Are sports curses real? The question has been asked lately due to how utterly snakebitten the Dallas Mavericks seem to be after trading Luka Doncic. Shaquille O’Neal and Adam Lefkoe discussed their thoughts on this on the most recent episode of The Big Podcast with Shaq, and it’s safe to say that for the Big Diesel, sports curses are very much real, and they’re not to be messed with.
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The Mavericks have suffered injury after injury since dealing Luka, to the point where head coach Jason Kidd had only seven players available to him at one point earlier this week. Anthony Davis, the centerpiece of Dallas’ return, got injured in the third quarter of his first game. Kyrie Irving, the team’s other perennial All-Star, tore his ACL.
Shaq sees parallels between the Mavs’ situation and something he went through in college, when his girlfriend at the time stole his underwear and put a curse on him.
No, really. Shaq was one of the most dominant big men that college basketball had ever seen while at LSU, but he put up three stinkers in a row after his girl cursed him.
“I was walking through a dorm, and my emotional girlfriend saw me talking to another girl,” Shaq said. “So she took my drawers, and it was crazy, she told me, ‘You won’t score more than six points.’
He continued, “So first game I had five, second game I had six, and the last game I had six. I had a breakaway dunk, I tried to windmill it and missed. I had to go to my room and get my drawers.”
Maybe it’s not the same as trading away a 25-year-old superstar, but still, Mavericks fans are suffering just like Shaq did back then.
The Mavericks are just the latest franchise to be cursed
If there’s an instance in sports history that seems most similar to this Luka deal, it has to be “The Curse of the Bambino,” which the Boston Red Sox suffered with for over 84 years after selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.
Ruth became the central piece of the most feared lineup in baseball history, nicknamed Murderer’s Row, and led the Bronx Bombers into a golden age as the most dominant franchise in North American pro sports. The Red Sox went over 84 years before finally winning another World Series, suffering one bizarre misfortune after another along the way.
The Red Sox finally broke the curse by coming back from a 3-0 ALCS deficit to beat the Yankees, then sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2004 World Series.
The Mavs are in the very early stages of it right now, but hopefully, their fans don’t have to wait nearly a century to taste success again. Whatever happens, maybe this will teach teams not to trade away once-in-a-lifetime talents in the prime of their careers.
