In case you haven’t noticed, sports fans are sticklers for superstitions and hardcore believers in curses. Yesterday, I blogged about a possible curse of the NFL’s Pittsburg Steelers and I began thinking about other sports “curses.” Most don’t involve deaths (like the Steelers curse), but just bad luck. One of my favorite sports curses stories is that of the Billy Goat.
I spent my 7th and 8th years living outside Chicago. Even though we were not in the city, most everything came to a stop when the Chicago Cubs played and I remember watching many games on television. Many fans blame the Curse of the Billy Goat as the reason why the Chicago Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908. Actually, the Curse of the Billy Goat began in 1945. While the Cubs won their last World Series in 1908, they actually appeared in the series in 1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945 – quite an impressive streak! But, since 1945, the Cubs have not won the National League pennant. What happened?
Well, the story is that Greek immigrant Billy Sianis, a Chicago tavern owner, had two box seat tickets to game four of the 1945 World Series in which the Cubs were playing the Detroit Tigers. Sianis wanted to bring his pet goat Murphy the game. Murphy was ready to cheer for the Cubs, wearing a blanket, which read, “We got Detroit’s goat.”
Both were allowed into the game and paraded around the field before the ushers lead them off. The ushers allowed Sianis and Murphy to go to their box seats. It started to rain and Murphy started to stink, at which point he was ejected by word of the Cubs owner Philip Knight Wrigley. Sianis was insulted and reportedly put a curse on the Cubs that they should never again with a pennant or World Series while playing in Wrigley Field due to the offense.
If you are a Cubs fan, you know the rest of the story. Fifty-two long years later and still no pennant for the Cubs. It is the longest pennant drought in the history of Major League Baseball. Now, maybe it is just a coincidence, but just in case, people have tried to break the curse. Billy Sianis’ nephew Sam was brought out onto the field several times with a goat. Some crazed fan even hung a butchered goat from the Harry Caray statue in 2007. The Sun-Times condoned the stunt, but the Cubs did win the NL Central Title that year.
Are the Cub fans destined to suffer forever or is there a cure for the curse? Sam Sianis has said that the only way to end the curse is for the Cubs organization to show a “true sincere fondness” of goats – to allow them into Wrigley Field because they like them, not only because they are trying to get publicity.