AMERICA AT LARGE:JUST TWO weeks ago this morning, Sports Illustratedhit the stands with its paean to Detroit and its baseball team. The issue, dated September 28th, featured a panoramic, rat's-eye view of Comerica Park and a banner headline describing Motown's division-leading baseball team as "The Righteous Franchise".
The natives – those who hadn't already fled that metropolitan ghost town – were getting nervous even then: "God," tweeted one, "I hope you don't believe in the Sports IllustratedJinx."
There are probably more educated Americans without a superstitious bone in their bodies who will consider the link between an appearance on the cover of the nation’s premier sporting publication and subsequent misfortune more provable than, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution.
The cover of SI's2008 NFL Preview issue, for instance, featured New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Fifteen plays into the first game of the season Brady tore ligaments in his knee and was lost for the season.
This year, the issue previewing the college football season had Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford on its cover. Bradford, who won the Heisman Trophy last year, injured his throwing shoulder in the opening game against Brigham Young and hasn't played since. Oklahoma, touted by SIas the likely national champions, have already lost twice.
With a bit more than three weeks to go in the regular season, the Tigers led the American League Central by seven games and were already plotting their play-off rotation. But they had already begun to slip by the time they made the Sports Illustratedcover, and finished out the year by staggering to the wire. On the last day of the season a win by the Minnesota Twins left the two in a dead heat, setting up Tuesday night's one-game play-off in Minneapolis to determine the divisional championship.
Even after nine innings of play the issue still hadn’t been settled.
The Tigers had taken an early lead with a three-run first inning, but the Twins chipped away and led 4-3 after seven, before a Magglio Ordonez home run tied it in the eighth, and the game went to extra innings.
Detroit had forged back ahead by scoring a run in the 10th, only to have the Twins respond with an equaliser, and it wasn’t until the bottom of the 12th that Minnesota scored to earn a trip to New York and an opening-round match-up against the Yankees.
Up in the Land of the Lutherans they're celebrating the grit and determination of the never-say-die Twins. In Detroit, they're blaming Sports Illustrated.
The notion that there is a curse associated with the SIcover is as old as the magazine itself. The first cover, back on August 16th, 1954, depicted Eddie Mathews of the Milwaukee Braves, who had just won nine straight games. The day the story came out, the Braves lost to end their winning streak, and a week later Mathews was sidelined when an errant pitch struck him in the hand.
The next few years saw an almost macabre series of tragedies befall SI cover subjects. A 1955 issue featured skier Jill Kinmont. The week that cover appeared, Kinmont hit a tree in practice and was paralysed.
In 1957, Oklahoma had won 47 games, so SI'scover story on the Sooners, entitled "Why Oklahoma is Unbeatable", didn't seem outrageous – until they lost, 7-0, to Notre Dame the next weekend. An issue previewing the 1958 Indianapolis 500 showcased Pat O'Connor, who a few days later was killed on the first lap.
For a 1961 story the magazine put Lauren Owen on the cover and described her as "America's Most Exciting Girl Skater". Two days later the entire US skating team, including Owen, was killed when their plane crashed in Brussels. Coincidence? Maybe, but by then you'd have found a lot more people ready to hop on a 707 operated by Sabena than to pose for a Sports Illustratedcover.
The trend was sufficiently well established that in 1979, after the magazine had sent me as a 25th-anniversary memento a poster with every cover to date, that I wrote a column for the Boston Phoenixexploring the phenomenon. Although I didn't say as much in the story (why let the facts get in the way?), it did occur to me even then there was a certain inevitability to the process: particularly in its infancy, SI was disposed to putting what seemed a disproportionate number of race car drivers on its covers, and guys like Wolfgang von Trips and Jimmy Clark wouldn't have had a long life expectancy whether they'd been on a cover or not.
The association between Sports Illustratedand impending disaster eventually became so firmly ingrained in the public consciousness the magazine was forced to confront it. A 2002 issue in which Alex Woolf explored the phenomena depicted a black cat on the cover, along with a headline "The Cover That No One Would Pose For". Woolf noted that the anxiety over the jinx had indeed caused potential subjects to shy away. When he got the New England Patriots into the Super Bowl, Bill Parcells – who, in fairness, probably harbours more superstitions than any football coach I've known – phoned his daughter Jill, who worked for the magazine, and left a two-word message: "No cover!"
Woolf's research unearthed more examples I hadn't even recalled: on the eve of the 1960 US Olympic trials, the cover subject was Carin Cone, who hadn't lost a backstroke race in four years. After her SIcover, she failed to qualify for Rome.
The curse even seemed to extend to retired athletes. A 1996 cover story on Ted Williams accompanied one of those Lion-in-Winter stories, 35 years after the Splendid Splinter’s last game with the Red Sox. A few weeks after the story came out, Williams tripped over his dog and broke his hip.
Woolf solicited the opinion of a sports psychologist, Dr Jim Loehr, who responded that there might be some validity to the jinx. In Loehr’s opinion, being elevated in the eyes of the magazine’s 20 million readers sometimes created an additional burden that translated into performance, “a natural consequence of the changing dynamics of expectation”, the shrink said.
This still wouldn’t explain the plane crashes and other tragedies, though it might address what happened to the Tigers.
In his history of the jinx, Woolf aired another episode little known outside the magazine’s offices, which is that a millionaire sportsman named Bill Woodward was scheduled to have been on the cover as the Sportsman of the Year. Woodward owned a colt named Nashua, which had won that year’s Preakness and Belmont Stakes. The cover photo included Woodward, wife Ann, jockey Eddie Arcaro and Nashua.
The weekend the cover went to the printer, Ann shot and killed her husband, sending SIinto a Code Blue scramble. A cover photo of Dodger's pitcher Johnny Podres, along with a story, was hastily substituted.
“The picture was lame, and so was the choice of Podres as Sportsman of the Year,” wrote Woolf. “Although he had defeated the Yankees in Game Seven of the World Series, he had lost more games than he’d won that year. But Podres had the inestimable advantage of not being dead.”
