Sports Curses

Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of sports-related curses. Some are quite famous - the curse of the bambino, the billy goat curse, the Sports Illustrated curse, while some others are less so. Some have to be read incredibly selectively to seriously be considered curses. Some could be considered curses, but the reasoning is incredibly uninspired. Here's a couple of interesting finds.



I would be remiss not to mention that one of the curses here is about snooker. Now, I probably would be wise to leave it at that. But I'll just add that this is, of course, the famous "Crucible Curse" - as everyone knows, no first-time champion has ever defended his title at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where the World Snooker Championship has been held since 1977.



There's the incredibly dubious Curse of NHL Expansion - it's not even clear who is cursed under this curse. Arbitrarily the Maple Leafs haven't made the Cup finals since the expansion of '67, while two of the expansion teams, the Kings and Blues have never won it.



Of course, there's the legendary Utah Sports Runner Up Jinx. Who doesn't know about Utah's famous inability to go higher than second place in a sport? Examples include the Jazz in 1997 and 1998, and the Utes looking the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship to Kentucky in 1998. Less-known examples include the Salt Lake Bees (minor league baseball) losing the Pacific Coast League championship three times, Real Salt Lake losing the Western Conference Final to New York Red Bulls, the Utah Snowbears folding after completing a 27-1 season, before they could attempt to take the championship, and the University of Utah Women's Gymnastics team finishing second three years in a row. According to experts, the curse was either formed when Dennis Rodman stated that "Utah Will Never Win a Championship," or alternately when Poltergeist was filmed there (the people of Utah are very religious.)



The curse that inspired this article is the Curse of the Colonel. After their first ever Japan Series championship, Henshin Tigers fans, to celebrate, fan look-a-likes of every Tigers player jumped into a river off a bridge in Osaka. Having no white people to resemble star slugger Randy Bas,s the fans threw into the river a statue of Colonel Sanders, the only white person hanging around. Since then, the Tigers have yet to take another Series.



Then last, but, not least, there's my favorite the "Socceroos Witch Doctor Curse." Now the explanation could not possibily live up to the name of the curse, but basically the gyst is that a Australian Soccer player paid a witch doctor while in Mozambique to curse the opposing team - the curse worked in that game, but the players couldn't come up with the money, and since then (well, up to 2006) the Socceroos had been unable to qualify for a World Cup.