Superfans by George Dohrmann

Author:George Dohrmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Tyler Austin Black’s tattoo. Still waiting for that ninth title.

Kentucky center Willie Cauley-Stein, a player who has spent many hours in tattoo parlors, was the first to retweet the picture of Black’s tattoo, and it took off from there, with other players and fans sharing it across social media. Black got a call from an ESPN reporter, who wrote a story about the tattoo, and Black became, for an instant, the most famous Wildcats fan in the state. Discussions about him and his tattoo dominated talk radio. Was it brilliant, the sign of a true fan? Or was he just an idiot? On Twitter, where the dark side seems to dominate, Black was encouraged to cut off his leg. “A lot of people called me inbred and said I lived in a trailer,” Black says, shaking his head.

He went to Lexington for a few days after getting the tattoo and ended up in the same bar as Kentucky players Jon Hood and Jarrod Polson. “They all got a picture with me and told me how much they loved what I’d done,” Black says.

He was blissful, and it only got better. The NCAA Tournament began about two weeks later, and the Wildcats were seeded eighth in one of the four regionals (in a sixty-eight-team field), meaning there were at least twenty-eight teams seeded higher. But the Wildcats won five straight games, reaching the national championship game against Connecticut in Arlington, Texas. “People were freaking out,” Black says. “They were calling me ‘The Eight Prophet’ or something like that. They were like, ‘This man is Notre Dame, blah blah blah. He is about to be correct. Who’s the idiot now?’ ”

A local CBS crew filmed Black while he watched the semifinals victory over Wisconsin. Afterward, a CBS reporter called him and said she had two tickets to the national title game for him if he could make it to Texas. He invited Nathan, the “preppy frat-type dude,” and Nathan borrowed his mom’s car, and they drove thirteen hours to Texas.

Across from AT&T Stadium in Arlington is a bar called Tailgate Tavern, and before the national championship game, as Black drank and socialized there, fans came up to him and took pictures with the tattoo. “You’re the man!” they said. “You’re our savior.” If Black could have frozen time, could have picked one moment to live over and over, that might be it. Sitting at that bar, free ticket to the NCAA title game in his pocket, the adulation of his fellow Kentucky fans washing over him, the belief floating in the air that he had helped his Wildcats win. That was about as good as it gets.

Then Kentucky lost to Connecticut.

Black wasn’t the prophet anymore, the savior; he was once again the fool, the Kentucky fan with a tattoo declaring the team a champion in a year it finished as runner-up. After the game, Black and Nathan went back to their hotel room and crashed. The next morning, they made the long and depressing thirteen-hour drive back to Richmond.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.