Bleeding Purple Gold – The psychology and soul of LSU superfans

Does it bother you? The tick of the clock—3, 2, 1, 0. Game over.You’re devastated. Your adrenaline drops—roughly 20%, according to studies. You might even be sick.But you’re not. Next Saturday you’ll feel better, because we’ll win. And you’ll be floating. Invincible. Victorious.You’re not afflicted.You’re an LSU fan.”Athletic teams can easily become part of our identity—a reflection and an extension of us,” says Erich Duchmann, a family and sports psychologist in Baton Rouge. “The team is them, but people say, ‘We won,’ and whether it’s a win or a loss, it certainly feels like it happened to me. We all feel it.”

According to Duchmann, the building of personal identity and group identity plays a large role in our desire to choose sides, to be completely enamored with one team and despise all challengers. Psychologists call this ingroup–outgroup bias.

Anyone who has stood in Death Valley among 92,000 screaming members of the Tiger Nation knows that LSU football is a premier example of this mind game at play.

In Tiger football we find a collective, a group to rejoice with and, at times, suffer with, too.

“Some communities encourage [building one’s personal identity on a sports team] more than others,” Duchmann says. “I have a feeling South Louisiana is more conducive to it.”

And this is perfectly healthy.

Sports afford fans all the drama of physical combat and psychological warfare with none of the detrimental real-world consequences. After a loss, your team may fall out of the Top 10, but your home won’t be ransacked or your SUV commandeered by invading forces.

LSU football feeds our needs for competition and entertainment simultaneously. And it is unflinchingly cyclical.

No matter how triumphant the victory or devastating the loss—2012 BCS championship game, I’m talking about you—all the drama regenerates itself. The stakes are set anew at the start of every season.

And like the team itself, fanatics begin preparations long before kickoff.

The wooden boards of the First Presbyterian Church stairwell creak just a bit, even under the slight weight of petite Lora Cross making her way up two flights.

At 92, everyone calls her “Granny,” and she climbs these stairs each summer to get ready for making it to her seat inside her other house of worship, Tiger Stadium.

Cross says she grew up on the West side of the stadium, and she flew to away games in a four-seater prop plane piloted by her dad.

Now, fellow season ticket-holders cheer for Cross when she makes it to her seat. She never leaves early, either, not even when it rains.

“They are out there playing real hard. At least I can stay and cheer real hard,” she says.

Cross has passed on her undying passion to her daughter, Lora ?”Bunny” Ferris, and her granddaughter, Becca Ferris Behrnes.

“It absolutely connects us,” Behrnes says. “I went through a rebellious phase growing up, and for a while I thought I was too cool [to be an LSU fan]. But honestly, I always missed the fall here.”

Now, Behrnes has a daughter of her own, a toddler, Camilla, and all four generations share LSU game days together. Getting a 92-year-old and a tiny Tiger fan under 2 to a home game takes some logistical planning—and physical training—but for others, prepping for a new season is more of a mental exercise.

“I’m already expecting to not have a voice come Sundays,” says Joel D’Aubin, a founding member of the Painted Posse, a group of Christian LSU students who paint themselves and get loud on the front row of the student section. Last year the Posse had more ESPN highlights than a lot of players.

Fans use football games as an avenue for amplifying their connections, be it the faith of the Painted Posse or the bonds of the many families that gather in the mobile tent city known as Tiger tailgating.

Sharon “Mama” Ford has been celebrating with family on campus since 1982. In 1995 they incorporated their group as the Ford Family Tailgate, now three generations strong. Like a pilgrimage, friends come from New Orleans and Texas, Georgia and New Jersey.

“It’s more than a party,” Ford says. “It’s a reunion. It’s a chance to pass this down, to instill this passion in the younger children.”

And yet this joy is always balanced by the potential for a tragic outcome on the field.

“I’m devastated after a loss,” Ford says. “I can forgive the boys if they make mistakes, and if we played hard and just got beat, that’s one thing, but when the coaches make a blatant mistake, I lose it. I’m not polite. They are paid well to get it right.”

Ford is not alone.

By all accounts, Carl “The Cat” Dunn, an employee at the Clerk of Court’s office, is a tough guy, but even he admits to crying after an LSU loss. Watching the Bayou Bengals get beat takes an unexpected toll on his emotions.

“It’s a feeling like you’re living through heartbreak, especially when you see a lead evaporate in front of your eyes,” Dunn says.

The occasional tears are worth it, though, for the thrill of victory.

“Being an LSU fan is better than getting into drugs or alcohol,” Dunn says. “LSU football is our drug.”

If that is true, two fans who may have overdosed are brothers Scott and Kent DeJean, also known as The Evil Twins.

Kent is a minor celebrity on local radio as the self-described “hatchet man” who riffs on rivals at the start of The Les Miles Show. “I think [Coach Miles] likes me because I can say things he can’t—things he probably wants to say,” Kent says. “I’m a little edgy but right on the line.”

The DeJeans haven’t missed a home game in 31 years and have thrown now-legendary tailgate parties—an attorney, Kent claims theirs was the first to become an LLC in 1986—with huge spreads, beer funnels, opponent effigies and faithful re-enactments of hallmark LSU plays.

“Tiger football becomes a part of you,” Scott says. “Every game is profound. It’s do or die.”

To help secure a Tiger victory, the DeJeans always sit in the same seats—Scott to the left and Kent to the right. Always.

The concept that the team on the field needs its fans to act a certain way or wear something specific is a widespread and intensely held feeling among fanatics.

Psychologically, it is part of the identity-building process.

“If I cheer or show any confidence, we mess up,” says superfan Dale Goodrich Sr. “So I keep quiet the whole game.”

225 spoke to many Tiger fans about their superstitions. Some feel compelled to wear the same hat, shoes, even boxers, for games. Others stick to strict routines. Film and television entrepreneur Will Semons sits perfectly still and has food and drinks brought to him during the game.

“Usually someone is willing,” Semons says. “They get it.”

Superstition has gone high-tech, too, with some sending out regular “good luck” group texts. If they forget to text, surely the team’s chances decrease.

“I have seen LSU from an outsider’s perspective and now an insider’s point of view,” says Jason Suitt, LSU’s new director of fan experience, who joined the Athletic Department this year after 13 seasons at the University of Arkansas. “LSU fans truly believe they can impact the outcome of the game, and they do just that by showing up and showing out.”

Another way fans show out is by collecting memorabilia. Perhaps no one has done so more obsessively than Dr. Jack Andonie. The New Orleans OB/GYN befriended Coach Charlie McClendon in the early 1970s by calling his office on Mondays to encourage him after every loss. Soon, Andonie became a team recruiter in the New Orleans area, and by the time he donated his entire collection to the LSU Alumni Association in 1997, he had amassed more than 13,000 items of memorabilia.

“LSU games and all the memorabilia became a hobby that I could share with my kids,” Andonie says. “My wife really raised them, because I was working all the time, but we could bond over the Tigers.”

The Jack & Priscilla Andonie Museum is free and open to the public on West Lakeshore Drive near Sorority Row. The museum exists today because of the graciousness of his children, he says, who essentially donated their inheritance to the university their father loves so much.

A more modest collector, LSU ?Rural Life Museum staffer Steve Ramke, has his own man cave—an “LSU Room” at home. For Ramke, collecting is less about the item and more about the experience of meeting the players. He never buys memorabilia online and only displays what he has had signed in person.

Growing up in a military family, Ramke was a latecomer to LSU fandom when he arrived on campus as a freshman.

“I grew up in Texas, where high school football is like Friday Night Lights, but at my first LSU game, I thought, ‘I’ve stepped into a whole new monster,'” Ramke says. “When I hear those trumpet notes, I still get chills. People talk about an aura around LSU football, and it’s definitely there. It’s real, and it never escapes you.”

As a phenomenon, superfans make an impact far beyond the volume levels inside the stadium.

The intense magnetism of Tiger football is a complex and evolving ecosystem that includes the young men who strap on the pads, who have LSU emblazoned across their skulls and the eye of the Tiger on their palms.

Until last year, Duchmann spent nearly two decades counseling these players.

While a battalion of coaches and trainers sculpted the Tigers’ bodies to perfection, Duchmann was, for all intents and purposes, the coach of their minds.

Thirty hours a week. For 17 years.

He took calls and texts from Les Miles at all hours. He met with troubled players one-on-one. He saw, day after day, fans treat them like gods and how that messed with their heads.

“They can’t even walk across campus without being stopped several times,” Duchmann says. “So they have to make a choice: Do I be an [expletive] and keep walking, or not? That atmosphere of idolization is a minefield.”

In his experience, players that are not well-adjusted are, as he describes it, “swimming upstream” against the swift current of temptation.

Those temptations have had an impact on LSU’s roster, like that of other major programs, with multiple failed drug tests, legal entanglements, suspensions and dismissals in recent years.

“It’s hard for these athletes to walk that path,” Duchmann says. “Fans might think, ‘But there’s a pot of gold up ahead. Just behave!’ Well, it’s not that easy. The pressure on them is tremendous.”

Former Tiger tight end Chase Clement, now with the New York Giants, recalls times when negative fan reaction to LSU mistakes made him and his teammates think fans were overlooking their efforts. But those moments were few and far between, he says.

“I love the fans—miss the chants already,” Clement says. “LSU fans are more respectful and loyal to their team than any I’ve ever seen.”

Duchmann can relate to this extreme attention on athletes. The New Orleans native once followed the Saints religiously, and he celebrated and mourned his way through the lean years when the beleaguered squad was often called “The ‘Aints.”

“I went from happy to demoralized so often,” Duchmann recalls. “I had to pull back from it. Those losses just ruined too many weekends.”

The psychologist says some superfans may need to follow suit, particularly if their behavior becomes irrational and negatively affects others. But he says it’s a lack of balance in other areas of life that can turn healthy fandom into a problem, not what’s on the scoreboard.

“The more you personally identify with a team, the more highs and lows you will have,” Duchmann says. “But those highs and lows are good, actually—for most people.”

Like Duchmann, the Evil Twins have pulled back. They still attend every game, but they rarely tailgate. They are calmer—”more objective,” Kent DeJean says—both about the team and their devotion to it. They don’t even yell anymore.

Looking back, they view the lows Duchmann mentions as necessary for truly appreciating the highs that come with being a Tiger fan.

Over lunch at Boutin’s, the DeJean brothers recall driving 10 hours to Fayetteville in the early 1990s to witness LSU get drummed by Arkansas—all while freezing November gusts blew the stench of a live boar directly in their faces.

They actually laugh about that now. They’re in a good place.

“This is the golden age of LSU football, and yet you ask a lot of fans today, and they’ll say it’s average,” Kent DeJean says. “Kids today have seen nothing but winning. We lived through Curley Hallman! And because of that I can tell you, you can never touch the face of God unless you’ve experienced the bowels of hell.”

They haven’t always enjoyed the winning seasons that have been the trademark of the Miles era, but, like “Mama” Ford or Becca Behrnes, Kent and Scott DeJean have had the high of sharing LSU football with family.

“The best part of LSU football is that we’re together all the time because of it,” Scott says.

Much of what LSU superfans experience can be explained with psychology. And yet, most will say the Tiger Nation is about the head and the heart.

Few exemplify this more than Marvin Dugas, a New Orleanian in engineering sales who’s known around tailgates as “The Big Ragoo” for his likeness to the character from the 1970s hit TV show Laverne & Shirley.

Dugas has missed just two home games since 1971.

“True fans will follow and support the team through thick and thin,” Dugas says. “I’ve been through the tough years, the ridicule. But I’ve always had a sense of pride in my team.”

And yet for Dugas, being a Tiger fan is about more than what’s happening on the turf. It’s about the people he encounters, the camaraderie he feels and the friendships he holds more dear now than any championship.

“You get all these different people showing up and cheering for the Tigers,” Dugas says. “Different classes, different races, people from New Orleans, people from Grand Isle, doctors and carpenters, rich people and poor people—and here’s the beautiful thing: We all come together.”