Pushkin. I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. This season of the podcast is all about the rise of sports gambling in the United States, but none of it would be possible if we didn't have such seriously emotional fans, in particular football fans, which leads us today
to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Steeler Nation is so deep and so wide that fans can pick from any number of fight songs, from a Poka themed one by Jimmy Pohl, first Steeler, to a hometown tribute by Pittsburgh native Whiz Khalifa, and of course they are countless other songs as well. The Steelers have been around and owned by the same family since nineteen thirty three, where their fans go other franchises follow. In the nineteen seventies, Steeler Nation starts to
wave golden rally towels in the air. They call them terrible towels. Soon every team has its own towel, but those other towels, They're not terrible. It's just not the same. Pittsburgh is the crucible of modern fandom. So that's why I had to call up Marcy Cottingham. She's an associate professor of sociology at Kenyon College in Ohio, but she comes from Pittsburgh and from this gravitational center of football. She studies the feelings and rituals of fans.
I kind of just grew up surrounded by sports fandom. My father was a very big Steelers fan. We would listen to Myron Cope. I don't know if you know who that is, but we would listen to Myron Cope on the radio driving home from church every Sunday. And I moved away for five years when I got my undergrad degree, and that I moved back.
To get my master's degree.
And it was in that transition back that it really became odd to me, Like I suddenly started to see familiar things as strange.
What was it that, can you remember what like caught your eye? It's like being in a Martian in your own life.
Yeah.
Well, the first thing was seeing that every door in the frozen food aisle section of my grocery store had a terrible towel tucked into the handle during one of the seasons. And I remember just being really struck by the pervasiveness of this object throughout the city. As I was kind of acclimating to life there.
Why do you think you never saw it before.
In sociology, we have this idea of we kind of internalize and are socialized to really take for granted what we see early on. Right, it just becomes natural to us. It's just the things are.
And you explain what the Terrible towel is.
I can't remember the exact dimensions, but it's basically the size of a hand towel.
It is kind of a bright.
Yellow gold color with black lettering on it that described as the Terrible Towel. It was created by Myron Cope Hartly, I believe to kind of fundraise money.
So I said to them, I'm not a gimmick guy. I've never been a gimmick guy. And they said to me, your contract comes up for renewal in a.
Few months, and I said, well, let me see if I can think of a gimmick.
So, and initially it was supposed to be used for like drying off seats at the stadium, but it has since its inception kind of morphed into being this symbol that has waived during important events during the kind of game and fans use it as decoration or grocery stores use it as decoration, as I noted, And so it's this kind of ubiquitous symbol of stealer's fandom.
And if you actually someone would actually use it to clean the floor or or put their feet on it in the stadium, how would people respond?
Oh, people would go crazy, right, it would be sacrilegious. It would be violating this sacred symbol.
Have you seen that happen?
I have read about.
It though, in a couple of news articles about opposing teams, but where opposing teams will use the terrible towel, say after they get a touchdown, right, and they kind of use it to step on or gloat or you know, a lead up to a pregame trash talk, right, where the terrible towel is used and abused.
Yes, exactly.
So it is a sacred object and they and the other team knows it.
I mean that that's kind of how I frame it, because of the visceral emotional reaction engenders.
Right, Like I never studied sociology, I forgive you that.
No.
I you know, I've picked up from time to time just as an amateur sociology books and they're riveting and it makes me I know, it's a hole in my education. But can you just explain the distinction between the sacred and the prof of the sacred in the mundane.
So this distinction sociologically goes back to the work of Emil dirk Him. So he's a French philosopher, French social theorist, kind of considered the founder, one of the founders of sociology, and he makes that distinction between the sacred and the mundane, where the mundane is something that is every day we use it. It has its utilitarian purpose is front and center. To distinguish it from the sacred. We have these objects
that are kind of set apart. They're not utilitarian, they have these special roles that they're supposed to play in our lives. Dirkheim was one of the first to really use this kind of differentiation to talk about society as a whole, as the kind of social collective taking on these sacred qualities through rituals.
Have you yourself ever been emotionally attached to a team, Well, I am.
To Stealers at this point. It's been such a part of my career and my life. I do have like, whenever I see news about something that's about the Stealers, you know I'm actually going to be picking up my dad from the airport today, and I know he's going to have his Steeler socks on or whatever. Right, and so it's a part of my blood in a way
I can't really get away from it. I will say think that there's something about the working class ethos of Steeler's fandom in particular, that I also find encouraging and interesting to reflect on.
When you walked into the Steelers Stadium and started to just take notes, like what's the purpose of this research?
The purpose is to try to see and understand ourselves differently. Right. I use often in my intro classes the analogy of kind of being an alien, where we try to bracket out all of our preconceptions and assumptions when we're viewing the social world. If I chose something that was somewhat personal to me, right, I grew up kind of in
the area where I was surrounded by it. And so it's not just about understanding a group that's out there, but also understanding so more broadly, and the importance of sport in society, which historically I think has been a little bit underappreciated.
When you go to observe the Steelers. Do you feel like you're the first sociologist ever to have done so.
There's a lot of folks that have done work on this, But what I have found when I was starting out was that a lot of it took a very kind of negative view of fandom and was trying to explain violence and destruction and hooliganism that was associated with fandom prior to this research, and it didn't necessarily cast fans in a very positive light. It suggested that they were kind of fanatical, right, as the term suggests that they're kind of overcome by their emotions. They can't be trusted,
they're totally irrational, right. What I wanted to do was to not dismiss their emotions as pointless or as problematic, but instead to really understand how they could provide a sense of belonging and meaning to fans.
Still emotional as opposed to kind of conventionally rational the behavior you're observing, I don't know, it's still difficult to explain.
Sure, Sure, And a lot of my work I try to trouble that neat distinction that says cognition and emotion are totally separate from each other. These symbols that sports fans use can be transferable. They can be ways of connecting with neighbors or connecting with family members, and so while they're not rational in a strict way, I don't
think they're necessarily irrational in a strict way. The common caricature is that they are swept up in their emotions and that there's no rationality, and the cathartic view is basically that, because you know, contemporary modern life requires us to exert a degree of restraint over our presentations to other people, including our emotional expressions, that we need certain outlets or kind of benign valves to release our pent
up emotions. And much of the work on sport tends to think about sports as doing this, like it's just this release valve that lets people express.
All of these pent up emotions.
And my work argues that we need to instead think about emotions as something that's generated from our social interactions with other people. And this means that it's through our presence, our co presence with other people, our connections to them, our use of symbols, those peak kind of ritual interactions that we have that particular emotions are generated, Like the excitement comes from that moment, not as something deep in the psyche of fans that are walking around waiting for a place.
To unleash it.
We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, how all this excitement translates to grown men stripping to their underwear in the freezing Pittsburgh cold. I'm back with Pittsburgh Steelers fan and scholar Marcy Cottingham. So what did you do? Did you go for the whole season?
I went for tailgating and sports bars and then two different games. And we hadn't initially thought we would be able to go to a game, but it turned out that when we were at a sports bar, believe it or not, a woman came up to us and gave us tickets, so we were able to actually go to Hinesfield, which ended up being pretty critical.
Why would it have been so difficult to go to a game?
Well, the waiting list for getting tickets, the price. I was a very poor grad student. Oh, I see, they're in high demand, as you can imagine.
And you so described me like a couple of things you saw when you're in your martian mode that you that you thought worth noting.
There were two in particular that still really stand out to me just kind of observing the interactions of fans in the stadium. I saw the interactions that my informant, who I call Kevin, had with people that were absolute strangers, and I was struck by the amount of just camaraderie and connection that he was able to have with these
people that he had never met before. So, for example, there was one really spectacular play I think it was in the fourth quarter of one of the games that we saw, and there were two gentlemen in front of us, and the one began to strip off his clothing. So it was in December, very cold, he had many layers on, but he literally peeled off his layers to stand there bare chested, screaming that, you know, obviously out of exuberance
that the Steelers had done so well. And then immediately after that, another great play happened and his friend, who was next to him, also started to peel off his labors, stripped down and then kind of clasp hands with his friend and scream in each other's faces, and it was really wild to watch, and then they proceeded to high five. So that sense of like connection with each other that really emerged during that peak emotional experience was fascinating to me.
And nobody around them would have thought this behavior strange.
Absolutely not.
No, did you lean in and say, sir, why did you just do that? I, in the moment assessed that I would probably not get a very coach and answer or I try to interrogate someone in that moment.
It's also just incredibly loud, like it's just hard to have a conversation. I did, though. So there was another interaction that I didn't tell you about yet. That was it was at a game and we were in the concession stand and we were standing in line.
To get food.
Of course, everywhere you're at in Hinsfield, there are video cameras so you can continue to watch the game no matter where you are, and so while we were standing there in line, we watched that the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger kind of threw the ball away into the crowd, and my informant, Kevin, who was with me, you know, he was like, oh damn it, you know, yelling basically at
the quarterback for screwing up. And the gentleman in front of us turned around and said, do you not know what it's like to throw a football in freezing weather really kind of defending the quarterback in that moment, and that was a really kind of clarifying like interaction that I observed.
How did it resolve itself?
There was some grumbling under the breath, I believe. My informant like, how dare you right? And this really points to I think that the idea that the quarterback can themselves become like a sacred symbol that is seen as unimpeachable in a way.
But of course we.
Also like to yell at them when they screw up, so it's a little bit of a blurry blurry line.
How did the Steeler fans respond to you with your notebook and your martian like detachment.
Yeah, they were welcoming. They poured me a shot when we were doing rounds. They invited me to hang out and eat with them at the tailgate party ahead of time. There's an environment of festiveness, of camaraderie, right of connection.
But you're part of the tribe.
Yeah sure, sure, yeah, you're a part of group. And my informant, he gave me a terrible tall towel before we went. He's like, you have to have something. But yeah, I mean, they were friendly. They wanted to chat about.
You know, I would sometimes ask them like, well, what do you mean by fairweather fan, and like trying to get something to unpack things that they they also take for granted, right, And that can be a little bit uncomfortable when you're doing this type of research because people are like duh, Like obviously everybody else.
They didn't find they didn't find it unsettling to be studied.
Maybe they didn't let on, thankfully, but no, they didn't really didn't.
So when do you make the connection to religion?
That was kind of early on, going back to Durkheim's work where he's trying to connect this idea of questioning what are the bounds of religion per se? And so I was playing with this idea of the sacred in the profane in the context of the Terrible Tell, thinking about how objects can potentially start out mundane and then transition to become.
These sacred objects.
And I mean just the fervor that I saw, I mean, part of it is a pretty personal reason, which was at the time before I did this research, I was actually very religious myself, and so I could see similar dynamics in some of the church services I had attended and the earnestness, the congregation coming together, the singing, the visceral emotion responses that I was seeing.
After a quick break, I asked Marcy the difference between religion and fandom, because in Pittsburgh it could be hard to tell. Are back with sociologist Marcy Cottingham talking about the overlap between religion and fandom.
We have the example of Steelers fans using symbols from the Steelers in things like funerals and weddings. There are some examples of people actually having weddings at Hinesfield on the turf right, having terrible towels that are especially made and monogrammed with the bride and groom's name that are handed out at the wedding. It can be black and gold, BoA's and Tiara's.
Right, all we've got funerals.
Funerals.
We had the example of one of the mayors of Pittsburgh that died and that was a very Steeler's infused funeral process with the whole city involved. But then there are other examples of fans, some of whom hadn't even been at a game before, who lived elsewhere, who were big steel fans. Their widow brought their ashes to Hinsfield to scatter kind of the dying wish of a fan.
Scatter the ashes on Hinsfield.
I don't know if they actually scattered, but the urn was there and the reporter wanted to interview this person, and then you just have the memorabilia being incorporated into the funeral itself.
So what does Steeler's fandom lack that a religion has. Why is it only a quasi religion?
So the extent to which there is a strict set of beliefs that have to be affirmed is not really there.
Right, I was able to just go to all these things.
There wasn't necessarily a sense that I had to, you know, agree to any set of dogma right, or affirm anything in particular.
It was well I had had you had to signal that you So if I walk into a Catholic church, no one asked if I'm Catholic, you can walk. You could do that. You could do this in a Catholic church and probably and no one would require you to wear a cross or signal in any way. So you would need in a way the bar you had to jump over to be included with in the Steelers religion was higher than the bar that the Catholic Church would put up.
Maybe maybe.
I mean when when I was doing this research, my committee was like, wonder, I had thought about wearing an opposing team's jersey to some of these events just to see the reaction I get.
And my committee was worried about my safety.
So if I wore a yamaka to a Catholic church, I would not probably be assaulted. It's interesting, So I'm really going to push on this, like what does it lack that to qualify as a religion.
I mean, it's not considered exempt by the government, right, so it doesn't have that status of being a religion in that sense, but that official label might be all that really separates it.
That's interesting. What are people getting out of it?
What I saw people getting was I think a very clear sense of community and belonging. That's meaningful that you know, developed this community, but it doesn't necessarily have that antagonistic or you know, potentially fraught elements.
And also mainly everybody in the stadiums for the same team for the most part of the most part, what kind of response did you get to from your academic colleagues.
There's a recent book that's out that's on college football and all of the debates about you know, student athletes and needing to be protected and to what extent do they have certain.
Rights as workers.
Right.
But it's unfortunately, I think, still seen as somewhat frivolous or silly among you know, serious academics.
Ninety seven of the one hundred most watched TV shows last year in the United States were football games, right. It is. It is the thing that everybody is paying attention to. If there's anything everybody is paying attention to, it's kind of odd that the people who are supposed to be studying people regarded as frivolous.
I mean, I think most of the folks that have cited my work tend to be in like sports marketing or kind of a business angle to it, so you will see that engagement you know, organization studies folks, but sociologists per se, I don't think have spent nearly enough attention or interest on sports fandom as something to continue.
To be curious about. Right.
It's it's something that we tend to think, oh, well, they're fanatics, that explains it, right, But I find that unsatisfying.
If I give you a giant budget, Like Michael, No, I want you to know. I'm just curious. So I gave you a giant people going to hear this. This may be you may get a check. So the question is, you've got a giant budget, what would you do with it? If the NFL said, here's a we want to know about ourselves.
Oh oh the NFL.
No, no, never mind, some curious billionaire says, you do what you want with this check is virtually a blank check. Well, and you wanted to go do some more sociological studies, that isn't just you sitting in the stands, but a little more rigorous, like a little more sure, what would you do?
I mean the questions that I would have now would be what are ways that we can make this sport safer.
Or well, yes there are people working on.
That, but also how those changes would potentially impact random Right.
They're always changing the rules, So the rule changes aren't a problem the problem. But you may have just put your finger on something Removing the violence might be a problem. That the violence may be part of what's bringing people together.
Yeah, I mean, we have other sports where.
They're not as violent, aren't as popular. That's true, not even close.
But maybe that might be a product of the historical times we're in. Maybe maybe things might shift, you know, it's you know, we're saturated with violence in many ways every day, and so maybe they're as an opportunity to think through other ways of spectating competition that are not rooted in that.
Do you have any interest in the effect gambling will have on fan culture.
I haven't researched it to know all the ins and outs. My sense is that it could be potentially, you know, trying to capitalize on some of these emotions, but in a way that would probably really distort it, right, because the gambling component is you're getting that high from the gamble, and the sports is kind of secondary.
That it might undermine the social purpose of fandom, right, right.
That it would undermine the kind of you know, pure devotion to your team. So to what extent those different practices have changed and maybe changed fandom or generally so that people aren't as attached to a particular team.
So thank you. This is really helpful and totally fun.
My pleasure. Bye bye, Thanks so much.
Marcie Cutting him as an associate professor of sociology at Kenyon College, and author of the book Practical Feelings. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia gen Kott, Catherine Gerardeau and Ariella Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguier.
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