My first football experience tool place at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The Browns were playing the Steelers and the year was sometime early 70s. I was around seven years old and not much of a fan. I knew Cleveland wore brown and Pittsburgh black and that guys in the bathroom were beating the shit out of each other because of this-but that was the extent of my knowledge.
But, like damn near every other Cleveland resident, I became a fan. Dedicated, devoted, despairing. Along those lines, last night, about halfway through a miserable Cleveland Pittsburgh rematch, when the supposedly Superbowl-bound Browns were once again loosing to their Midwest rivals, I shut off the TV, swore a bunch of times and got into bed to read a book. My wife just started laughing. She's not a football fan, not a Browns' fan, not one who understands what it means to live and die with a perennial loser.
What's the big deal-she wanted to know. Well, it's a good question.Certainly, I understand the draw of rooting for the underdog (for a look at the psychology of under-doggedness check out an earlier post) but when the mutt in question is as woeful as the Browns something else might be going on.
In 2006, Bizjounral, conducted a study of fan loyalty and found that the Brown's fans are the most loyal in football. While the study was slightly less than rigorous they based their decision on a few key factors: 1) The stadium ran at 99.8 percent occupancy during football games for the past seven years, despite a record of 36 wins and 76 losses in the same period. 2) The challenges confronting fans (bad weather-which C-town is certainly famous for). It is also worth noting that Browns Backers Worldwide, with 93,100 members, is the largest sports-fan organization in the US and that the Dawg Pound, the rowdy bleacher section at the stadium, remains one of the most feared places to go during a professional football game.
But this only tells us what we already know. As ESPN's Rick Reilly points out in his column this week, Cleveland will always be a Browns' town: "Name one other city that lost a team and had the league give it back. Name, uniforms, everything! If the Cavaliers left, two janitors might look up." What Reilly was pondering is why the Browns still rule the roost when the Cavs have LeBron James and a string of winning seasons.
Leonard Koppett, in his classic of sports journalism and sociology, Sports Illusion, Sports Reality, pointed out that sports are an illusion, specifically "the illusion that the outcome of a game matters." But isn't this illusion almost entirely worthless when a team is a perennial dog like the Browns?
So what's the real draw? Well, it's hard to say, but lately I've been wondering if this sort of loyalty has something in common with sexual fidelity. I raise this point because my wife, who grew up in the free-wheeling California of the 70s, saw just about every marriage around her dissolve into deceit and divorce. In Cleveland, at least the C-town of my youth, I can remember exactly one marriage I knew of ending in divorce. Now, sure this is a subjective opinion, and about as far from rigorous science as possible, but the reason it got me thinking about football was because of some new research into fidelity.
Four studies were run, all at the University of Montreal. The first looked at 145 students (mean age 23) and the second at 270 adults (average age 27) and both found a strong correlation between infidelity and people with avoidant attachment personality styles. The latter two studies looked at reasons for infidelity and while no correlation with sex was discovered (meaning, evolutionary ideas aside, men did not cheat more than women), instead everything came down to the desire to distance oneself from commitment and a partner when tiems got rough. Meaning, infidelity came down primarily to attachment v. attachment avoidance.
Since psychologists have long known that attachment (in all varieties) is mostly a trait learned from one's parents, how likely one is to cheat on a spouse and get divorced and such comes down to this one contributing factor.
So what does this have to with football fans? Well, since attachment/avoidance is a trait inherited from one's parents and sports fandom and home team relations also come down (indirectly at least) from a similar local, is it possible to extend one's interpersonal relationship styles to one's sport team identification?
After all, is it an accident that California is the divorce capital of America and Los Angeles fans have long been considered the most fair-weathered in the nation(despite fielding nearly perennial champions in the Lakers and mostly solid performances in the Dodgers)? So is this real science? Perhaps not. But it is a factor worth considering when trying to explain why Browns fans are so devoted to a cause utterly unowrthy of such ministrations.
