A curse turns on the Yankees
By Craig Carter
Sunday, November 4, 2007 2:04 AM PST
As we all know, the Red Sox recently won the World Series, which means it looks like the Curse of the Bambino is indeed over.
For those of you who never heard of the Curse of the Bambino, it goes something like this. Way back in 1920, the owner of the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth’s contract to the much hated Yankees, and the proceeds of said sale were used to fund the Broadway musical “No, No Nanette,” a show that had the classic songs “Tea For Two,” and “Please Don’t Send the Babe to the Icky Yanks.”
At any rate, it was said that this incident brought a curse on the Red Sox because they didn’t win another World Series until 2004. Of course, it should be noted that prior to 2004, the last year the Sox won the Series was 1918, some two years before Ruth was sent to the stinky old Yankees, but diehard baseball fans know better than to allow things like facts and sense stand in the way of perfectly good nonsense baseball lore.
The Sox were cursed, and now they’re not. Well, maybe not.
You see, the night the Sox won Game 4 of this year’s World Series, thus completing a most impressive sweep, the fans in Boston celebrated. Which is to say the fans in Boston took to the streets to engage in your basic drunken Bacchanal.
They cheered and hooted, got in fistfights, defaced public property, defaced private property, made lots of noise and set a few motorcycles afire.
I just want to know what goes through the head of your basic jackass sports fan, where he or she thinks the best way to celebrate a favorite team’s success is to set a vehicle on fire or to get into a fistfight.
It all reminds me of why I’m so glad I no longer really have a loyalty for any team.
I’ve reached a place in my life where Notre Dame can be having the worst football season in the school’s history, and I can shrug my shoulders and say, “Such a shame.”
Good thing the Irish chose this time of my life to stink up the NCAA because had they done this like 10 to 15 years ago, I’d be in your basic blue funk, yelling at my television and writing nasty letters to Notre Dame’s athletic director.
But I’m a mature man, (yeah, right!) so it doesn’t really bother me at all.
Oh, sure, I’ll think the Yankees stink ‘til the day I die, and Notre Dame football will always be a lure for me, even when the bad teams are beating up on them, and, of course, I’ll root for the Montana Grizzlies because you just gotta love a team whose fight song has the word,“tummy” in it, (and because I attended that school, of course), but it doesn’t matter quite so much as it used to. If they lose, I shan’t be bummed, and if they win, I definitely will not set things on fire. But getting back to the subject of curses, I think 2007 might just be the beginning of the Curse of the Torre for the despised Yankees. George Steinbrenner and the rest of the Yankee organization definitely deserve to be cursed for at least 86 years for the way they dumped longtime manager Joe Torre.
Love the Yankees or hate them, Joe Torre is one of the classiest guys to ever don a baseball uniform, and only a completely derelict organization would treat a manager that won four World Series and got his team to the playoffs 12 years in a row the way the Yankees treated Torre.
You’re better off without’em, Joe. They’re just the smelly ol’ Yanks.
