In the 1945 Baseball World Series, the Chicago Cubs (champions of the National League) played the Detroit Tigers (champions of the American League). Because of wartime travel restrictions, the first three games were played in Detroit and the last four in Chicago.
William (Billy) Sianis was the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago, and he bought two tickets for the fourth game (the first in Chicago): one for himself, and one for his billy–goat Murphy (clearly some sort of mascot).
Sianis and Murphy saw the first few innings of that fourth game, but then Philip K. Wrigley – owner of the Cubs – asked them both to leave, as Murphy's odour was upsetting other spectators. Sianis, outraged, allegedly declared, "Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more."
No one really knows whether Sianis meant that the Cubs wouldn't win another game in that World Series, or that they'd never win the National League again (which would have meant that they'd never contest a World Series again), or that they would never again win a World Series. But they did lose the fourth game of the 1945 World Series – the one from which Sianis and Murphy were ejected – and Sianis's prediction was beginning to look like a genuine curse as the Cubs failed to win the National League for the next 70 years (meaning that in all that time they never got to play in the World Series).
In 2016, however – coincidentally (or not) on the 46th anniversary of Billy Sianis' death – the Cubs defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 5–0 in game 6 of the National League Championship Series. They went on to beat Cleveland Indians 4–3 in the World Series, thus seemingly ending the curse. It was their first World Series win since 1908, and their third altogether – the first having been in 1907.
1907 was only the fourth World Series. The first, in 1903, was won by Boston Americans; the second, two years later, was won by the New York Giants, and the third (in 1906) by the Cubs' local rivals, the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox won for a second time in 1917, but they had to wait nearly as long as the Cubs for their third win (and their last to date) – which came in 2005.
Another famous 'curse' was the one that afflicted the Boston Red Sox, who sold their star player, Babe Ruth (nicknamed 'the Bambino') to the New York Yankees in the close season of 1919–20. They had won the World Series in 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918, but they had to wait until 2004 for their fifth win. This lean period had become known, in a tongue–in–cheek manner by most followers, as the Curse of the Bambino. The Red Sox went on to win a sixth World Series in 2007, and a seventh in 2013.
Philip K. Wrigley was the son of William (Bill) Wrigley, founder of the chewing gum company, who had become the Cubs' major shareholder in 1921. The Cubs' home ground is known as Wrigley Field. The Wrigley family's association with the club ended in 1981, when it was sold to the Tribune Media Company (whose portfolio includes the Chicago Tribune, as well as nine other daily newspapers and 39 television stations).
© Haydn Thompson 2017