There's no such thing as curses
Posted: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 4:20 PM
Curses don’t exist. Good-luck charms don’t work. Destiny is no more real than the chupacabra. And the Great Spirit in the Sky doesn’t care how hard you pray or how many goats you sacrifice or what sin you swear to give up for the rest of your life, He, She or It isn’t going to help you win a ball game.
Of these things I am as certain as I am that Sarah Palin needs to work on giving interviews.
My thoughts were directed to these things while I was reading Bob Cook’s terrific piece about the Billy Goat Curse and other reasons why Cubs fans experiencing high anxiety as the playoffs begin.
Bob doesn’t suggest that a billy goat could have anything to do with the Cubs’ epic run of futility. He just tells the story about the goat that was refused admission to the 1945 World Series even though it had a perfectly valid box-seat ticket, and the goat’s owner, who vowed the Cubs would pay for their effrontery by never winning the World Series again.
That wasn’t a hard call to make. At the time, the Cubs had already laid down a 37-year base of losing on which to build. Since then, they haven’t even been to the World Series, which supposedly proves that there is a curse.
Stuff and nonsense, as Winnie the Pooh would say. The wonderful thing about sports is that you make your own luck, good or bad. And most of the production process takes place between the ears.
That’s why sports curses can indeed take on a life of their own. You tell a team often enough that it’s cursed, and the thought takes root in the back of the players’ minds. To prove they aren’t cursed, they try harder to win, and everyone knows what happens when you try too hard: you fail.
It’s also why players’ superstitions sometimes seem to work. If I believe I can’t fail as long as I wear my lucky socks, I’m going to feel more confident with them on and less confident without them.
In my case, I believe I can’t play well with a golf ball that is any color other than white. I also can not hit a ball off a pink tee. The proof is that every time I hit a colored ball or use a pink tee, I hit it badly. I know this is utterly insane. The reason I hit an orange ball poorly or slice it off a pink tee is because I expect to.
The other side of that is embodied in a golfing buddy who found a pink ball and hit it so well he decided to play nothing but pink balls. He was glad to suffer the verbal slings and arrows of his macho friends because the day usually ended with them reaching for their wallets. Of course, he was a darned good golfer before he started playing a pinkie.
Anyway, the Cubs aren’t on a 100-year schneid because of a goat. For most of their streak, they lost because they were a lousy team. Okay, so they collapsed against the Mets in 1969 and a few years ago there was that Bartman thing. But when you get to the postseason once a generation, you can hardly blame a black cat or an overeager fan – or a billy goat. The way the Yankees won 26 World Series started by playing in 37 of them.
Teams that rarely are contenders are going to fail more often than not. They get too excited, get to talking about bad luck, start pressing and blow it. Only when they stop caring about history and curses and everything else do they finally come through.
In 2004, down 0-3 to the Yankees in the ALCS, the Red Sox poured a glass of Jack Daniels before Game 4 and every player took a sip – before the game. It wasn’t enough to get a gnat drunk, but it was the gesture that counted. The self-proclaimed “idiots” were spitting on tradition and that stupid Curse of the Bambino and the Yankees and propriety. Freed of their psychological baggage, they didn’t lose again that year and have tacked on another title since.
So if the Cubs want to conduct some sort of group exorcism, I highly recommend it.
Anything they do that makes them think they’ve broken the non-existent curse can’t hurt.
At the same time, all those fans who think that they can affect the outcome by performing some magic ritual should just chill out. Waving towels and dressing the same in the park helps fire up the home team. But eating a lucky meal or wearing lucky underwear doesn’t do anything for anybody.
Shakespeare had it figured out more than 400 years ago when he wrote “Julius Caesar” when he had Cassius tell his co-conspirator: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”
