SUPER RUSH

	January 24, 1997
	A look at what makes a football fan tick. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston has a personal preview of Super Bowl XXXI.

PAUL SOLMAN: On Sunday, the Packers of Green Bay, Wisconsin, known for its cheese and cheeseheads--those fans wearing foam cheese wedges--will contest the red, white, and blue Patriots of New England. Up to 150 million Americans will watch the Super Bowl, including me, because the plain, possibly embarrassing, fact is that I am a New England Patriots fan, short for fanatic, which in turn derives from orgiastic rites in Roman temples or fana. No wonder then that come Sunday my heart will pound with the packs. And, in fact, that's what prompted this story. Why, I've wondered, am I physically linked to a bunch of over-sized men I don't know, who aren't even from New England? Why do we fans feel much as football players do when it's they who are paid sometimes millions to transform themselves into hyper humans, while we have no real stake in the outcome at all? I consulted a wide range of experts on this, from the groves of academe to the trenches of sports talk radio. Boston sportscaster Glenn Ordway and former football stars Fred Smerlas and Steve Nelson were mixing it up with a call-in audience. This caller was re-living the win over the Miami Dolphins that got New England to its last Super Bowl in 1986. CALLER: I was in Miami for squish the fix, and I always said it was the greatest moment of my life--behind being my two kids being born, and this was-- TALK SHOW HOST: How about your wife? CALLER: Forget that. PAUL SOLMAN: Macho sport, macho men. Just to former great Fred Smerlas describe his football persona. FRED SMERLAS, Former New England Patriot: Let's say someone runs at you with a hatchet, and, you know, all that adrenalin starts pumping. That's where you are. It's almost like a combination of aggressiveness and fear and all those anxieties and everything compiled into one ball to make you--the great players can make it to the next level. They can take it to a level where you can't even comprehend. You know, the anguished you ever been, if you get so strong where a person could pick a car up, that's what made the great players great. PAUL SOLMAN: Now as Fred Smerlas just suggested, football has a lot to do with chemistry, and we just don't mean team spirit. Chemicals are behind the rage, the aggressiveness, and what fans feel as well. We know this because we asked a fan of the Patriots and chemistry alike. Harvard Neurophysiologist Michael Hasselmo, who studied the fighter flight response governed by adrenalin and its brother compound norepinephrine. MICHAEL HASSELMO, Neurophysiologist: They're really for putting the animal in a situation of being able to defend its life, save its like. That means you can't have the animal in that state constantly. Its very wasteful of energy. So you want to have a system that can detect very specific sensory stimuli and put the animal into a state where it will optimally escape or, you know, defend itself. PAUL SOLMAN: And why does adrenalin and norepinephrine help you do that? MICHAEL HASSELMO: Well, it really is it gets your muscles working better because they're getting more blood supply. You have the sweat to cool off the body. You've got the increased--actually you have an increase in release of sugars from the liver, so you get more energy as well. So it really is, you know, focused on getting the energy to the muscles and getting them moving. PAUL SOLMAN: In short, athletes like other animals optimize energy for periods of crisis. And like athletes, fans too wind up at the mercy of such secretion. SPOKESMAN: The adrenalin gets flowing. The crowd certainly is--all gets into it at different levels, and everybody feeds off of everybody else's excitement. And I think that's part of the fan of it all. PAUL SOLMAN: Heart pounding? FAN: Absolutely. Adrenalin, sweat, because it was cold--the wind chill was about 5 degrees-- and I was sweating. PAUL SOLMAN: These are New England fans talking about the Patriots' post win two weeks ago that got the team to the Super Bowl. FAN: I know my blood pressure rose. I was very scared. PAUL SOLMAN: To Harvard's Hasselmo, the physiology of fandom simply mimics that of the players. MICHAEL HASSELMO: Same mechanisms are involved, I would say the exact same mechanisms, and, in fact, it's tougher on the fans because they're not getting the release of the physical activity unless they go and start pounding the coffee table as, you know, sometimes happens. PAUL SOLMAN: His scientific surroundings notwithstanding, Hasselmo has actually been known to pound a table or two during tight games. But not to worry--in excited fans, as in excited athletes, norepinephrine blocks the big hurt. FRED SMERLAS: For team pain nothing could stop you during the game. PAUL SOLMAN: Fred Smerlas has mellowed since his days in the pit, but he still exudes a certain, well, manliness which leads us to yet another chemical culprit in the mystery of sports behavior, a chemical we share with our fellow primates, according to another one of our Harvard professors, anthropologist Peter Ellison. PETER ELLISON, Anthropologist: When two males contest for who is the toughest male on the block, there's usually a clear winner and loser. And we know that the loser experiences a profound drop in the levels of the hormone testosterone, while the winner experiences a significant rise. PAUL SOLMAN: Testosterone, the male hormone that literally and figuratively puts hair on your chest. In sports, from wrestling to tennis, winning triggers a hormone high. Lose and your testosterone drops like a stone. And experiments with fans at soccer's World Cup showed exactly the same pattern. PAUL SOLMAN: Does this suggest then that sports and sports routing is a guy thing? PETER ELLISON: At a very deep level this part of it is definitely a guy thing and goes all the way down to the gonadal level, so it's a matter of testosterone production by the testes and how that affects the brain's incorporation of experience. PAUL SOLMAN: So if the Patriots win on Sunday, am I going to be sort of gonadally high? PETER ELLISON: For a while. Until you get over it, you will have testosterone levels that could be two times higher than your normal levels. If they lose, you may have a hard time growing a beard the next morning. PAUL SOLMAN: Well, I was thinking, as long as I don't lose anything else off the top. And much more seriously, if the Pats win, I hope New England fans won't behave like those in Northern Virginia who, one study suggested, engaged in more assaults on women in the 36 hours after their team, the Washington Redskins, won. Peter Ellison, meanwhile, had something loftier on his mind--evolution, the likely reason why competition and testosterone have become defining traits of masculinity. PETER ELLISON: The males who are dominant in the troop of primates are probably for that period the most reproductively successful. So vying for dominance is vying for reproductive success in a primate society. PAUL SOLMAN: In terms of evolution, it's not how you play the game but whether you win or lose. The winners tend to get the girls and, thus, to get the kids to carry their manly names out through time. And if you lose, well, in Boston, you get to drink with your buddies and commiserate over past defeats. FAN: I still haven't got over the fact the Red Sox lost in 1986. That took a part of me away, and that part will never be back. I thought for sure that we were going to win the World Series, and I'm still feeling that, and that was a long time ago. That was 11 years ago. PAUL SOLMAN: Okay. To this point the story seems to be simple. Without chemicals, fan life, itself, would be impossible. But there's got to be more to it than that. I mean, why do we root for our teams in the first place? We sought out yet another Harvard professor for an answer. Psychologist Kagan is one of the school's graying eminences. He said he too would be rooting on Sunday, but why? JEROME KAGAN, Psychologist: I'm a New Englander. And although no players lives in New England and the coach didn't come from New England, this is our place. And there's something about the human mind, not the animal mind, the human mind, that you can't fight that. PAUL SOLMAN: And what is it about being human? JEROME KAGAN: It is that I have identified with the place where I live symbolically, and, therefore, if something about New England is grand, important, competent, potent, then in a way that is irrational, I'm enhanced in some way. PAUL SOLMAN: So why do you care about these guys? FAN: Because they're our team, our hope. PAUL SOLMAN: Hope for what? I mean, they're not you. FAN: Hope for New England, for the region. They represent us. PAUL SOLMAN: So, symbolic identification is running high in New England at the moment and in Green Bay too. But, says psychologist Ellen Langer, who prefers dog fur to pigskin, the Super Bowl can simply be an event to enjoy for any of us so long as we bring what she calls mindfulness to the game. ELLEN LANGER, Psychologist: And what that means is to actively notice things that you hadn't noticed before. And when you do this, then the activity, itself, becomes more exciting for you. PAUL SOLMAN: Langer once asked three groups of women who didn't like football to watch the Super Bowl and notice new things--players' faces, how a pass is thrown, whatever. ELLEN LANGER: So one group draws six of these novel distinctions. Another group was asked to draw three. Another group just watched the football game. And what happens was the more distinctions people drew, the more they liked a football game. PAUL SOLMAN: So to the people in our audience who aren't particularly interested in the Super Bowl this weekend, you'd say, hey, tune in and look for six, or ten new things? ELLEN LANGER: No. No. I would say that if you want to watch the football game, the way to watch and enjoy it would be to watch it mindfully. But I think that is one is not inclined to watch football, that would be just fine. One could go bake a cake in the same mindful manner or read a book or talk to a friend. PAUL SOLMAN: To Langer then, Super Bowl mania is more a matter of male culture than male chemicals. And as a result, she figures, women can be just as rabid fans as guys. So if you choose to enjoy the game this Sunday, chemically, symbolically, mindfully, or simply as a way to sublimate your blood lust, and if you prefer to bake a cake or read a book, hey, to each his or her own. Just one request: Don't taunt me if Green Bay beats my Patriots because as I finally learned, I will be under the influence of forces well beyond my control.