, leans heavily toward anthemic, pump-it-up tunes like Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and the Village People’s “YMCA,” but stadiums’ playlists include more varied fare too, including songs by Santana, Eminem, the Clash, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Halftime at the 2006 Super Bowl featured the Rolling Stones, with the fans swaying and holding up lighters, exactly as they would do at a concert.
No one, to my knowledge, has studied the impact of rock on any aspect of sports, from ticket sales to the athletes’ performance. It is unlikely to improve the latter, judging from players’ complaints about the noise, which can reach a decibel level approaching that of rock concerts.52 But for the fans, the effect of rock music at sporting events is probably much the same as its effect at concerts: It makes people want to jump up and dance. No doubt this exuberance is carefully contained at stadiums, just as it is limited to scheduled times—halftime and other kinds of breaks—but the experience of dancing in the bleachers with fifty thousand other people has to be compelling. One fan describes outbreaks of dancing at Yankee Stadium, “where male members of the grounds crew lip-synch and dance to ‘YMCA’ as they sweep the infield during the fifth inning break, and are joined in performance by the ballpark crowd en masse.”53 A commentator writes of the effect of Gary Glitter’s song “Rock and Roll Part 2,” to which the fans shout “Hey!”: “I first heard it in Denver at a Steelers-Broncos game, and the faithful there, who are as committed a group of fans as any I’ve ever seen, literally would rock Mile High Stadium. The stands would actually shake and sway when they bounced up and down and reached a Rocky Mountain ‘Hey!’”54 Rock ramps up the party atmosphere—the mood of excess and self-abandonment—which in turn encourages the more extravagant forms of costuming, face painting, and stadium-wide synchronized motions. Decades earlier, in the middle of the century, sports events in America had been fairly disciplined, thoroughly masculine gatherings, heavy on the marching music and other militaristic flourishes. Rock entered this unlikely setting and carved out a space for Dionysian pleasure.
While Americans were acquiring the habit of dancing at games, global soccer culture was encouraging the notion of the game as an occasion for festivity, regardless of its outcome. An American reporter observed in 1994 that
some Americans like to party before games. Some like to party afterward. Some do both. Brazil and Holland say: Why let the game interrupt a good party? … At World Cup, which is held every four years, the fans feel they are part of the game. And your team doesn’t even have to be here. Take those five guys dressed in green and gold, including one dressed as a banana. They’re from Tokyo. Spent about $4,000 each to jet in for the Brazil game.55
Nationalism remains a potent force motivating soccer fans at international matches, but some fans transcend it to celebrate any team’s performance. At the England-Denmark game at the 2002 World Cup, for example, the Japanese spectators, who made up half of the stadium crowd, wore red and white in support of England, even though there was still a possibility that Japan might face England in the semifinals.56 Most fans, of course, retain an intense loyalty to their teams and interest in the technical aspect of the games, but there seems to be a kind of hollowing out of sports events going on, as the game diminishes in comparison to the pageantry and the collective high induced by tens of thousands of people singing, chanting, and dancing in unison.
But if the carnivalization of sports represents a kind of victory for the fans—a chance to party and break free of the traditional passivity of the spectator role—it was not a victory for the same kind of fans who created modern spectator sports in the first place. Obviously, few working-class fans can afford to travel to soccer matches in distant countries, and the price of a ticket to a home game rose precipitously in the 1990s, thanks to fancy new stadiums and skyrocketing salaries for the players. In 1996, a sports sociologist noted that, with the price of a ticket for American hockey, football, and basketball games approaching fifty dollars, “the high cost of going to sporting events has denied the underclass and even the lower-middle class from attending them.”57 In the United Kingdom, new “all seater” stadiums not only inflated the price of tickets but eliminated the terraces in which working-class fans once stood as a mass to sing and clap in synchrony. Working-class fans have been “cut out of the loop,” according to Faludi: “Fans of value were the rich and corporate who could afford the luxury boxes and personal seat licenses, the latter costing as much as $5,000 in some cities. Watching a football game in person … was like buying a car now; it required a down payment.”58
Whether the festive atmosphere of the games will survive this demographic change remains to be seen. In the last few years, the wealthiest fans have signaled their distaste for the ongoing carnival by withdrawing into their own closed-in skyboxes or luxury suites built into the stadium, where executives can pursue business deals over cocktails and buffet meals while keeping an eye on the game. An article in American Way magazine explains the need for the growing separation of the classes.
If a CEO is forking over a cool million a year [in fees for his luxury suite at the stadium] to wheel and deal new clients, he or she isn’t the least bit interested in bumping elbows with bleacher-seat fans. The last person these people would want in their private room is a fanatic who paints his face and hollers obscenities at the officials. (Ironically, a team’s most loyal fans are often those least likely to be able to afford such luxurious accommodations.)59
As for the working-class fans who have been priced out of their erstwhile gathering place: Maybe they will be able to keep the tradition of festive fandom alive within the sports bars, which have proliferated within the United States to the point where it is hard to find a bar without team paraphernalia and multiple large-screen TVs permanently tuned to the sports channels. Or maybe, like the folk football and footraces of centuries ago, the colorful traditions of late-twentieth-century sports fandom will be lost forever—at least to the class of people who invented them.
Conclusion:
The Possibility of Revival
As we saw at the beginning of this book, nineteenth-century Protestant reformers sometimes sought to shame European carnival-goers by imagining
the reaction of a converted “Hottentot” to such unseemly goings-on. The converted “savage” would, in these fanciful accounts, be disgusted to find supposedly civilized Christians dancing, masking, and cavorting in public exactly like his unconverted brethren at home. But the more interesting case would be that of an unconverted “savage” plopped down in the modern urban world—say, an eighteenth-century indigenous Australian, Plains Indian, or resident of New Guinea—transported into midtown Manhattan just as the lunch-hour crowds are hitting the street.
He will necessarily be dumbfounded by flashing lights, automobiles, and the near-complete replacement of trees and grass by a built environment. But leaving aside the technological futureshock, with all its comic possibilities, what will amaze him most is the size of the crowd he finds himself in: as many people, within a block or so, as he has ever seen together in his life, and then only at the annual gatherings of his tribe, where several hundred people might come together at a time, for days of dancing, feasting, and other carnival-like activities.