Excessive fan identification

A day after my column on “Understanding Sports Fan Behavior” came out, business communications practitioner Dante Velasco, a co-judge in the 2009 Philippine Quill Awards of the International Association of Business Communicators, told me during the Quill awards night at PICC’s Forum 3, that he was with a group of businessmen earlier in the day who were discussing the suspension of Burger King’s Wynne Arboleda for attacking Smart Gilas fan Alain Katigbac.

The group referred to the column I wrote and agreed that, indeed, there was a need for some kind of Fan Code of Conduct to make sure that all “stakeholders” in a game are properly protected and can go about their respective businesses of: playing (in the case of players), refereeing (in the case of referees), coaching and managing teams (in the case of coaches, managers and team officials authorized to sit in the team bench) and enjoying the game (in the case of spectators). Some members of the group agreed that the National Football League Code of Conduct that I quoted in my column was a good starting point, although the parking lot situations in the States did not particularly apply to the Philippine setting.

There was mention also of how complex the overall situation in society had become necessitating, in this particular Arboleda-Katigbac case, even the intervention of a relatively new field, sports psychology, to understand fan (and player) behavior.

The Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP), in a paper entitled “For Better or For Worse, Fan Behavior Impacts Athletes” says “we all know of cases where negative fan behavior has driven some athletes to perform less than their best...or perhaps even knock them out completely out of the competition. Daniel Wann, who heads the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) Special Interest Group on Fandom and an author of “Sports Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators”, among other, says that athletes want to live up to a high paying contract, as well as fan expectations. It is the same with Olympians who strive to live up to expectations. Athletes may say they are immune to fans, but we know better. It is like...adolescent(s) who say they don’t care what their parents think.”

A professor of Psychology at Murray State who had been studying the psychology of sport spectators since the mid-1980’s, Wann works with athletes by helping them learn how to address fan behavior. Wann, according to the AASP, works with the athletes to develop their mental abilities while the coaches focus on their physical skills. “The key is for athletes to learn to compartmentalize what they pay attention to, to be able to tune out the fans, but not the coaches. They need to be selective between valuable information (from coaches or teammates) versus noise (from fans).”

Wann has studied spectator violence, actions of parents as spectators at youth sporting events but has paid particular attention to fan identification or a fan’s psychological connection to a team.The AASP says that just like athletes are involved in their sport for varying factors, fans are motivated for different reasons. Wann says that “it is important to remember that fans are driven by a variety of motives. You can’t paint them with one brush stroke. Some are driven by the entertainment of sport, some want to see a good contest. Some are there for social reasons, while others are there to see beautiful plays”.

Fan identification has been, so far, the most fascinating aspect of sport psychology as far as Wann is concerned, “In all of the studies that have been done, the most interesting information is the psychology of the fan. Fans who make a connection with a local team have better societal connections. Identification with local teams has been shown to be related to lower depression, lower loneliness and feelings alienation, higher self-esteem, higher energy levels and greater levels of trust in people, as well as greater satisfaction in social life.” The AASP therefore says, “If you are lonely and depressed...find a sports team to support”!

For many sports fans, the stadium is the place where they can let their hair down and release all the tensions that every day living brings. As pointed out by Karen Goff of the Washington Times, “For many sports fans, a stadium is the last place in America that will tolerate taunting, binge drinking, verbal abuse and other otherwise-inappropriate social behavior” and, if I may add, in the Philippines, it is one of the few places where fervent prayers and invectives are simultaneously uttered and where rosaries and the dirty finger are brandished at the same moment, at times by the same persons. Such is intense fan identification. It can be excessive...and profane at times.