Sports "curses" and sports belief systems

I could easily move on from last week's post, but since the two most "cursed" teams in the playoffs are the ones who made it to the World Series that starts tonight, it seems worth the effort to break down how the idea of cursed teams functions within the belief systems of sports that were the subject of last week's post.

In case you've been under a rock for the last few days, the Chicago Cubs are in the World Series for the first time since 1945, and looking to win their first Series since 1908 (not a misprint), which is, of course, a drought of 108 years. Their counterparts in Cleveland, in the meantime, have not won a World Series since 1948, and though they have been to the World Series a few times since then, those trips to the Series were painful enough to suggest "cursedness" for some more than long-term absence from the Series (a la the Cubs). They were the victims of Willie Mays's catch (i.e. "The Catch") in 1954, they were on the wrong end of Atlanta's only World Series win in that run during the 1990s, and were within an inning of winning it all in 1997 only to watch Jose Mesa blow a save to the then-Florida Marlins. It seems fair to say that Cleveland fans have known their share of baseball-propelled grief.

Popular culture has in fact used both of these long droughts for movie fodder. It takes a kid with a surgery-enhanced arm to rescue Chicago in Rookie of the Year, while Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen and others did the trick in Major League and its lesser sequel. So that part's a draw, I guess. The celebrity-endorsement battle goes decisively to Chicago, however, as the likes of Bill Murray and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam have been regular presences in Wrigley Field, and the ancient stadium (which still didn't exist when last the Cubs won the Series) and the long lack of success have become oddly fashionable in recent years.

So anyway, back to the idea of curses. The story goes that in that 1945 Series the Cubs declined admission to a man's billy goat, supposedly prompting said man to pronounce a curse on the team, which either said the Cubs would never get to the Series again (in which case it is now broken), or would never win again (yet to be determined). The incident happened in game four of that series, and though the Cubs lost that game, they did win one more game in the Series, so it doesn't seem as though the curse was effective immediately.

Ridiculous as the whole thing sounds (and is), it persisted as good newspaper fodder, although "persisted" might not be the best word. The team went 82-71 in 1946, but didn't have another winning record until 1963. Is that cursed, or just bad? It seems the "curse" language didn't really kick in until 1969, when the team got out to a big lead in the National League East only to collapse and lose the division to the New York "Miracle Mets." Their next actual playoff appearance was not until 1984, when the team achieved the then-unprecedented feat of blowing a 2-0 lead in the National League Championship Series, losing three straight to the San Diego Padres (with a misplay by Leon Durham being magnified in the malaise).

A handful of other unsuccessful playoff appearances followed, with the next major flareup of curse talk coming in 2003. Holding a 3-1 lead against the Marlins, and with lots of talk about curse-busting in the air, the Cubs lost to Josh Beckett but still came home needing only one win to get to the Series.

*Full disclosure: I was at game four in Miami in 2003, which the Cubs won handily to take that 3-1 lead. On my way out of the park with my father-in-law, we were passed by numerous Cubs fans chanting "bring on the Yankees!" At that point I lost all respect for Cubs fans and would have been happy had they never made it to the Series again, and would not be bothered if they didn't win. Don't presume, or you deserve whatever sports suffering you get. (See, even I have my belief systems about sports.)

Game six offered for many the ultimate "curse event": a foul ball into the stands, which Cubs OF Moises Alou attempted to catch, instead glanced off an unfortunate fan. How that explains how the team suddenly gave up eight runs in the inning is beyond me.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, bad teams were frequently the norm as well, with that 1954 WS loss followed by its own stretch of bad teams, with occasional winning records and no playoffs until that 1995 event.

Based on this admittedly limited survey, curse talk (in these baseball cases at least) seem to serve a few functions:

1) covering for a long stretch of losing baseball, although not necessarily immediately. It seems to kick in only when said sad-sack team comes close to winning. The Cleveland version of a curse didn't even get invented until after 1960, when the team traded popular and successful Rocky Colavito. While the talk might have local currency, it takes the approach of success for it to go national.

2) somehow filling an apparent need for a better story than "this team was bad for a really long time and now they're good but still can't win it all."

3) avoiding blaming the team for its failures.

This is the vexing part to me. The Kansas City Royals weren't thought of as "cursed" in their thirty-year gap between World Series wins; they were just bad. Nobody has invented curses for the Padres (established 1969) or Houston Astros (1962), who have never won the World Series, or the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals (1969) or Seattle Mariners (1977), who have never even been. Yet a colorful if highly anecdotal story about a goat gets to explain a century of un-success in Chicago.

I wonder if curses are just a particularly maddening manifestation of the "my team, right or wrong" mentality. My team can't be this bad; something else must be to blame. If my team is this bad, does that mean I'm bad too? If you are forced to accept that your team is bad, or that it plays badly when it gets to the playoffs, then your sports belief system is challenged, and that's the one unacceptable thing for a sports fan to contemplate.

Really, I promise you, rational people, people who act and think intelligently and rationally and ethically in every other part of their lives, absolutely fall into this mindset when it comes to their team. It's beyond the similar mindset of blaming umpires or referees for bad calls; it starts to veer into talk of conspiracy theories and "rigged" contests at worst (the NBA seems most prone to the latter talk, though). (And in case you're wondering, yes, I do speak from experience.)

It gets a little ugly, and is bad enough to witness in sports. Just imagine how nasty it would be if that mindset crept into our lives outside baseball, or sports in general. Like, say, in religion. Or politics.

Just imagine, indeed.

At least one cycle of curse-talk will end with this series, thank the Lord.

Sports and belief systems

You might recall the basis for the name of this blog. Imagine the scene as a befuddled outsider (a yankee, probably) observes how southerners lose their minds over college football and comments on the passions being (for good or ill, quite possibly) like religion, only to have a native respond (a grizzled veteran, preferably) with something along the lines of "son, down here football ain't a religion, it's way more important than that."

Leaving aside the evident truth of the statement (more often than I as a pastor like to think about), and a previous and somewhat jocular blog entry to the contrary, I wouldn't necessarily argue that football, or any other sport for that matter, is a religion. I would easily and quickly argue, though, that sports share many things with religion. Possibly one of the chief similarities is that partisanship to most sports, or to individual teams in particular, seems to involve something like a belief system.

I'm thinking of more than the obvious "my team > your team" sentiment expressed with varying degrees of passion and/or vulgarity by fans, or sometimes with humor as by the t-shirt below, or in the song from Weird Al Yankovic's most recent album (your tolerance for which may be determined by your tolerance for an s-word that rhymes with "ducks").

Nota bene: I do acknowledge that there are plenty of fans who in fact know that such a claim is absolutely untrue for their team, and that in fact theirs is the team Weird Al is making fun of. They're the ones who are absoluely floored by a 6-6 season and a trip to the Independence Bowl, or not actually being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs before Labor Day. Those teams are not that common, and their fans tend to be looked down on by fans whose belief system is governed by one of the few close-to-universal claims, "if you're not a winner, you're a loser." But they do exist, and they are perhaps less verging on literal insanity than most.

No, I'm suggesting that there are somewhat more subtle, and usually unconscious, attitudes or assumptions or beliefs that underlie the fanship of an awful lot of sports followers.

I have no intention of trying to claim these beliefs as universal across sports, aside from the above winner/loser dictum. I'd say that many of the beliefs are particular to their sports, possibly to individual teams or the cities in which they play, and in a few cases to the league (or conference, in college) in which a fan's team plays. So instead I'll point out a few specific cases as best as possible.

Since I'm watching a baseball playoff game right now, its particular character as a very organized belief system jumps out at me, with the particular distinguishing characteristic that much of the game's belief system seems to originate with not fans or coaches, but the players themselves. This claim derives mostly from the particular canon of law, practically Talmudic in its scope, usually known as The Right Way to Play the Game (or in some cases The Unwritten Rules). 

This usually ends up being boiled down to "don't show me up." Anything that the offended party takes as embarrassing to the offended party comes under the ban here -- watching your home run ball leave the yard, flipping your bat after hitting it, any kind of gesture by a pitcher after striking out a hitter, a particularly showboat-ish catch in the outfield, you name it and it can be considered offensive by somebody, and you get condemned as not knowing The Right Way to Play the Game. And then somebody throws at your head, which is somehow construed as The Right Way to Play the Game.

Baseball also seems more prone to particular beliefs about curses than other sports. The lodestar example of this curse obsession is in this postseason, currently tied with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908, and rather than chalking it up to having a lot of bad teams and then having good teams not play well when they did get to the playoffs, a curse about a billy goat became the (ha!) scapegoat. Varying events such as a collapse in the NLCS agains the San Diego Padres in 1984 and the so-called "Bartman game" in 2003 (seriously, people, Bartman didn't choke away eight freaking runs to the Florida Marlins -- who, bitterly to Cubs fans, went on to win the World Series that season), are of course blamed on the Curse of the Billy Goat. I'm guessing that lots of Cubs fans are invoking that curse after being beaten last night by Clayton Kershaw, who is only one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Meanwhile, tonight there are probably Cleveland fans who are wondering about the Curse of Rocky Colavito after tonight's starting pitcher, Trevor Bauer, lasted only 2/3 of an inning after suffering a cut on a finger a few days ago. Since Mike Napoli just hit a home run to give his team the lead against the Toronto Blue Jays, perhaps they're calming down for a moment.

You can read about a whole bunch of other sports-related "curses" here. Other sports do get invoked, and in some cases cities are somehow regarded as being "cursed" across all sports teams.With the Cleveland Cavaliers' NBA championship, the supposed "Cleveland curse" would seem to be gone, with Buffalo and/or San Diego (which has never experienced a major-sport championship for any of its teams) most likely to be regarded as "cursed" even if no specific cause of a curse can be noted.

Most such sports beliefs aren't that elaborate or overtly stated, though. So much of the "belief system" around a sport or team is much more likely to go unspoken, and perhaps to claim much more power for its unspokenness. 

Sometimes that belief is tied up with beliefs outside of sports, such as nationalism. Here football is most prominent, though baseball certainly tries with its "national pastime" nickname. Football has certianly wrapped itself in the flag, both on the pro and college levels, and particularly since 9/11. It has also shown a propensity for direct military display, sometimes funded by the Department of Defense (although NASCAR and MLB also score heavily there).

But perhaps the most insidious unspoken belief in sports, and likely the most unspoken and most powerful, is simple but sinister, and one shared with nationalism at its most base.

My team, right or wrong.

It may have adaptations; my conference, right or wrong (fans of the Southeastern Conference, particularly in football, are Exhibit A here); my league, right or wrong; maybe my sport, right or wrong?

It's the impulse that turns Baylor University and its fans into particularly horrid victim-blamers in the face of accusations of sexual assault against its football players (and Baylor is hardly the only example here, though probably the most egregious of late). My school, right or wrong.

It's the impulse that (along with gobs of cash) makes FIFA one of the most corrupt organizations on earth. My sport, right or wrong. 

It's what allows Atlanta or Cleveland baseball fans, or fans of a whole heap of college teams (Florida State, for example), or Chicago hockey fans, to ignore the inherent insult in making mascots out of fellow human beings (even those who have enough ethical understanding to know better). My team, my school, right or wrong.

And (you knew I was going here) it makes football fans, teams, collegiate conferences, and the NFL unwilling to face just what playing the game has most likely been doing to players for more than a century, even if we only noticed it when Mike Webster died.

And this is why it will be virtually impossible to "fix" football. 

Because my game, right or wrong. 

It has to be the players' fault. Something must be wrong with them. Or the coaches are doing it wrong. Or the helmets are wrong, or the artificial turf is wrong, or anything other than the basic and hard-to-escape observation that when very large and very strong men run into each other at very high speeds and over and over and over and over and over again, the miracle is that such brain trauma doesn't happen to more players. 

It can't be that. My game, right or wrong. 

And thus the game will go on, and people will keep on getting damaged beyond repair, and nobody in the stands will be able to tell. 

And, I guess, nobody will care.

The giving and receiving of hits

Two highly prominent athletes in their respective sports are currently sidelined due to suffering concussions in competition. (That would actually be three if you count Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who is trying to rehabilitate while missing the end of the NASCAR season due to concussion effects from much earlier this year.) One of last year's Super Bowl quarterbacks, Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, missed the team's most recent game due to a concussion. For Newton, the season started on a rugged note when he received multiple hits to the head in the season opener against their Super Bowl opponents, the Denver Broncos, and the pattern has continued through the season so far. While the initial reaction after game one was mostly about the dubious hits he has received, of late the conversation has turned to suggestions that Newton will have to change his style of play, relying more on pocket play and getting rid of the ball quickly instead of keeping plays alive with his feet. While this smacks a bit of "blaming the victim," it also seems pretty lame; the notion that any of this will guarantee that further harm does not find Newton is pretty untenable given that concussions don't happen just to running quarterbacks (ask Case Keenum).

Meantime, in the National Hockey League, possibly its best player is sidelined again. Sidney Crosby, center for the Pittsburgh Penguins, is day-to-day (such a thoroughly existential phrase) after a collision in practice on Friday. Any such concern for Crosby is magnified by his previous experience. Crosby missed nearly two seasons after suffering a concussion in 2011 (though he was hardly the first NHL player to have significant time lost due to concussion), leaving his sport missing one of its brightest lights and amplifying the concern about concussions in hockey during a time when a number of its former players were being revealed to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The end of that period also marked the start of legal action against the NHL over head trauma. It may be coincidental that the NHL just announced new policies adding "spotters" at matches -- certified athletic trainers with hockey experience -- who can call for players to be removed from the game when a concussion is suspected.

In the current climate around both sports, such losses draw heightened attention from fans of these sports, or even sports fans generally. This is, of course, a far cry from past years in which the word "concussion" might not have entered the discussion at all, and neither Newton nor Crosbly would have missed any action until neither one of them was able to walk. That only began to change after a number of deaths, mostly of football players at first, who were found to have suffered from CTE. This is of course well-established now, but I find it worthwhile and even needful to reach back in memory and try to remember how it was when we didn't know or understand what was going on, and to try to figure out how I came to the position I currentled y occupy, one in which watching football at all just isn't something I can stomach anymore.

In doing so, I find that the turn started many years ago, with the death of Andre Waters.


Andre Waters played twelve seasons in the NFL, mostly with the Philadelphia Eagles. His reputation, and it was a pervasive one, was as one of the hardest hitters in the league among its defensive backs, or frankly from any position. On occasion Waters would draw fines for the severity of his hits, and that in an age when the league was cranking out videos like "NFL's Greatest Hits" and other such similarly themed titles.

After his playing career ended Waters began to get into collegiate coaching, working at Morgan State University, the University of South Florida, and Alabama State University before ending up at Fort Valley State College, an HBCU in central Georgia not far from my hometown. Between that and the fact that Waters was a native of Belle Glade, Florida (not far from West Palm Beach, where I was living in 2006), the story caught my attention. It's not as though Waters was a favorite player, by any means -- he was usually causing harm to whatever team I was following. But his was a familiar name, and the report of suicide was naturally shocking.

And he wasn't a Pittsburgh Steeler.

Mike Webster had died in 2002. He had been diagnosed with brain damage during his life, but his diagnosis of CTE was not of course known until after his death. Another former Steeler, Justin Strzelczyk, died in an automotive accident in 2004, and the following year onetime teammate Terry Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze. Both were also found to have CTE in postmortem examination.

As bizarre as it sounds, one could at that point rationalize such stories by wondering damn, what are the Steelers doing to their players? After all, the three had all played for them. Maybe they were just too abusive in practice or something. Also, all three of these players had been offensive linemen. They were in position to get hit a lot, and on every play. If you don't want to think there's a real problem, you look for anything that can be used to limit the scope of that problem. So no, it wasn't crazy-sounding to posit that the Steelers somehow abused their offensive linemen in some way.

Andre Waters's death and diagnosis messed with that.

For one thing, obviously Waters didn't play for the Steelers. He spent the last couple of years of his career with the Arizona Cardinals after his time with the Eagles.

Also, Waters wasn't an offensive lineman. He was a defensive back.

He wasn't the one being hit. He was the hitter.

He was famous for delivering punishing hits. One might even say he was notorious, though such terms are usually reserved for the likes of Jack Tatum (the one who paralyzed Daryl Stingley) or Lester Hayes. To learn that Waters had suffered from this condition messed with a lot of the mythology about football, perhaps the most pervasive of such being a gratuitous perversion of a well-known scripture: when it comes to hits in football, it is better to get than to receive.

If a ferocious hitter like Andre Waters could end up dead at age 44, with a brain likened to that of an 85-year-old Alzheimer's sufferer, clearly hitting was not a lot better than being hit.

I would actually go so far as to say that the death of Andre Waters was the first one to cause me to pay attention to football and CTE and the deaths of players -- not in any systematic way, and not nearly to the point of even thinking about giving up watching football (though I had lost a lot of interest in the NFL by this time), but enough to wonder about what effect the game might have on some number of its players.

At that point it was hard to imagine the numbers of former players who would be found to have suffered from CTE, or that such big names as Junior Seau or Ken Stabler would be among their number. It was certainly not imaginable that a movie would be made on the subject or that a book like League of Denial would come along.

In short, it was not imaginable that we'd end up where we are now, where football -- not just the NFL but football at every age -- would have to think about change, would have to face the possibility that people might decide it wasn't worth the risk for their kids. It was hard to imagine that players who never played beyond college would be diagnosed with this condition.

And yet here we are.