Hey, there’s a storm cloud over your head
Superstitions and sports often go hand-in-hand. Any baseball fan from New England can tell you that, as can any athlete who has worn the same underwear for any length of time without washing it.
Some people have good luck charms, things they wear or carry with them that they believe will bring success. Others will do certain things, or eat certain meals, before a game to bring out the best in their performance.
And then there’s the underwear.
Or any sort of outfit, if you’re a fan. Yours truly has certainly been know to wear the same collection of clothes when a little extra karma is needed.
What about sports writers? I’m sure there are some out there who have a lucky pen or pencil, or something to that nature. I can’t say that I have one.
But is it possible for a sports writer to be an omen of bad luck himself? Before you answer, consider the following.
When I was a senior in college – and sports editor of the student paper – I spent most of a semester doing a weekly feature where I had an Q&A with an athlete about things other than sports. In total, I probably did about six or seven of these interviews, and of those athletes, one suffered a season-ending knee injury less than a week later. Another suffered several nagging injuries and had a disappointing season. And a third was busted for underage drinking, again less than a week later.
My first newspaper job was in a small town in southern Kentucky. We covered several different high schools, including the one that was in the same town as the paper. As second-in-command of the sports desk, I only covered that school’s football team on three occasions. Of course that team lost all three games, including one to a school from a smaller classification who it hadn’t lost to in about 40 years.
My second newspaper job was in a western Pennsylvania town about an hour north of Pittsburgh. I arrived with about three weeks before the high school basketball playoffs began. During that time, unless I was covering two of our local teams playing each other, the school I was at a game for lost. And once the playoffs began, that continued, much to the delight of my boss.
And that wasn’t all that happened while I was at that paper. We also had an Athlete of the Week feature that either myself or the other sports writer would do. After a while, it seemed that whenever I would write the feature, the athlete involved would then have his or her worst week of the season right after.
One of the kids, who ran track, pulled his hamstring at practice THE SAME DAY we did the interview. That fall, when I went to talk to him for football, he said something along the lines of “I don’t know if I should talk to you, the last time I did, I got hurt.” I’m pretty sure he was joking.
It seemed the bad luck had left me when I returned to New Hampshire a little more than four years ago.
Until now.
But instead of being bad luck to a number of teams, my less-than-desirable charm seems to only have a hold on one team. This basketball season, I’ve seen this team play three times, and all three have been its worst games of the season. We’re talking not only losses, but losses in which this team has scored its fewest points all year.
The first time, no one said anything. The second time, it was ‘hey, you know you’ve seen our two worst games of the year?’
The third? Of course there were plenty of jokes about my presence and the bad luck it brought. At least, I’m pretty sure they were jokes.