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Sports Plane The most famous curses in the world of sports

Curse of the Goat

During Game 4 of the 1945 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers, local businessman William Sianis was kicked out of Wrigley Field after other spectators began complaining about the stench of the goat he had brought into the stadium. When an angry Sianis left, he cast a curse on the Cubs, dooming their chances of winning the title.

The rest, as they say, is history.

But is it? Was it the actual curse or just a publicity stunt that became popular, thanks to the team’s decades of disgrace? The answer is probably a bit of both.

Sianis owned the nearby Billy Goat Tavern and had brought Murphy, her goat, to the game with a poster promoting the bar. When asked to leave his seats, he knew it was an opportunity to draw more attention from his establishment. For years, Sianis shared her story with anyone who wanted to hear it and did her best to make it timeless.

“He was known for being an incredible promoter of himself and a great showman,” said Mickey Bradley, co-author of the book “Haunted Baseball.” “He did everything he could to promote his business. In 1969, the Cubs were having a really good year and he said he would remove the curse. Then it all fell apart and his nephew kept it going for a long time too. They did everything they could to fan the flames of this curse and it was marketed madly. “

Of course, for the curse to continue, the team had to maintain a losing streak, and it did. The Cubs hadn’t won the World Series since 1908, 37 years before Sianis’s self-declared curse, but with each passing year, the legend continued to grow. And since the Cubs failed to win in the postseason, the curse only seemed to further legitimize itself and attract more believers.

There were numerous attempts to reverse the curse over the years, including Sianis himself before his death in 1970. Meanwhile, the “Curse of the Goat” became a reference everywhere, from newspaper headlines to sports broadcasts.

For Phillips Stevens Jr., a retired professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo and an expert on superstitions and magical thinking, the belief in such a curse and its popularity stems from something that is at the center of all human thought.

“What people call superstitions are really examples of magical thinking, and they are a fundamentally human belief,” Stevens said. And even if you, or one person on a team, personally believe that it is silly and the world doesn’t work this way, you probably accept it and do your best to support the idea because you know that others believe it deeply and not. you want to be the one who doesn’t. “

The curse of the Bambino

The Boston Red Sox were one of the most successful teams in baseball’s early years, winning five of the sport’s first 15 World Series titles. But that winning streak came to an abrupt halt after the 1918 season, following the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The Yankees would win their first championship in 1923 and would become one of the most dominant franchises in sports.

The Red Sox wouldn’t win another World Series in 86 years.

While Ruth’s departure from Boston had long been seen as the beginning of the team’s decline, the “Curse of the Bambino” gained momentum until Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy wrote a book with that as his title in 1990. For some, the idea that Ruth felt slighted by the move explained the team’s decades of bad luck.

“That obviously started with Dan Shaughnessy, but it only worked because the fans were looking for some kind of explanation,” Bradley said. “And beyond that, it gives the fan base another identity and an aspect by which they were united.”

The Socceroos

While in Mozambique to qualify for the World Cup in 1969, the Australian men’s national football team, nicknamed the “Socceroos”, was the favorite to beat Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The Socceroos were determined to do whatever it took to ensure victory, and reportedly turned to a local shaman for help and asked him to curse their rivals. The team won the game 3-1, but the shaman was not paid for his services. As the story goes, the curse was reversed and fell on the Australians. “From that moment he put the curse, everything went wrong for the team,” said Johnny Warren, the then team captain.

The Socceroos qualified for only one World Cup in the next 32 years and suffered a series of devastating defeats.

In 2004, Australian television personality John Safran decided to do his part to reverse the curse as part of his television series. Together with two shamans, the group returned to the field where the curse was first placed and performed various rituals in hopes of breaking the curse.

The Australian team qualified for the 2006 World Cup and former player-turned-broadcaster Craig Foster thanked Safran after the victory. The Socceroos reached the round of 16, which is still their best result of the tournament.

While the history of the origin of this curse has been disputed, and some believe that such a curse was never placed on the team, it is clear that Warren and many other players actually believed it.

“If all the players on the team believe it, or at least they are worried about it and have a little anxiety about it, they are not going to play their best,” said Stevens Jr. “It was a problem for everyone, believe it or not. . Like certain superstitions on game day, these beliefs or attempts to reverse a curse are part of that effort that you make, to get an idea of ​​whether you are really controlling anything or not, to give yourself a sense of control in a world. potentially chaotic, which is large and impersonal ”.

Cursed stadiums

The Superdome, home to the New Orleans Saints, was built in a 19th century graveyard, and after the team failed to win a single playoff game in its first 33 years of existence, some began to speculate whether the stadium was damned.

So before the Saints’ 2000 wild card game against the St. Louis Rams, the team performed a voodoo ritual led by area priestess Ava Kay Jones. She was joined by a snake, as well as dancers and drums, and performed the ceremony in the field.

Brandi Kelley, who worked with Jones at the ceremony, told ESPN that the idea was to “honor the spirits that were in the Dome, appease them and give them the recognition they deserve.”

It could have worked. The Saints beat the Rams, 31-28, and have since won 10 playoff games and the 2010 Super Bowl.

The Superdome is far from the only stadium to have been built on top of a graveyard. The home of Premier League Southampton FC (also nicknamed the Saints) was built on top of an Anglo-Saxon settlement known as Hamwic, and tombs and human remains dating from the 7th century were discovered at the site. Like the NFL Saints, these Saints also struggled at their new stadium after its completion in 2001. The team failed to win at the new field and many began to believe that something supernatural was at stake.

The team brought in a witch named Cerridwen “DragonOak” Connelly in hopes of appeasing the spirits. Hours later, Southampton FC recorded their first victory at the new stadium.

“I guess the players must have really believed (in the curse) enough to justify someone coming in and doing the ritual, and I don’t know if it was a coincidence or if it really helped, as they won right after,” he told ESPN. in 2020 Andrew Frewing-House, a Southampton-based paranormal investigator, “But I think they convinced themselves it was gone, even if it wasn’t true.”

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