Growing up in a family where sports come second only to religion, many things done go unquestioned and are learned behaviors. One of my earliest sports memories happened at a Detroit Red Wings game in Columbus, with a former Red Wing being my namesake my mom got her, and me a ticket to a game. Before the third period, I distinctly remember the corpse of an octopus flying from the stands and splatting right into the middle of the rink and onto the ice. Little did I know this is something that Detroit fans have been doing since the 1950s, it supposedly “represented the eight wins needed to secure the Stanley Cup during the era” (Lee, 2017). Obviously, this octopus did not make the players play better magically, but this is a common theme in sports and many of your favorite athletes have closet tendencies that they think help them win while also making them look like a psychopath.
Unless someone is an amateur sports fan, there is a good chance they know the unwritten rules in place when it comes to jinxing, this is the act of saying something like “We are going to win.” When the game is still in question. In the event that the team does lose, and the jinx is “to blame” many fans will be the onslaught of verbal assault from their fellow fans, at times a jinx can even inspire a physical altercation between fans who believe that the insignificance of one person’s words made the team to play worse and ultimately lose. But fans are not the only ones with these superstitions, many players have something they do before or during competition to help them achieve the thrill of victory. One of my favorites comes from one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time, Lyoto Machida, who has said to the media that he starts off his mornings with a nice glass of his own urine. Machida says he learned this from his father and that this is something that his whole family has done with the belief that it is a form of therapy and has many health benefits.
While many of these rituals seem very farfetched there is scientific evidence that shows that athletes with rituals may perform better than their counterparts, the idea is that athletes with superstitions feel a stronger internal locus of control which means that mentally they feel more in control of external things and can even feel less effects of external stimuli such as a bad play or negative crowds. Superstitions provide a way for an athlete to gain more perceived control of their surroundings, and for athletes, this is invaluable in sports where athletes can often feel the outcome of a game or play can be completely out of their control. Many experts have even put superstitions in the category of sports psychology, which also features things like meditation, visualization, and guided imagery to help athletes sharpen their mental edge and in turn improve their physical performance. Superstition on the surface may seem like athletes doing very weird things that don’t matter but they may be the key to athletic success.