Double, double toil and trouble: Can England, Blues and Rory shake off their curses?
By Malcolm Knox
On Monday, England play in a major football championship final. On Wednesday, NSW try to win an Origin decider in Brisbane. From Thursday, Rory McIlroy tees up in the British Open. Macbeth’s witches will have to charge for overtime.
Curses – be they 10, 20 or 60 years old – make for compelling viewing. They’re sport’s equivalent to Hitler documentaries. The fascination is gruesome, morally dubious but endlessly fascinating. You stare into the face of it and wonder what was inside their heads. There is no answer. It’s a magic spell. You keep watching, but are you cheering for the competitors or for the curse?
Curses aren’t quite the same as choking, though they can overlap. Greg Norman was cursed for a few years – Bob Tway, Larry Mize, Paul Azinger and Jack Nicklaus all got outrageously lucky at his expense – and he was just the right guy in the right place at the wrong time. But then in 1996 the curse turned, infamously, into sport’s most famous choke. Maybe he’d been choking a little bit all along. Google “choking” (then change your search to “choking in sports”) and this is one contest the Shark always wins.
The Blues in Origin haven’t really choked, have they? Not in the sense of the Broncos in the 2015 grand final, Parramatta in 2001 or the Dragons in 1999. It’s more that the Blues have kept on losing, which is not choking until it becomes such a pattern that it sweats itself into the fabric and winning becomes not just a habit but an inevitability. Which is why it’s sometimes puzzling when the Blues place such emphasis on their “history” and their “culture”. Why would you want to remember anything about your predecessors travelling to Brisbane for game three? Wouldn’t you want to forget? Or not know in the first place?
Sadistic cruelty, aside from all the other reasons, is a reason most neutrals want to see the Blues lose. The curse is entertainment and they don’t want it to stop.
Heartbreak: Greg Norman’s Masters misfortune is etched into folklore.Credit: AP
England’s football drought is not technically one 58-year choke dating to the 1966 World Cup. The English football team is better described as a perennial disappointment under the weight of unrealistic expectations. Their lost penalty shootout to Italy at Euro 2020 was their only appearance in a major final since 1966. More commonly, they have choked in penalty shootouts at the thought of making a semi-final, which doesn’t qualify them for either a final or for the complimentary Great White Shark apparel.
In 2024, England even have something anti-choke about them. Uniquely for England, they have lived by the saying “better lucky than good”. They were convincingly adequate in the group stage before being favoured by the luckiest draw since Nick Kyrgios’s 2022 Wimbledon run, enabling them to dodge Spain, Germany, France and Portugal. Unlike their cricket team, which holds the moral Ashes, the England football team have suffered a run of moral defeats while winning the actual games.
A 95th-minute escape from Slovakia. Penalties against the might of … Switzerland? Beating the Netherlands thanks to a refereeing decision that even Gary Neville called an “absolute disgrace”. This is decidedly un-English, and has the whiff of a curse being lifted. Spain have been easily the best team all tournament, so England don’t go into Monday’s final under any pressure at all, other than Harry Kane in front of goal carrying the desperate desperate desperate desperate need of 55 million people united under the Labour Party and the – desperate? - hashtag #ItsComingHome.
(What is? Whose home? And if you invented the language, where’s the apostrophe?)
English football has not suffered from a choker’s mentality so much as an ever-present readiness for defeat. Choking is more like being under hypnosis, drawn magnetically to a strange but familiar horror. The South African cricket team, for example, whose chokes have been the stuff of tragicomedy, or, if you prefer, comedy, choked again in last month’s T20 World Cup final. None of those players came into the final with choking experience on their resume. They had grown up in an era of national sporting pride, with their rugby team repeatedly winning World Cups. So here they were in Barbados, six wickets in hand, 26 runs needed off 24 balls, against an Indian team with a record of fracturing under their false confidence. It’s there. Right there. In their grasp. And within 10 minutes, it’s gone. Again!
Are we not entertained, or are we just mean?
Rory McIlroy misses a straightforward putt for par to lose his share of the lead on the 18th at the US Open.Credit: X
“We all choke,” John McEnroe once said. Michael Jordan missed more game-winning three-point shots than anyone. Jack Nicklaus finished second in 19 majors. “A lot of guys who have never choked have never been in position to do so,” said Tom Watson. But it’s easy for them to say.
Curses do end and chokes can be overcome, but not always. And this is the most revealing thing about them. When the curse is lifelong, how does a person recover? Is there any greater courage than to bravely wear an embarrassment that can never be erased?
France’s Jean van de Velde only ever got one chance, and his choke in the 1999 British Open was more spectacularly self-inflicted than any of Norman’s. Van de Velde, a journeyman professional, only needed a double-bogey on the last hole at Carnoustie to be the Champion Golfer of the Year. He hit driver off the tee, flared it into a grandstand and got a lucky bounce onto the short grass. He hit his second into another grandstand, where it hit a railing, then a stone wall, and then flew 50 metres backwards. He chunked his next into the water. He took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers and … let’s not go on.
Credit: Illustration: Simon Letch
Van de Velde never again got into that position (winning, not swimming). He has been asked about it, he said in 2022, “a million times” – maybe an underestimation. All who meet him say what a lovely person he is. “It didn’t hurt me,” he said, “but I can only talk for myself. Maybe it hurt others.” It didn’t hurt Netflix, which put him in a 2019 documentary series called Losers.
Good losers are heroes, but does that make bad losers villains? Last month, McIlroy became the most criticised person in world sport when his response to throwing away the US Open with two missed short putts was to floor it in his courtesy car for the airport. McIlroy has choked several times in his decade-long major championship drought, but this was the most Normanesque.
Unlike Norman, however, McIlroy had cameras follow him into the players’ room where we could watch him watch Bryson DeChambeau break his heart. Unlike Norman, McIlroy had a mobile phone melting down with millions of posts and messages crowning him with the C-word. McIlroy’s response was to do what you, I, or any ordinary human would do. He chucked a wobbly. He didn’t want to burst into tears in front of the world, so he went home without facing the press or congratulating the winner.
Curses, chokes, hexes: as Shakespeare said, they’re all fun and games until they happen to you. Unless you’re Jean van de Velde. Nobody remembers the fellow who won the trophy (Paul Lawrie), but van de Velde is remembered for his mistakes and admired for the way he accepted them.
So for England, for the Blues, for Rory, their curse may be someone else’s entertainment. They may win and lift their curse, and good luck to them. But winning isn’t redemption, it’s just winning. Redemption is going on to live well as a loser.
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