Perhaps just baseball can beat the football in matter of superstition. Famous is the curse of Bela Guttmancoach of Benfica than in 1962after scoring the double in the Champions Cup leading the Portuguese team, he launched anathema to all Portuguese football when the Lisbon leaders refused him a prize for the victory: “A hundred years from now no Portuguese team will be European champions twice in a row, and the Benfica will never win a European Cup without me!”. So far it has always gone like this, actually: Benfica lost seven finalsfive of which were Champions Cup…
In baseball this is the year of broken curses, on both sides of the Pacific. Seven years ago the longest and most famous one collapsed, which damned the fate of the gods Chicago Cubs. They took it 108 years old to win the World Series again, and many believed the fan was responsible William Sianis and his goat Billy, the smell of which had caused him to be removed from the stands where he went to cheer on the Cubs, in the 1945 finals: “You will never win the World Series again”, he said as he left amidst the laughter of the other fans, because Chicago had been dry since 1918, but he was winning that game. He lost her, and only in 2016 did he manage to regain the ‘pennant’which indicates samples. I’m Red Sox in Boston they were necessary 86 years old to overcome the curse of ‘Bambino’, or Babe Ruthwhich was sold and went on to make the fortune of the Yankees.
This is the past. The present says that a few days after the success of Texas Rangers in the American pro tournament (after 63 years of unsuccessful attempts), in the morning the Colonel’s taboo, in Japan. That is, the curse that prevented success for 38 years at Hanshin Tigersteam playing a Nishinomiya, periferia di Osaka and that he had won Japan Series for the last time in 1985. And it leaves from that moment a story that needs to be told calmly.
To celebrate the victory, Tigers fans chose a very original way. They invited all the players to dive into the Dotonbori Canal: For each player, he also dived a fan who looked like him. Except there was an American player on that team, Randy Bass, for which it was not possible find a lookalike. He looked a little like Bass the statue of Colonel Harland Sandersthe founder of the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken. And then the fans took a statue of him outside a shop and they threw her into the river. It is not known whether the real colonel was upset, given that he had already died five years earlier. But while the managers of the other KFC outlets rushed to fix and bring the other statues inside, on the team of Tigers was in the dark of defeatat least until this morning when the success came in game 7 against the Orix Buffaloes by the Italian Alessandro Maestri.
For the record, the statue was fished out of the canal in 2009, without glasses and a hand. But evidently another fourteen years had to pass before that the colonel’s anger subsided.
2023-11-05 16:43:18
#years #Tigers #bring #Colonel
