Are You a Superstitous Sports Fan?

Leon Berman is the host of “Shake the Shack,” a Friday night rockabilly radio show on KEXP I listen to as I drive to volleyball.  Last night one of his co-hosts pressed him to talk about his Seahawks pre-game rituals. (Sunday the Seahawks play Green Bay for the NFC championship.)  Leon’s family has held Seahawks season tickets since 1975.  He was genuinely reluctant to discuss the rituals, but admitted they were pretty OCD, and included things like not only wearing the same clothes, but putting them on in a precise order, and not only cooking the same brand of sausages for breakfast but aligning them in an exact pattern in the pan.  These, he admitted, were just the tip of an all-day iceberg.

Where does the belief that these rituals influence events come from?  You could say it’s an arrogant belief in one’s power:  if I do certain things associated with my team’s victories in the past I can help the team win by repeating them.  Baseball players in particular seem to do this regarding their individual performance: wearing the socks they wore the day they hit for the cycle.  But I think it’s not arrogance, it’s fear.  Our team wins an unexpected victory, and we think about all the circumstances surrounding the game, including what we did that day.  We begin to fear that if we don’t make our small contribution to those circumstances, the team may lose.  We recreate the details of the pregame period as a ritual, motivated not by arrogance and optimism, but by a sense of obligation and fear.

Do I have Seahawk rituals?  No.  And yet, when I think about my behavior….

I tend not to watch games from beginning to end.  I have the game on in the TV room and pop in from time to time to watch in small chunks, maybe five minutes. Okay, here it is.  I seem to believe that whether I’m watching or not influences the game.  But it can go either way.  If the Hawks do something good while I’m watching, I feel I need to stay at the set so more good things will happen.  If the other team marches down the field for an easy TD, I feel my presence is a negative influence that day and I leave the room hoping my absence will reverse the game’s direction.  I’ll pop back twenty minutes later to see if I’ve been successful….

Nothing rational about this other than an insight into how primitive religions were formed.