Dave Mason

Sports curses are a way to make depressed sports fans feel better about their embarrassing excuse for a team.

Yes, let’s blame everyone but the team for coming up short year after year.

It wouldn’t make sense to blame the overpaid, underachieving players for choking every season.

Does anyone truly believe in the Curse of the Billy Goat? No, but it makes Cubs fans feel better about the team’s 100-plus years of failure.

There’s some talk that Power Balance Pavilion, (formerly Arco Arena), was built on Indian burial grounds, and that’s why the Kings never won a championship in Sacramento.

Of course, Indian burial grounds forced the Kings to miss 15 free throws and shoot 10 percent from three-point range in their 2002 game-seven loss to the Lakers. It had nothing to do with the pressure of a game seven against the defending champions.

I don’t blame fans for buying into curses because it’s a way to cope with the misery they have to deal with every year.

And there’s nothing better than when a “curse” is broken. Ask the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

 

Cassie Kolias

 

Sports curses are silly.

I know that fans take them incredibly seriously, and often blame losses on them, but what I really want to know is how athletes feel about them.

I know that every sport has superstitions, especially baseball, but I don’t necessarily believe that the team blames their failures on a “curse.”

Up until 2004, Boston Red Sox fans would tell stories of how trading Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees would become the Curse of the Bambino, which started in 1918.

Chicago Cubs fans could still be using the Curse of the Billy Goat to explain why their team hasn’t produced a World Series title since 1908. The curse originated from the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, Billy Sianis, being asked to leave a game at Wrigley Field because his goat was bothering other fans.

He was so mad that he supposedly shouted: “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.”

And they haven’t won. Although sometimes dumb and meaningless to some people, sports curses are real to fans, and to me they are real entertaining.

 

Anthony Honrade

In order to succeed at any sport, athletes need to not only be physically prepared, but mentally prepared as well.

The most successful athletes have the confidence in themselves, and also their abilities, that allow them to perform at a high level.

In my opinion, if a player were to believe in a curse, then it only shows how mentally weak they are.

I also think that believing in curses is just a way for an athlete or a team to place the blame on something other than poor performance.

Sure some athletes may have an item that, in their mind, brings them luck, but that’s because that particular item gives them the confidence they need to succeed.

Although curses are common beliefs among the players, curses are a huge deal for the fan bases of these teams. I still don’t believe that curses are a real thing.

A curse is nothing more than a superstitious belief that some players have come to accept to explain a team’s lack of success and it shows their lack of confidence in themselves.