Cubs’ billy goat cursers just publicity hounds

A publicity seeker for his bar, William Sianis started a cottage industry of curses with his billy goat (image via Wikipedia).

You can’t go anywhere without hearing or reading some reference to the Cubs’ alleged billy-goat curse.

Usually  the curse is included in Chicago media accounts of the team going 100 or 101 years without a World Series championship. Latest was Chicago Tribune beat writer Paul Sullivan’s off-hand reference to the curse in a wrap piece on the century-long title drought.  Sully stuck in the curse reference like it was second nature and it’s likely he was hardly even aware of actively inserting a curse angle. You cover the Cubs, you end up writing about a curse, it’s part of the background scenery of 21st Century Cubology.

Now the curse reference is being applied to another team going through a playoff funk. Bernie Miklasz, sports columnist for the St.  Louis Post-Dispatch, decided to tie the Cardinals’ pratfall in Game 2 of the Division Series to Cubs-like behavior:

This October, the Dodgers have a chance to sweep the Cardinals, who have inexplicably turned into the Cubs, right before your disbelieving eyes…These aren’t really the Cubs; they only look like it. They are the Cardinals, striking out and dropping balls and loitering on the bases and blowing saves and going all Leon Durham ‘84 on us in an epic meltdown.

Except that there is no curse in St. Louis today.

Only curse words.

And there is no billy goat haunting the Cardinals.

Just two years ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks got some laughs by dressing up a Steve Bartman impersonator, had him sit in the Chase Field stands with a billy goat, taped the scene and played it on the stadium jumbotron while Bobby Vinton’s “Mr. Lonely” played as accompaniment smack dab in the middle of the Cubs’ Division Series against the D-Backs.

Well, most are having a good laugh, but I never  see what’s funny. Constant references to a farm animal cursing the Cubs is the ultimate misdirection from the only hex at hand — the team was cursed by the game’s worst ownership and front-office management for too long.

To think that this cottage industry of curses sprung up from mere publicity stunts by a bar owner and his heir.

The billy-goat story, of course, dates back to the 1945 World Series, when William Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat tavern near the old Chicago Stadium on Chicago’s West Side, was kicked out of a game along with his mascot goat even though Sianis had tickets for both. The story got traction not only because of the spectacle of an animal sitting in the stands, but also due to the fact many thirsty sportswriters were regular patrons of Billy Goat’s. Sianis knew if he proclaimed he’d curse the Cubs from ever reaching the World Series, he’d get plenty of free ink in the newspapers. That he did.

Through the ensuing decades Sianis tried to use the goat to tie in to other big events to promote his pub. He attempted to smuggle the goat via a hearse into the Republican National Convention at  Chicago Stadium, this time in an effort to lure delegates into the bar. Then, in 1959, Sianis hatched a plan to get the goat into the World Series between the White Sox and Dodgers at old Comiskey Park. But “Barnum Bill” Veeck, always a savvy promoter, thought this was tomfoolery and crossed the line. Veeck warned Sianis not to try it because the cops were looking for him and the goat.

Nothing really was written about the curse for the generation between the ‘45 World Series and the rise of the Cubs under Leo Durocher in the late 1960’s. There was plenty of reason to refer back to the supposed ‘45 Sianis curse since the Cubs had just one above-.500 season between 1946 and 1967.  But Baseball Digest editor John Kuenster, a baseball beat writer for the old Chicago Daily News in the 1950’s and 1960’s, recalled not seeing anyone write the curse angle in those long, down decades.

But that all changed around 1970.  Mike Royko, the Babe Ruth of newspaper columnists then working for the late, lamented Chicago Daily News, and Chicago Tribune sports columnist David Condon were regular patrons of Billy Goat’s. By now the bar had moved in between the Daily News and Tribune offices, on lower Michigan Avenue. Through all those besotted nights, Royko and Condon heard the ‘45 curse story. When the Cubs continually fell short of first-place finishes in the Durocher era, the columnists began working the billy-goat angle into whimsical pieces on the Cubs.  That was particularly lazy of Royko, a Cubs fan who could have done everyone a whole bunch of good by going after Phil Wrigley’s horrific stewardship of the Cubs in the same way he exposed the wrongs of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s machine.  But Royko took the easy way out and simply played the Cubs for laughs in his column — until the last piece he ever wrote before his death in 1997, when he claimed the team’s slow pace of roster integration after Jackie Robinson condemned them to losing status.

The curse story fell into the old pattern — if something is repeated often enough, it’s perceived to be true. The revival of the curse via Royko and Condon persuaded Sam Sianis, William Sianis’ nephew who took control of Billy Goat’s after the latter’s death, to try to “lift” the ‘45 curse by attempting more goat visits to Wrigley Field. Condon publicized a July 4, 1973 spectacle in which the younger Sianis and his goat arrived at the ballpark via a limo driven by a character named “Fabulous Howard.” Cubs ace Fergie Jenkins tried to get the goat admitted by a side door, but it was blocked by stadium security. The goat never got in. However, the curse story got even more traction when the Cubs, 47-31 and 8 1/2 games in front in the NL East on June 29, 1973, went into an all-time nosedive to 56-64, 5 1/2 games back, just six weeks later. After the season, the Cubs cleaned house of most of the Durocher-era stars and entered a decade-long dark age. The goat, the curse and Cubs collapses were all tied together for good.

On top of the free publicity he got from John Belushi’s  Saturday Night Live “cheezeborger” sketches, Sam Sianis made more visits with various goats to supposedly lift the hex. The new Tribune Co. management admitted man and beast to Wrigley Field on Opening Day 1982, during the 1984 playoffs against the Padres and several other occasions. The hex was lifted each time; no pennant resulted.

Copycats jumped into the act. Some Wisconsin seminarians brought their goat down for good luck when the Cubs lost their first 12 home games of the 1994 season. Initially barred, the would-be holy men appealed to Ernie Banks for help. Mr. Cub put in the good word and the goat made a circumference of the outfield from right to left field, then walked down the third-base line to home plate amid a phalanx of cameras. The Cubs won that day to break their home losing streak. The legend grew.

In 2003, several fans tried to bring their goat into Minute Maid Park in Houston to hex the Astros, then dueling the Cubs for the NL Central title, in the final week of the season. WGN-Radio broadcast the attempt live. The goat did not get in, but the Astros still collapsed. It didn’t matter for believers in the baseball occult since around the same time Steve Bartman was obtaining his ticket to Game 6 of the League Championship Series.

With the power of their bully pulpits, Royko, Condon, et. al. never explained what gave a Greek tavern owner the power to apply a curse to a baseball team.  At least William Sianis actually uttered a curse, or so his publicists stated. The Red Sox had to deal with a phantom “Curse of the Bambino” from around 1990 until they finally won a World Series in 2004. Babe Ruth never cursed the Red Sox when they traded him to the Yankees in 1920. The concept of a curse was taken off the title of a Dan Shaughnessy book about the Red Sox soap opera when it came out two decades ago.

Fiction and fantasy overwhelmed facts with both the Cubs and Red Sox, with the latter team fortunate to debunk the nonsense with two Fall Classic triumphs in the last five years.

In the Cubs’ instance, couldn’t all of this hubbub about curses been put to better use explaining why the Cubs can’t produce a 30-homer, 100-RBI guy since Billy Williams? And, going further, putting the kind of heat Royko refused to apply to Wrigley on succeeding waves of management that just can’t figure out how to win?