Feeling Blue Over the Browns

As the manager of the Cleveland Psychological Assn., Jean Mitchell is a pretty good judge of the local mood. And ever since November, when the Browns announced plans to move to Baltimore, she has received calls from distraught football fans looking for therapists.

“Many have expressed feelings of depression and anxiety,” she said. “But they usually explain that they’re upset about losing an ‘activity’ or something like that. They feel ashamed, I guess, to be reacting so strongly. They don’t just come out and say, ‘The Browns are leaving, what am I going to do?’ ”

It might seem paradoxical, this poignant vulnerability among fans of one of the most brutal team sports ever devised. But the outbreak of gridiron grief suggests that some Americans have a surprisingly complicated bond with their home teams. Look no further than the Dawg Pound--those truly rabid Browns followers who don basset hound masks--to sense the powerful psychology of the fan, which is, after all, short for fanatic.

Clevelanders are not alone in their frustration. Half a dozen professional football and hockey teams have bolted in the last three years. They include the Rams, who left Anaheim for St. Louis last year (having left Los Angeles in 1980), and the Raiders, who left Oakland in 1982 for Los Angeles, then left last year for, yes, Oakland.

The Houston Oilers are officially heading to Nashville in 1998, while Cincinnati, the Tampa Bay area and Seattle may also lose football franchises. In one of the more counterintuitive moves, hockey’s Winnipeg Jets are scheduled to settle next season in Phoenix, finally remedying Arizona’s tragic lack of frozen recreation.

For many casual and hard-core fans alike, the shuffling of franchises has been not only disappointing but disillusioning, in that it starkly reveals the serious money behind all the play. Team owners are lured away by rival cities offering financial perks such as tax breaks and new stadiums bejeweled with skyboxes and luxury seats that add millions in revenue.

And while baseball and basketball teams have stayed put for a decade, high ticket prices, imponderable salaries and the “rent-a-player” era of free agency have challenged fan fealty.

Researchers have long puzzled over the bond of spectator to team. They have measured testosterone levels to see if a guy watching a game on TV gets a hormone boost as does a guy on the field. They have found that women who watch sporting events, such as Sunday’s Super Bowl, are mostly interested in the men with whom they watch. They have discoursed on BIRG, or Basking in Reflected Glory, a phenomenon that helps explain Southern Californians’ general indifference to the struggling Rams’ departure--there being little glory in which to bask.

In other, less blase cities coping with “franchise relocation,” as the experts call it, people are wrenched by the departures and furious at the betrayal of loyalty they seem to imply. For a diehard fan, watching a game “is not simply a diversion,” said psychologist Robert Cialdini, a pioneering BIRG researcher at Arizona State University. “The self is really involved. So when cities lose teams, they lose a little bit of themselves.”

Loyalty and Betrayal

Jack Lesyk, director of the Ohio Center for Sport Psychology in Cleveland, estimated that 75% of his patients have used therapy time to discuss football. Michael McKee, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, a renowned medical research center, said he had a number of middle-aged male clients who were upset over the loss of the Browns, who just ended their 49th season with the NFL’s fourth-best attendance record. “Clevelanders feel that they’ve been among the most loyal fans in the game,” he said. “They take this as a betrayal. Anger is probably the predominant emotion I’ve seen.”

The Browns’ owner, Art Modell, who reportedly is in self-imposed exile in Palm Beach, Fla., has said the reason for moving to Baltimore was strictly bottom-line. With the Browns still playing in 65-year-old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, he said, the team was starting to lose money despite capacity crowds. He couldn’t refuse the promise of a new $200-million stadium with 108 luxury boxes and thousands of pricey “club” seats. For its part, Baltimore was merely adhering to pro sports’ new Golden Rule and trying to do unto another city as was done unto it when (as Baltimoreans see it) Indianapolis stole the Colts in 1984.

Observers of this latest debacle in the city once called “the Mistake on the Lake” offer several reasons for the gloom and anger. In one way or another, the theories address the complex role of spectator sports in America’s increasingly nonparticipatory culture.

Said Mitchell, of Cleveland’s psychological association: “Many people here look at football not just as a sport but as a tradition. It has been a bonding process for fathers and sons, one of the few that the male ego would allow. This has been a way of life for many people for many years.”

Others point out that the Browns’ likely departure occurs just as bitter memories of the city’s emptied factories and a river so polluted it caught fire in 1969 were being eclipsed by a revitalized waterfront, the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Indians’ winning the 1995 American League pennant. “Cleveland was just emerging from a kind of inferiority complex,” Lesyk said. “Now there’s this setback.”

Also, the Browns’ action may upset Clevelanders who regarded the team as a safe harbor in a tossing sea of social and economic change. American society is now so unstable that the nation’s largest employer is a temp agency, according to Time magazine.

“People are constantly changing careers, everything is in flux,” said Lawrence Wenner, communications professor at the University of San Francisco and editor of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. “People have an identity with local sports teams because that is a common thread holding people together in a metropolis. You may not know your neighbors, you might not be involved with your community, but you have a common identity through these teams, and often very little else.”

“Part of living in a city has to do with some sense of cultural identity,” said Todd Boyd, a USC sports culture expert. “Sports teams are one way of creating cultural identity across lines of race, ethnic background and class.”

Curiously, the social cement that pro sports can provide doesn’t appear to hold in Southern California, some psychologists say. Although people love the Lakers and Angels when they’re winning, and have shown devotion to the Dodgers, they are viewed as America’s ultimate fair-weather fans.

Possible reasons are that the place is too sprawling, too rich in diversions, too overrun by people from someplace else and too steeped in a Hollywood ethos of “the Now” to stand by a losing team. “In L.A., the thing is to just to make the scene and then leave early to beat the traffic,” said Wenner, a Los Angeles native.

But Browns fans, undeterred by this season’s 5-11 record, haven’t given up. The city is suing the franchise for breach of contract; a trial is scheduled for February. A Save Our Browns movement has taken out newspaper ads in other football towns that warn: “If This Is Allowed to Happen to Cleveland, It Can Happen to Your City Too!” In addition, cyber-savvy Dawgs have opened a site on the World Wide Web. Supporters have collected 2 million signatures for a petition to the NFL to block the move. Mayor Michael White, not at all above the fray, was quoted as saying “this town got screwed.”

A Need to Identify

Central to intense fanship is what psychologists call identification, the longing to belong that helps explain why girls wear Mommy’s dresses, bankers wear pinstripes and, say, Atlanta Braves followers brandish foam-rubber tomahawks.

Cialdini and colleagues have found that fan identification can be curiously fickle. In a survey of eight college campuses, they found that students were more likely to wear clothing emblazoned with school names and logos on Monday if the football team won on Saturday. That is one way fans “connect themselves with a victor and distance themselves with the vanquished,” he said.

Fans may also reveal allegiances in subtle linguistic ways. In a phone survey that didn’t disclose its ulterior motive, Cialdini quizzed students on bizarre campus facts, ensuring that many failed. Then, while they were either feeling proud or stupid, he asked about the football team’s last outing.

Those who failed the bogus quiz were more likely than those who passed to refer to the team as “we” rather than “they” if the team won. Based on those findings, Cialdini argues that the lower one’s self-image, the greater one’s tendency to identify with a team, perhaps depending on it for a boost.

This Basking in Reflected Glory, as Cialdini originally termed it in the mid-1970s, “explains much of the rabidness with which fans attach themselves to teams,” he said. “Whole municipalities go into minor periods of mourning after defeat in a close game.”

Indeed, dozens of Kansas City Chiefs fans signed up for a group therapy session--”Chiefs Grief”--after the team lost a close NFL playoff game this month.

At Georgia State University, social psychologist James Dabbs has recently produced evidence of the biological underpinnings of BIRG. Before a televised World Cup soccer match between Brazil and Italy, Dabbs and colleagues recruited 14 Brazilians and 12 Italians at two bars frequented by the groups. Before and after the game, the researchers collected saliva samples, which were later analyzed for testosterone.

He chose to check that hormone because studies involving brawling lab rodents and competitive tennis players showed that winners generally had higher testosterone levels, making the hormone a sort of physiological marker of victory, if not dominance.

Brazil won, and its fans’ testosterone levels rose by an average of 28%, Dabbs said. The Italians’ levels did not rise and may have even sagged in defeat. The study was among the first to show that sports spectators undergo physiological changes similar to those presumably experienced by the players for whom they are rooting.

Dabbs emphasized that not all fans have a vicarious experience as tangible as the Brazilians’. Only because they were deeply devoted to the game and perceived that they had a lot at stake--ethnic pride--did they identify with the players so thoroughly, he said.

But he wonders if legions of hard-core fans may over time grow physically accustomed to the testosterone “pulses” elicited by even the occasional win. A franchise relocation, then, prompts a reaction akin to withdrawal. “I would speculate that hormonal changes may be part of their depression,” he said of Clevelanders’ despair.

It may also be that some Americans attach such strong feelings to sports precisely because sports are not important. “We play out life’s dramas through sports,” said psychologist Lesyk. The unambiguousness of a final score is refreshing in a world whose dilemmas are maddeningly ill-resolved and often intractable.

A Test of Loyalty

Curiously, of all the values that Americans project onto a sporting event, perhaps none is as potent as loyalty. Thus the hubbub over franchise relocation, and the great outpouring of admiration last summer when Baltimore Oriole shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. broke the major league record for most consecutive games played. In effect, he never missed a day of work in 13 years.

The new field of “evolutionary psychology” attempts to locate the origins of some human behaviors and emotions deep in our past, when certain nascent tendencies were cultivated or weeded out. In that light, the cheers for Ripken and the jeers for the Browns’ owner are just different expressions of an ancient clan value placed on cooperation and bonding.

“Loyalty to a clan appears to be one of the most primordial human emotions,” said William Allman, author of “The Stone Age Present,” a 1994 book on evolutionary psychology in everyday life.

For the most part, the bonds being formed and reinforced in stadiums, sports bars and in front of TVs are masculine ones. “I think that a lot of the pleasure that men get out of rooting for a team and knowing all the statistics is it’s a validation of their identity,” said Margaret Duncan, a feminist and sports scholar at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee who has studied men and women as they watched football.

“When you have men who are absolutely downcast because a franchise is relocating,” she said, “it’s a threat to their sense of who they are. It’s a critical symbolic failure” of masculinity. A feminist, she said, might take issue with city governments like Baltimore’s that invest millions in stadiums to lure teams, since disproportionately little of that public money benefits women. “I think the people who do tend to profit from these deals are men,” she said.

On the other hand, she said, sports in general and football in particular are a much-needed male outlet. “In ordinary life men are not given permission to jump up and down and wave their arms and yell. This is one place where it’s totally permissible for a man to get emotionally involved.”

In Cleveland, some see fans’ mourning as a symptom of the city’s health, which is suffering from a municipal version of the adage, “Love hurts.” “It’s a good sign,” said the Cleveland Clinic’s McKee, a Santa Monica native who moved to Cleveland in 1969. “It shows a sense of community, identification with the area.”

And in that sense, he added, team spirit isn’t mere passive naivete, but an active disavowal of cynicism, an involvement that both opens the door to thrills and leaves one vulnerable to disappointment. “It takes an almost studied innocence to identify with pro athletes, who are so well paid and always switching cities,” he said. “You have to suspend some of what you know about the real world.”

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Football Withdrawal

Never in pro football’s history have more teams left or been scheduled to leave their hometowns, lured away by lucrative new franchise deals and trophy stadiums. And while city leaders tackle economic impact questions, diehard fans feel abandoned, depressed, and angry, a range of emotions hinting at the surprising psychological complexity of fanhood.

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Year This team ... ... became this team 1921 Decatur Staleys Chicago Bears 1934 Portsmouth Spartans Detroit Lions 1937 Boston Redskins Washington Redskins 1946 Cleveland Rams Los Angeles Rams 1952 New York Yankees Dallas Texans 1953 Dallas Texans Baltimore Colts 1960 Chicago Cardinals St. Louis Cardinals 1961 Los Angeles Chargers San Diego Chargers 1963 Dallas Texans Kansas City Chiefs 1982 Oakland Raiders Los Angeles Raiders 1984 Baltimore Colts Indianapolis Colts 1988 St. Louis Cardinals Phoenix Cardinals 1995 Los Angeles Raiders Oakland Raiders Los Angeles Rams St. Louis Rams 1996 Cleveland Browns Baltimore? Cincinnati Bengals ? Seattle Seahawks ? Tampa Bay Buccaneers ? 1998 Houston Oilers Nashville

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Source: Official NFL 1995 Record and Fact Book. Researched by Paul Singleton and Tracy Thomas.