SPORT / EXTRA TIME
Chicago Cubs break curse and pass ‘loser’ mantle to Cleveland Indians
Published: Nov 03, 2016 11:43 PM
What's in a curse? Nothing, now, if you're a fan of the Chicago Cubs. The Windy City baseball team put paid to their troubled past with a dramatic World Series victory over the Cleveland Indians, edging an incredibly dramatic Game 7 of the series to finally finish with the title.

For fans of the Indians, though, the curse is still everything. In losing, the Cleveland side have taken over the ­mantle as the franchise that has gone the longest without a win. Their losing run now extends to 68 years, overtaking the previous record of the Cubs not winning in 108 years.

No matter that the final game of the 2016 World Series might go down as the greatest Game 7 in baseball history, in Cleveland it will go down as yet one more loss and yet more evidence that the city's sports teams are destined to lose.

LeBron James and the Cleveland ­Cavaliers ended Ohio's title drought in the NBA at the expense of the Golden State Warriors earlier this year. But the state's NFL team, the Cleveland  Browns, last won a title in 1964, before the Super Bowl was born.

The worst thing for Cleveland - or Believeland as it has come to be known following the Cavs winning and during this incredible run to the World Series - is that they were so close to winning. They had two chances to close the series out in front of their own fans, before ­losing Games 6 and 7 at home. But even still they took it to an extra innings in the deciding game. It really did go right down to the wire.

The only logical explanation for the loss is that they are cursed. It's a theory that pervades American sport in particular but carries to the wider world and almost every sport known to man. Causal reasoning is what psychologists would call it - where fans see two separate coincidental events and decide that they must be related - but such qualified medical opinion takes away from the viewpoint of those in the bleachers.

Take Manchester City. This week the Blues beat Barcelona 3-1 in the Champions League and with it felt like they had finally arrived at the top table of European soccer after years in the wilderness. Not bad for the club of "Cityitis": the wholly accepted belief that the team would always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, whenever possible.

The truth, as always, is more mundane. Teams lose. No matter how good they are, they can always lose. Superstition may come into it on an individual, and perhaps even a team basis, but a ­so-called curse is not written into the DNA of a sporting organization.

Cleveland sports fans, no matter how disappointed they may be at this ­moment, can point to their world champion Cavaliers as evidence of that.

The author is a Shanghai-based freelance writer. jmawhite@gmail.com