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Sporting News, The, Nov 8, 2004 by Sean Deveney

Strange that, in the days after the death of the Curse of the Bambino, there has been an impulse to deride that very curse as a silly indulgence.

I saw Peter Gammons on television offhandedly say there never was any curse, that the Red Sox simply lacked pitching all these years. I read commentary by writer Charles Pierce, who claimed the curse was nothing more than "mystical self-love and karmic exceptionalism."

Now, wait a clam-shucking minute. Gentlemen, as a lifelong Red Sox fan, I beg ... don't you take away my curse.

This curse did exist. True, some facts about it have been grossly distorted, but over the past 86 years, the Red Sox have given fans volumes of reasons to suspect higher forces were working against them.

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There are obvious tormentors--Aaron Boone, Bill Buckner, Bucky Dent, Enos Slaughter--and history is packed with near-misses and Game 7 failures.

The curse explains why a team that won five championships in its first 15 years, then sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees before the 1920 season, finished last nine times in 13 years while the Yankees won seven pennants during that time. You have to be cursed to finish second 18 times since 1920--and behind the Yankees 14 of those times.

Pitching? Ask Boo Ferris, Tex Hughson and Mel Parnell about the notion of fate playing an anti-Red Sox hand. They could have formed a dominant threesome in the late '40s and early '50s, but arm injuries shortened their careers. And can anyone explain why Roger Clemens won one crummy playoff game for the Red Sox but won four for the Yankees?

I think I know.

Curses are self-fulfilling. They exist simply because they exist. In Boston, Ruth's curse was myth made into reality. Perhaps players had expectations of failure lodged in their subconscious, and their play was affected.

Perhaps the negative energy that Red Sox fans emitted altered the universe's quantum mechanics and caused the ball to take impossible tumbles. Perhaps there really are baseball gods, and they just did not like us.

Maybe Ruth's curse was not real, but it existed. It existed because Red Sox fans kept trying to explain why this organization could find such monumentally depressing ways to lose. It existed because we continued to care.

The 2004 Red Sox, a group of guys you would not bring home to mother, have dosed the book on the Curse of the Bambino. These guys took pride in their limited intellect, and I suspect one reason they broke the curse was that they had enough trouble keeping their conscious minds in order, so there was no time to worry about some curse weighing on their subconscious.

Red Sox fans have won, and some say we will be emotional basket cases without our "mystical self-love." That implies we really did not want to win. Not so--the curse made the win all the sweeter. There is no joy in knowing you are going to lose in new and interesting ways. And that was our curse, knowing we would lose. We no longer are burdened by that knowledge.

Pitching? Self-indulgence? Please.

The curse is dead. Long live the curse.

2005 Ad

Sporting News, The, Nov 8, 2004 by Sean Deveney

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