Bye Bye Curse: What will Bosox fans have to moan about now?
By Roy Pickering
Superstition is such a natural fit with sports. A large number of pro athletes possess good luck charms that they cling to in tense moments, and the fans that desperately cheer them on have their own mystical rites and talismans. When you want something badly enough, any extra little bit of perceived assistance is quickly seized upon.
People who are normally quite rational and level headed somehow manage to convince themselves that the outcome of the contest at hand will be influenced by whether or not they change into a new pair of socks. Anything connected, no matter how loosely, to a past success becomes an item that just may guarantee future good fortune. At the very least, it becomes something that will help to ward off the evil spirits who side with the opposing team. And just as there are an endless variety of good luck charms possessed by players and fans, so too are there countless curses that supposedly doom a sports organization to failure.
Of the many seemingly unbreakable hexes in the world of sports, the Curse of the Bambino has been up near the top of the heap for quite some time. If any team in pro sports has ever seemed to have voodoo working against them, it would be the Boston Red Sox. You don't need to be a diehard baseball fan to realize that 1918 is a really long time ago, and for a team not to have won a single championship from then till now is quite a stretch of bad breaks. Those who do pay some attention to baseball no doubt recall the 1986 World Series that the Red Sox seemed to be on the verge of winning. Who can forget that slow groundball down the first baseline that evaded the reach of Bill Buckner's glove and trickled into the outfield, giving the New York Mets new life that carrying them to triumph in the Series? Growing up a Mets fans, that play happens to be amongst my most cherished sports memories. I'm pretty sure the orange and blue muscle tank top I was wearing sent positive vibes through the universe that allowed the Amazing Mets to prevail. Red Sox fans understandably view the circumstances in a much darker light. As for people who are afraid to walk under ladders, breaking mirrors, or the paths of black cats, they saw Mookie Wilson's Seeing Eye ground ball as additional evidence that the Curse of the Bambino lived on.
If anyone deserves to be cursed, I suppose it is the monumentally stupid. Letting the mighty Babe Ruth go to the New York Yankees for token compensation was certainly not very bright of the Boston organization. It should not have required a genius to recognize that Ruth was not merely a pretty decent pitcher, but additionally, a homerun hitting machine with tremendous star power to go along with his belly. The Babe is now and forever recognized as the greatest ever to play the game, even immortalized with a chocolate bar. The Red Sox had him on their payroll only to let him go. Some personnel moves don't look so smart in hindsight, and nearly a century later the mistake had still not been made up for. The Yankees dynasty was given birth to with their acquisition of Ruth and they have dominated the game of baseball ever since. As for the Boston, their cursed franchise has been cursing their luck ever since.
Change is the nature of life on this planet, whether it be slow in nature such as the process of evolution from a single cell organism to a spineless slimy creature to a monkey in a tree and eventually to George W. Bush in the White House, or considerably quicker moving, like the invention of the internet followed shortly thereafter by the proliferation of cybersex. In the middle of these time frames is the number of years it took for the Boston Red Sox to win another World Series after letting Babe Ruth go.
This year they finally did so, accomplishing it in as dramatic a fashion as possible, going up against their hated rivals, falling behind the Bronx Bombers three games to none, then somehow taking the next four games and vanquishing George Steinbrenner's coalition of highly paid mercenaries. After achieving the near impossible in overcoming such an overwhelming deficit against none other than the boys in pinstripes, moving on to beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series proved to be a piece of cake for the Sox. It was an extremely unique formula concocted by Boston, losing three straight postseason games and then proceeding to win the next eight in a row. But if proved to be quite effective, much like Bob Dole claims Viagra to be.
If you happen to be a Red Sox player or fan, it no longer matters what pair of socks you're wearing, so go ahead and change them after all these weeks. There is nothing that can be done or said to jinx the boys from Boston any more. The memory of Bill Buckner's gaffe no longer haunts you, the clutch homers of Aaron Boone and Bucky Dent no longer taunt you, the nightmare is over and your daydream has begun. It may still be joyless in Mudville, but for baseball fans in Boston it's officially party time. Big Bad Babe doesn't seem so menacing any longer. The Curse of the Bambino has been lifted. The Boston Red Sox are world champions. How 'bout that?
About the Author:
Roy Pickering is a freelance writer residing in Maplewood, NJ. Having recently completed his debut novel, "Patches of Grey", he is now in search of an agent and publisher while hard at work on editing a novella and writing a second novel. Roy is in no particular order, an amateur photographer, a Jets and Knicks fanatic, a budding tennis phenom, a Playstation connoisseur, an aquarium enthusiast, and a fitness buff. Another of Roy's favorite leisure time activities is perfecting his technique on the tenor sax.
A showcase of his prose and photography is located at www.roypickering.net. Roy's fiction can be found in numerous magazines and ezines as well. He is a contributor to two short story anthologies, "Proverbs for the People" by Kensington Books, and "The Game...Short Stories About the Life" by Triple Crown Publications. To continue following his Sports Issues column, current and future articles will appear at Associated Content and also at Gather.com.
