From VOICES: The Fan with a Thousand Faces

Volume 32
Spring-Summer
2006

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Like the processional leader or carnival king, the ardent fan is no mere spectator, but somehow a participant in the drama: he believes that the fervor of his rooting, the efficacy of his fetishes, will have a direct bearing on the outcome.

John Thorn is the author and editor of many books, mostly about sports, as well as occasional pieces for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe. He lives in Saugerties, New York.

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The Fan with a Thousand Faces by John Thorn

Death came to Frank B. Wood, retired electrician, on December 9, 1914, at age sixty-nine. In an obituary in the New York Tribune two days later—the first to my knowledge ever penned to memorialize a man notable for nothing but his allegiance to a ball club— Heywood Broun wrote:

Wood was a Giant rooter at a time when the fortunes of the team were at their lowest. Nothing could dampen his optimism. Often he would seek to root his team home against leads of anywhere from 8 to 10 runs. . . . With the coming of better teams came finicky fans. To them the loyal rooting of Wood seemed just so much tireless reiteration. His catchwords remained unchanged and the sudden and ear piercing shout of “Well, Well, Well!” did not always please strangers who sat close at hand. In fact, complaints were made and Wood was barred from the park for many years.

The New York Giants had just come off a World Series victory in 1905 when “Old Well- Well,” as he was universally known, was given the bum’s rush. In the year before his death, however, thanks to a sympathetic security officer, Old Well-Well would regain admittance to New York’s Polo Grounds and emit one last rallying cry. “For the rest of the game Wood was silent,” Broun wrote. “Not only his voice had weakened, but his optimism, too. He left in the seventh inning because the Giants were four runs behind. He did not come back all season, and no one heard his call again.”

Four years earlier, in the July 1910 issue of Success magazine, Zane Grey had anticipated the denouement of the tale with eerie prescience. In a short story entitled “Old Well- Well,” Grey returned his protagonist to the Polo Grounds after a long absence to utter one last, near-fatal whoop. The drama concludes with the old clan leader, worn out and useless, being packed into an ambulance.

This is the way it ends for the hero with a thousand faces—in ignominy or death. Over the past century America has added a distinctive voice to the legendary roster of sacrificed saviors and fisher kings: that of the common man who spurs his civic representatives on to glory. Today fans are players, too, for just as sport is a jumble of sublimated warfare and worship, fandom is sublimated play. Whether one views their odd actions as vicariously reenacted youth or echoes of archaic fertility rites or highly selfconscious role play, fans are always underpinned by hope, which one may characterize as unreasoned expectation . . . or blind faith . . . or black magic, to be summoned forth by a skilled practitioner.

Game day at the ballpark or arena creates something of the atmosphere of Mardi Gras or Carnivale, feeble vestiges of Bacchanalian or Saturnalian rites which themselves are pale shades of bloody mystery rites in the sacred wood. In Rome, slaves would become masters for a week, and peasants were in command of the city. The temporary inversion of social rank provided a safety valve to relieve the tensions in a rigidly hierarchical society. As Robert Henderson wrote of those pagan holidays in Ball, Bat, and Bishop, “All forms of sexual license, gross in the extreme, were freely practiced by all and sundry, while wine flowed freely. Processionals through the streets gave fresh impetus to the wild orgies. At the end of the period, however, the person who acted as king forfeited his life—a stiff price to pay for a brief period of merriment—after which the usual routines of life returned.”

At the ballpark, common people with dim knowledge of the demands upon professional athletes exert a holiday mastery in an afternoon’s suspension of the social order. “By taking militant sides on matters of which we have no firsthand knowledge,” John A. Kouwenhoven wrote in Half a Truth Is Better Than None, “we satisfy a deep need to feel like responsible citizens without really having to be responsible.”

Sport and religion rose together into the Christian era, with Easter serving as Opening Day. People played ball games in the spring to mimic fertility and thus promote it. These games were often staged between two halves of a community, or wedded versus virgin, in the form of bloody combat with sticks and stones. As kings began to question the honor of being slain for the good of their peoples, the communal contest evolved into a fight for possession of an effigy of the king (today’s ball or puck). A further innovation of the medieval period, one that spared the general populace and its ruler considerable bloodshed, was to delegate the competition of one town against another to their respective “champions,” predecessor to today’s Yankees or Mets player who dons the colors of his tribe and goes to battle.

Like the processional leader or carnival king, the ardent fan is no mere spectator, but somehow a participant in the drama: he believes that the fervor of his rooting, the efficacy of his fetishes, will have a direct bearing on the outcome. If luck is the residue of design, as modern-day oracle Branch Rickey posited, hope has been thought to be fueled by the special incantations or gyrations of Hilda Chester of Ebbets Field with her clanging cowbell and grating voice; Bill Hagy, human alphabet of the Baltimore Orioles; Nuf Ced McGreevey of Boston’s giftedly abrasive Royal Rooters; or the screeching “Well, Well, Well” of Giants rooter Frank B. Wood.

As leaders of their packs, these archetypal kings and queens of fandom played dramatic parts for which they had been fitted since time began. There is, I suggest, more to play than good clean fun.

John Thorn’s Play column was published in Voices Vol. 32, Spring-Summer 2006. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.