Sports and Superstitious Curses
Athletes are a superstitious bunch; from doing little pre game rituals to praying for divine help to believing in curses. The interesting thing about some of the curses that athletes believe in are that they are surprisingly accurate. This does not in any way mean that they are true, but a lot of the time people start to believe in something if it has gone on for a very long time. Curses range from the weird to the downright bizarre; from people being cursed by former players or curses befalling teams from witch doctors, the stories of some of these curses are hilarious as well as very odd.
No one really knows why so many athletes are so superstitious. It may have something to do with the fact that the desire to win is so great that if something was done once that enabled an athlete to win they will continue to do that same thing over and over again. They think that it was doing that particular thing that enabled them to win rather than their own abilities. It works the other way too, in regards to losses. If some superstitious activity was done and the team loses and keeps on losing, then that activity is labelled as having brought a curse onto the team. So many funny stories of curses abound in popular sports media that one has to stop and think, is there any truth to them.
A very funny and odd curse story is from the world of football. The Australian national football team, the Socceroos, reportedly hired a witch doctor for the 1970 World Cup qualifiers. The purpose of this dodgy doctor was to curse all the other teams in the tournament and enable Australia to win matches. The plan backfired when the Socceroos failed to pay the witch doctor's fee and the curse was reversed to fall on them instead of the other teams. The Australians lost their very next match against Israel when three of their star players fell ill. The curse was finally lifted when a film maker learned about it and travelled to Africa and had the curse reversed.
America, for some reason, is full of curses and stories about losing streaks attributed to a curse or injuries that were caused by curses. One of the oddest ones involves the popular sports magazine, Sports Illustrated. It is claimed that whichever athlete was featured on the cover of the magazine fell to injury very soon after that. The very first athlete to be featured on the cover started the trend. The baseball player Eddie Mathews, suffered a hand injury one week after appearing on the cover and it forced him to miss seven games. Over the years many other athletes have fallen prey to the curse, except for Michael Jordan who has been featured more times than any other athlete and has escaped injury. The magazine itself did a feature on the so called curse finding that 37% of its cover stars were struck with some sort of injury.
A very interesting curse in baseball was called the Curse of the Bambino. It involved the Boston Red Sox who were playing phenomenally well with their star player Babe Ruth. But as luck would have it, Ruth was transferred to the Yankees and so started the Red Sox's run of bad luck. They managed to lose every single time they appeared in the World Series from 1920 until 2004. The losses were even harder to bear because the Red Sox lost every time in game 7 of each Series. Their streak of bad luck was ended with a historic win against the Cardinals in 2004. Maybe the spirit of Babe Ruth decided he had had enough fun messing with his old team and gave them a break. Whether one believes in curses or not, the really interesting ones like the Curse of the Bambino are fascinating to read about.
No one can actually know whether curses are real or not. A lot of level headed people do not believe in curses and superstition but a huge number of athletes seem to. It seems to be the case that once a supposed curse hits a team or a player they go out of their way to lift the curse and get back onto a winning streak. Maybe if they spent more time practising and improving their skills and techniques, they would not need to remove imaginary curses in the first place.
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