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.
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