Cubs and curses: how our superstitions can be overcome

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Gerry ChidiacWhen five million people gathered recently to celebrate the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, it was the seventh largest gathering of people in history – and certainly the largest sports-related gathering ever.

Why was this event so significant to so many people?

For one thing, the Cubs hadn’t won professional baseball’s World Series in 108 years.

For every one of those 108 seasons, fans gathered in the spring and said, “This could be the year!”

And the Cubs came close many times. They lost in the World Series seven times between 1908 and 1945. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they had one of the strongest starting lineups in baseball and never even won their division. In 2003, the team collapsed in National League Championship Series, again falling short of their ultimate goal.

Despite the fact that they had an enormous fan base and one of the most hallowed stadiums in sports, the Cubs just couldn’t win.

When humans don’t understand why things are the way that they are, we look for explanations. This is the case from tribal cultures to advanced societies, according to anthropologists. So sports are rife with superstitions. We see it in players and fans: we avoid getting our hair cut on game days, wear a particular sweater, or do some other ritual to assure success. We do this because we know that no matter how well we prepare, anything can happen in an athletic event.

For fans of the Cubs, more than a century of losing has been blamed on the “Curse of the Billy Goat.” It’s said that a tavern owner wanted to bring his goat into a game. When he wasn’t allowed, he cast a curse on the Cubs, preventing them from ever winning another championship.

Boston Red Sox fans held a similar belief. After the team traded Babe Ruth (nicknamed the Bambino) to the New York Yankees, Boston too had a very long World Series drought. The “Curse of the Bambino” lasted 86 years, until it was finally broken in 2004.

What’s interesting is that the same man who broke the Curse of the Bambino also broke the Curse of the Billy Goat. Theo Epstein was hired to run the Red Sox in 2002 and resigned his position in Boston to join the Cubs in 2011.

Is Epstein a powerful shaman? No, he’s a very effective business leader who understands what it takes to be successful. And he’s passionate about baseball. He put together the best teams he possibly could, with the best leaders and the best players. He created positive attitudes from the top of his organizations to the bottom. He couldn’t control the bounce of every ball or the outcome of every game, but he knew that with all of these pieces in place, winning was inevitable.

We too don’t control every aspect of our lives. Just as every sports team loses from time to time, we all face our share of setbacks.

The key is to know what we want to achieve, to learn and understand how to achieve it, and to work hard every day to make it come about.

Effective people are not people without problems, they’re people who respond effectively to challenges, just as the Chicago Cubs overcame the Curse of the Billy Goat to win the 2016 World Series.

All the years of setbacks simply made their victory that much more significant. This is indeed reason for the largest celebration in North American history.

Troy Media columnist Gerry Chidiac is an award-winning high school teacher specializing in languages, genocide studies and work with at-risk students.

© Troy Media


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