My father had been waiting his entire life for that whistle. After 75 years, the curse was over. Mayo were Gaelic football champions having overturned the second-biggest deficit in the history of All-Ireland finals. The county hadn’t seen such a miracle since Father Horan got the taoiseach to fund an international airport near the shrine of Our Lady of Knock.
Three months before Dad was born in Castlebar, Mayo won the 1951 title. Their celebrations on the way home were exuberant and, so the legend goes, disrupted a funeral in Foxford. The furious priest (some versions blame the widow) cast a curse on them, saying Mayo would never again lift the Sam Maguire Cup while any of those players lived.
Nonsense, right? Except that Mayo then lost 11 finals, four by one point. Fifteen days after the 2021 final, Paddy Prendergast died, the last of those who had played in the 1951 side. Only Mick Loftus, an unused substitute, remained, and when he died in 2023 Mayo fans hoped the curse had also expired. It didn’t look good when they fell seven points behind Kerry after 15 minutes on Sunday, their first final since 2021, but they reeled them in, taking the lead in the second half and clinging on for catharsis.
Sport loves a curse. We saw it at the recent football World Cup when a witch doctor claimed before Ghana played England that he had used his magic to prevent Harry Kane from scoring. Uri Geller promised to counter it with his mentalism, but he was better at bending spoons than free kicks. The game finished 0-0. The witch doctor then lifted his curse and Kane scored four more goals.
Derby County fans once believed that their team had been cursed by gypsies who were moved off land that became the club’s ground in 1895. Derby reached six FA Cup semi-finals in the next eight years, losing in three finals. Their next final came in 1946, before which the club apologised to the gypsy community. It may have helped since the ball (and the curse?) burst at 1-1 and Derby beat Charlton Athletic 4-1.
Birmingham City also suffered under a gypsy curse, which one manager, Ron Saunders, tried to banish by placing crucifixes under the floodlights, while another, Barry Fry, followed the suggestion of a clairvoyant to urinate on all four corners of the pitch. Perhaps they should try it at Benfica. Bela Guttmann managed them to two European Cup titles, then was sacked in 1962. He stormed off, saying that the Portuguese club would not be European champions again for a century. They are 64 years in and still waiting.
In baseball, the Curse of the Bambino supposedly prevented the Boston Red Sox from winning the World Series for 86 years after selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The Chicago Cubs blamed a 71-year run of failure on the Curse of the Billy Goat after a publican was banned from Wrigley Field in 1945 because his goat, Murphy, was bothering others. He told the owner that no one insulted his goat and got away with it. The Cubs lost that year’s World Series 4-3 and didn’t reach another until 2016.
Other sporting curses include the one that says golf’s Masters will never be won by the winner of the par-three competition the day before – some players fluff their final hole to avoid the jinx – or the Crucible curse by which every first-time winner of snooker’s World Championship does badly the following year. Then there is the ludicrous claim that every time Wales win the grand slam in rugby, a Pope dies. In fact, it has happened only twice and the way that Wales are playing Leo XIV should not expect a short reign.
There is the ludicrous claim that every time Wales win the grand slam in rugby, a Pope dies
There are plenty of non-sporting curses, of course, from the deaths of those who disturbed Tutankhamun to the tragic fate of the Kennedys to Gustav Mahler’s fear that he would die after nine symphonies like Beethoven and Bruckner. He died while writing his tenth. There’s also one concerning a Native American chief cursing William Henry Harrison that any US president elected in a year ending in zero would die in office. This happened to seven successive men before Ronald Reagan avoided it, though he was shot.
But there’s something special about superstition in sport. You often hear of players having to put their socks on in the same order or eat the same meal during a tournament. During the 2019 cricket World Cup final, Mark Wood sat on the washing machine in the laundry room at Lord’s for 30 overs in case moving brought bad luck. He wasn’t the first England player to be wary of a spinner.
Such concerns are silly. It is easier to blame a hex than your own failings. There are no such things as curses. Except that Mayo have just lifted the Sam Maguire for the first time since old Paddy Prendergast died and it makes you wonder…
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