Ten Sports Curses, and How They Ended (or Didn't)

The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 1918. In 1920, owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 in cash and a $300,000 loan. Ruth became the most famous player in baseball, the Yankees became a dynasty, and the Red Sox did not win another title for 86 years.

The near misses were brutal. Boston lost Game 7 of the World Series in 1946 and again in 1967, lost a classic seven-game series to Cincinnati in 1975, and in 1986 was one strike from a title before a ground ball skipped through Bill Buckner's legs. After that series, New York Times columnist George Vecsey tied Boston's misery to a curse, and Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy's 1990 book, The Curse of the Bambino, made the name stick.

The popular story that Frazee sold Ruth to finance the musical No, No, Nanette does not hold up: that show came several years later, and Frazee was producing Broadway hits before and after the sale. In October 2004, the Red Sox fell behind the Yankees three games to none in the American League Championship Series, then won four straight. They swept the St. Louis Cardinals and clinched the title on October 27, 2004.

For decades, Philadelphia followed an unwritten gentlemen's agreement: no building would rise higher than the statue of William Penn on top of City Hall. In 1987, One Liberty Place opened and soared far above Penn's hat.

The city's teams then went cold. The 76ers had won the NBA title in 1983, but after Liberty Place topped out, none of Philadelphia's four major pro teams won a championship for more than two decades. Fans eventually blamed the founder of Pennsylvania, offended at being looked down on. Skeptics will note that a long title drought is not unusual when each sport has two dozen or more teams competing for one trophy a year.

The fix was delightfully literal. In June 2007, workers attached a small William Penn figurine to the final beam of the new Comcast Center, then the city's tallest building, so Penn would again stand at the top of the skyline. (The first figurine was stolen and quietly replaced.) On October 29, 2008, the Phillies finished off the Tampa Bay Rays in a rain-suspended Game 5 and won the World Series, the city's first major title since 1983. When the even taller Comcast Technology Center topped out in November 2017, its builders put a Penn statuette up there right away. The Eagles won their first Super Bowl about two months later, in February 2018.

On October 16, 1985, the Hanshin Tigers clinched the Central League pennant, and fans in Osaka celebrated by leaping into the Dotonbori canal. Star slugger Randy Bass was an American with a beard, and nobody in the crowd looked like him. So fans grabbed the nearest bearded Westerner available, a plastic Colonel Sanders statue from a local KFC, and threw it in the river.

The Tigers won the Japan Series that year. Then they did not win it again for 38 years. They lost the Japan Series in 2003, 2005 and 2014, and fans blamed the Colonel, who had never been fished out. On March 10, 2009, divers working in the river finally recovered the statue in pieces, missing its glasses and left hand. It was cleaned, restored and returned to KFC Japan.

The drought finally ended on November 5, 2023, when Hanshin beat the Orix Buffaloes 7-1 in Game 7 of the Japan Series. Fans jumped into the Dotonbori again. In March 2024, KFC Japan held a farewell ceremony at a temple and retired the battered statue, saying it was too damaged to maintain. The Tigers reached the Japan Series again in 2025 and lost to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks in five games, which suggests they are now merely a baseball team.

The Chicago White Sox won the World Series in 1917. Two years later, in the 1919 World Series, several of their players took money from gamblers to lose to the Cincinnati Reds. Eight players, including the great hitter Shoeless Joe Jackson, were acquitted in court in 1921 but banned for life anyway by baseball's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

The scandal gave Chicago's South Side its own curse. The White Sox went 88 years without a championship and won only one pennant, in 1959, between the scandal and the 21st century. It made a neat morality tale: a team that sold out the World Series could never win one again.

The tale ended on October 26, 2005, when the White Sox beat the Houston Astros 1-0 in Houston to complete a four-game sweep, a year after Boston ended its own drought. In May 2025, Major League Baseball went further and removed Jackson and the other banned players, all long dead, from its permanently ineligible list after ruling that such bans end at death. The modern White Sox are not a ghost story either: in October 2026 they reached the American League Division Series before losing a deciding Game 5 to Cleveland. The scandal itself was entirely real; the curse is just a long drought with a convenient villain.

Since the late 1990s, EA Sports has put an NFL star on the cover of each year's Madden video game, and fans have kept score. Garrison Hearst, featured on a Madden 99 cover, broke his ankle badly and missed two seasons. Barry Sanders, on Madden 2000, abruptly retired before the 1999 season. Michael Vick, on Madden 2004, broke his leg in the preseason and missed 11 games. Peyton Hillis rushed for over 1,100 yards to earn the Madden 12 cover and barely matched that total over the next four seasons combined.

Then there are the stars who shrugged it off. Calvin Johnson set the single-season receiving yards record in his Madden 13 season. Patrick Mahomes won the Super Bowl after his Madden 20 cover. Saquon Barkley, who ran for 2,005 regular-season yards and won a Super Bowl to land on Madden 26, still put up more than 1,400 yards from scrimmage in 2025, though both his numbers and the Eagles dropped off, with a wild-card exit. The Madden 27 cover belongs to Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, whose season is underway.

Two plain facts explain most of the jinx. Cover athletes are chosen right after career years, so a step back is the normal expectation. And pro football has a high injury rate, so any star has a real chance of getting hurt in a given season, cover or no cover.

Béla Guttmann, a well-traveled Hungarian coach born in Budapest in 1900, built one of the great soccer teams of its era at Benfica. He won the European Cup, the forerunner of today's Champions League, in 1961 and again in 1962. Then he and the club failed to agree on a bonus, and he left.

On his way out, the legend says, he declared that Benfica would not win a European trophy for 100 years. Nobody can say for sure what he actually said; one version claims he was talking about Portuguese clubs winning back-to-back titles. But the results have been eerie. Benfica lost European Cup finals in 1963, 1965, 1968, 1988 and 1990, a UEFA Cup final in 1983, and Europa League finals in 2013 and 2014, the last one on penalties in Turin. That is eight straight European final defeats.

Before the 1990 final in Vienna, where Guttmann is buried, the club legend Eusébio visited his grave to ask for mercy. Benfica lost 1-0. The club has since put up a statue of Guttmann at its stadium. As of October 2026 the drought continues; Benfica's 2025-26 Champions League run ended in February 2026 with a playoff-round loss to Real Madrid. Reaching eight European finals is itself a sign of a strong club; losing them is what usually happens to the underdog.

In the 1950s the Detroit Lions were the NFL's elite, with quarterback Bobby Layne at the center. Detroit won the championship in 1957, its third in six seasons. Two games into the 1958 season, the Lions traded Layne to the Pittsburgh Steelers for quarterback Earl Morrall and two draft picks. Legend says the furious Layne declared that Detroit would not win for 50 years.

There is no solid record that he said it. His son later said he never heard his father speak badly of the Lions. But the losing that followed made the story stick. Detroit won exactly one playoff game between the trade and the 2023 season, and in 2008, the year the supposed 50-year curse should have expired, the Lions became the first NFL team to finish 0-16.

Then things changed. In January 2024 the Lions beat the Rams 24-23 for their first playoff win in 32 years, won again, and lost the NFC Championship Game to San Francisco 34-31 after leading by 17 at halftime. In 2024 they went 15-2 and lost their first playoff game to Washington, 45-31. In 2025 they slipped to 9-8, finished last in the NFC North, and missed the playoffs. As of October 2026 they have still never played in a Super Bowl, and their last championship remains 1957.

Rocky Colavito was Cleveland's favorite ballplayer. He led the American League with 42 home runs in 1959 and once hit four in a single game. On April 17, 1960, two days before the season opener, general manager Frank Lane traded him to Detroit for Harvey Kuenn, the reigning batting champion. Fans were stunned, and the team rarely contended for the next three decades.

Cleveland sportswriter Terry Pluto gave the slump its name in his book The Curse of Rocky Colavito, published in the early 1990s. The book was a fond history of bad management, not a claim of magic, but the label outlived its intent. Cleveland has since lost the World Series in 1995, 1997 and 2016, the last one in seven games to the Cubs. Colavito himself died in December 2024 at 91.

Cleveland, now the Guardians, has not won the World Series since 1948, the longest active drought in the majors at 77 seasons. As this file went live, though, the story was still being written: the Guardians had rallied from two games down to beat the Chicago White Sox in the 2026 Division Series, winning Game 5 by 2-0 on October 10, and were opening the American League Championship Series against the Tampa Bay Rays.

On October 6, 1945, the Chicago Cubs led the Detroit Tigers two games to one in the World Series. William Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, arrived at Wrigley Field for Game 4 with two tickets and his pet goat, Murphy. Ushers would not let the goat in, and team owner P. K. Wrigley backed them up, reportedly because the goat smelled. Sianis is said to have declared that the Cubs would never win a World Series as long as the goat was not welcome at Wrigley.

The Cubs lost that game and the series. They had last won a World Series in 1908, and for 71 more years they did not even return to one. The goat was blamed for every collapse in between, and the tavern was happy to keep the story alive.

The curse ended in the most dramatic way possible. In 2016 the Cubs reached the World Series, fell behind the Cleveland Indians three games to one, and came back to force Game 7 in Cleveland. After a rain delay, they won 8-7 in 10 innings to claim their first title in 108 years. Note the loser: Cleveland, keeper of the Colavito legend. One cursed team had to break the other's heart, and that is the best evidence that curses do not decide anything.