[from The Art of Sports / April 19, 2007]
Thirteen years ago this week, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun blast. Many wrote that off as “the day the music died,” but those people were grossly wrong in their assessment of the impact of Cobain’s death. Music raged on and evolved just fine; the real impact was the eternal damnation of Seattle sports.
Consider the evidence.
Cobain died in 1994 during the first week of baseball following the now-legendary Omar Vizquel/Felix Fermin trade. That same year baseball, went on strike, possibly as cosmic punishment to the Emerald City. In 1995, the Mariners lost the ALCS to the Cleveland Indians. In 1997, they were run over by the Baltimore Orioles. In 1998, the Mariners lineup incuded Ken Griffey, Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Jay Buhner and Edgar Martinez, and a staff led by Jamie Moyer, Randy Johnson and Jeff Fassero. For all that talent, they finished with a 76-85 record.
In 2000, despite mauling the White Sox in the ALDS, they were promptly destroyed by the New York Yankees, who actually snuck their way into the playoffs by winning the AL East with a worse record than the Wild Card Mariners.
In 2001, the Mariners won more regular-season games than any team before or since and got their asses handed to them once again by the New York Yankees in the ALCS.
In that same timeframe, the Seattle Supersonics have made it to the NBA Finals exactly once. Unfortunately it was in 1996, and the newly-unretired Michael Jordan and his 72-10 Bulls were waiting at the end of the road.
The Seahawks, in 2006, finally made it to the Super Bowl. And lost. To the lowest-seeded team to ever make it to the Super Bowl.
Even when it’s not playoff time, the teams are still condemned. Last night saw the much-hyped Ichiro/Matsuzaka matchup finally happen on American soil, and the results were mostly unspectacular. Matsuzaka threw a game fit for a third starter, and Ichiro went 0-for-3 the way he has so many times before and will so many times before he retires. Meanwhile, one of the great pitching performances of the year goes unheralded because young Felix Hernandez plays for a mid-market team that doesn’t have the luxury of a national propaganda network working on its behalf.
Is it a stretch to call this a curse? No, no more than saying any team is cursed to live up to its own hype or cursed to put up with the sense of entitlement that comes along with averaging a World Series win every 18 years. No more than any fanbase or national sports network is cursed to create its own stories and pick up the pieces when they get scooped by that most hated of institutions: real life and the sad realization that, despite the insistence of the Gammonses and Simmonses of the world, Fenway Park is not the center of the universe and the world does not owe anything to any team.
Somewhere, Kurt Cobain is laughing. And probably wearing a Rey Quinones jersey.