Curse of The Bambino - The Curse in Popular Culture

The Curse in Popular Culture

The 2004 Red Sox season was the subject of several non-fiction books and videos, including:

• Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King's book Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. O'Nan and King decided to write the book before the season began.
• Reversing the Curse by Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe.
• In early 2004, HBO produced a documentary called The Curse of the Bambino, featuring commentary from native Boston celebrities such as Denis Leary, narrated by Ben Affleck. After the 2004 World Series, the ending of the documentary was re-filmed with a number of the same celebrities and it was retitled Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino.

It has also been the subject of or prominent in some fiction works, including:

• The British memoir Fever Pitch, about author Nick Hornby's obsession with the Arsenal FC English soccer team, was adapted into an American film of the same name by the Farrelly brothers. The American adaptation was about an obsessive Red Sox fan. It was made during the 2004 World Series, which forced the filmmakers to rework the story; the Red Sox were not originally supposed to make it to the World Series.
• In the movie 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler reminds his girlfriend about what happened in 2003 including a screen capture showing the Red Sox winning the World Series, until the next clip shows the title 'just kidding'.
• On the television show Lost, Jack and his father Christian often use the phrase "That's why the Sox will never win the damn series" to describe fate. In season 3, Ben shows the end of the 2004 game to try to convince Jack that the Others have contact with the outside world.
• An episode of the children's TV series Arthur titled "The Curse of the Grebes" has Elwood City's baseball team losing two of its games in the world championship series due to events based directly on Bucky Dent's homer and Bill Buckner's error. The episode states that the team hadn't won a championship in 87 years and that their opponents, the Crown City Kings, had won 25 since then. Johnny Damon, Edgar Renteria, and Mike Timlin all voice caricatures of themselves. The Kings resembled the Yankees while the Grebes resemble the Red Sox.

The curse has been mentioned in some musical recordings, including:

• The Ben Harper song "Get It Like you Like It" includes the lines "But Johnny Damon swung his bat. Grand Slam. That was that. An 86-year curse is gone."
• Phil Coley's album Sports Songs and Beyond, artist Phil Coley sang a song, "The Curse of the Bambino Is Back!"

The curse or its breaking has showed up in Other public occurrences of the curse or its end include:

• At WrestleMania XIV in 1998, guest ring announcer Pete Rose taunted the Boston crowd about the curse (Rose was on the Cincinnati Reds team that beat Boston in the 1975 World Series).
• After New York's defeat, the Curse was poked fun at during the "Weekend Update" segment of Saturday Night Live, when the ghost of Babe Ruth explains that he left during Game Four with the ghosts of Mickey Mantle and Rodney Dangerfield to go drinking.

Although not as well known to baseball fans, some Broadway producers believe that there is also a correlated curse on the Longacre Theatre, which Frazee owned at the time that he initiated the sale of Ruth's contract to the Yankees. The Longacre, which Frazee had built as his personal showplace in 1913, was one of the many properties that Frazee sold around the same time. (The sale of the theater to the Shubert Organization was actually completed a few months before the sale of Ruth's contract.) Because of the perceived curse, many producers avoid staging productions at the Longacre, fearing that they might be investing in a box office bomb.