Am I Really a Sports Jinx?

Back when I was work­ing at RIPE, I used to joke to my co-work­ers that I’m bad luck to any team that I root for. When the BC Lions were in the Grey Cup, some of them either dis­cour­aged me (or encour­aged me, depend­ing on their pref­er­ence) from watch­ing the game on TV, because some­how they would always win when I missed the game and lose when­ev­er I watched. It was almost uncan­ny how the act of observ­ing the game, like some sort of twist­ed Heisen­berg Prin­ci­ple, made the team lose.

This year, I didn’t watch a sin­gle game that the New Eng­land Patri­ots played in, except for one: The Super­Bowl.

After win­ning every oth­er game they played dur­ing the whole year, they lost this one game I watched in the last 35 sec­onds. It was prob­a­bly one of the biggest Super Bowl upsets in his­to­ry. In fact, ESPN.com is now hav­ing peo­ple rank and vote what they think are the biggest upsets in his­to­ry, and tonight’s Super Bowl XLII (42) is list­ed among the can­di­dates: (here’s a screen cap­ture for pos­ter­i­ty:)

Oh, and by the way, after miss­ing their reg­u­lar sea­son, I also saw that ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, when the Boston Red Sox lost to the New York Yan­kees, which is, nat­u­ral­ly, in the list.

Note to self: If your team is play­ing, and you’ve not seen them play in any oth­er game, and they’ve won every oth­er game, be sure to watch them, and bet against them, big time, par­tic­u­lar­ly if it’s any team from New Eng­land vs. New York. At least you can prof­it from the mis­for­tune you seem to emanate.