The Jinx

In 1945 a tavern owner named William Sianis bought two tickets to the World Series — one for himself and one for his pet goat — and was asked to leave Wrigley Field on the grounds that the goat smelled. Sianis, the story goes, pronounced from the gate that the Chicago Cubs would never win a World Series again. They did not win one for seventy-one years. A goat, a bad smell, and seven decades of failure: it is the single most efficient piece of storytelling in American sport, and almost none of it means what it appears to mean.

A curse is what a fan does with variance they cannot stand. Sport is, underneath the narrative, a machine for generating randomness — bounces, injuries, inches, a foot on a line — and over a long enough run the randomness will hand any club a decade, or a century, of heartbreak for no reason at all. “We were unlucky for a hundred years” is an intolerable sentence. It has no shape, no villain, no meaning, and nothing to do about it. “We were cursed” has all four. It converts blind noise into a story with a cause, an antagonist, and — this is the seductive part — the implied promise that a cause can one day be lifted.

And the claim is unkillable for the same reason the cabbie’s fare and the barstool ghost are unkillable: you cannot disprove it. Every loss confirms the curse; every win, when it finally comes, becomes the curse being broken, which only proves it was real all along. It is a belief engineered, by the grieving ingenuity of fans, to survive contact with any possible evidence. We did not build these stories because we are fools. We built them because the alternative — that it meant nothing — is unbearable.

Pull any curse apart and you find the same three unglamorous parts. The first is regression to the mean, the quiet law that runs the SI and Madden jinxes: extraordinary performances are extraordinary partly by luck, and luck does not re-sign for next season, so a peak is almost always followed by a step back — no hex required. The second is confirmation bias, the Drake engine: a belief that counts its hits and forgets its misses will feel airtight from the inside no matter how leaky it is. The third is the oldest and most human — the need for control. Offered a situation of enormous stakes and almost no agency, the mind reaches, every time, for a ritual to perform; psychologists call the reflex the illusion of control, and Ellen Langer once watched gamblers throw dice softly for low numbers and hard for high ones, as though a wrist could boss a cube.

The psychologists have caught us at it more directly, too. In 1948 B.F. Skinner put hungry pigeons on a timer that fed them at fixed intervals, unconnected to anything they did, and watched most of them invent elaborate private rituals — one turning in circles, one thrusting its head into a corner, one swinging like a pendulum — each bird behaving as if its dance was working the machine. We are the pigeons with better narration. And here the essay owes itself the same discipline it applies to everyone else: there is a tidy evolutionary story on offer, that a brain which sees a pattern in noise out-survives one that shrugs at a rustle in the grass. It is plausible, it is unfalsifiable, and it is exactly the species of just-so claim this magazine keeps declining to lean on. Into the cabinet it goes, with the other specimens.

None of this is stupidity, and none of it is lying. It is the same software the whole of this issue has been taking apart, running now on the purest possible fuel — random chance, which humans have never once been able to leave alone. The cabbie banks a fare; the Havana bar banks a dead novelist; the general banks a tide; and the fan, staring down a century of variance with a beer going warm, banks a curse. Each one converts something shapeless — a brush with fame, a run of luck, a bad bounce — into a story you can hold, and repeat, and belong to.

The curse even borrows the same trick as the barstool: it insists the magic lives in an object — a goat, a magazine cover, a video-game box — the way a bar insists a dead man’s greatness still clings to a particular seat. Then, one October, the drought ends, because droughts do; and the city that spent seventy-one years blaming a goat spends about a day and a half pretending it never really believed in the goat. We audit the counting, not the counted. The bad luck was real. The goat was innocent. And we will build the next curse the moment the next century of variance requires one — because a team that lost for no reason is a tragedy, and a team that was cursed is, at least, a story.