Tag Archives: sports ritual

Sporty Superstitions

My sister is a sailor on the Stanford women’s team, the number one ranked women’s sailing team in the country. She’s starting in regattas as a freshman, so one would assume she knows what she’s doing. Although I couldn’t get any specific advice on how to make that happen—sorry to those hoping—I did manage to squeeze out some of what she considers to be a part of her “luck” factor. Before any race, and whenever she’s feeling nervous on the water, she does a specific breathing exercise that her coach introduced to the team.

This breathing exercise, which she plainly calls “our breathing exercise,” is recorded online as “5-in-5-out.” Funnily enough, she never really learned it “formally,” she told me:

“It’s just something that our coach told us one day. No real explanation, no official name—I don’t even think he gave us instructions beyond ‘do this when it feels right.’”

Still, from what I found online, the method follows the exact same steps she described:

  1. Sit up straight or cross-legged.
  2. Relax your shoulders.
  3. Inhale quietly through your nose for a count of five.
  4. Hold your breath for a count of five.
  5. Exhale quietly through your nose for a count of five.
  6. Repeat for 10 minutes.

She did however note minimal flexibility in how she practices it:

“I don’t really care about sitting a certain way or how long I do it for. Most of it is just up to whatever I think is best at the moment.”

At the end of the day, she does it however and whenever she feels she needs it.

Breathing exercises are one of those things that I’m not sure folklore has fully claimed yet. I feel as though it is typically regarded as more medicinal than folkloric, but we all know those two things go hand in hand. If I had to classify it, I’d say this kind of ritual has two hands in the folklore cookie jar—one reaching into sports superstitions, the other into traditional yoga and meditative medicinal practices.

When it comes to luck in sports, superstitions are everywhere. Baseball players wear the same jersey without washing it, Serena Williams famously wears the same pair of socks throughout a tournament, and my sister practices this breathing ritual before racing. It’s fascinating that humans try to “cheat” natural physical systems by invoking rituals, almost like tapping into forces beyond the physical—maybe an over-dramatization, but I think my point stands.

The interesting thing is that these seemingly kooky practices often have real benefits. If you believe you are lucky, you can sometimes manifest that luck into something real, whether it be confidence, composure, or performance.

Historically, these breathing techniques have deep roots. The Box Breathing method—famously taught to Navy SEAL snipers to maintain calm and focus—is a modern example. Yet, these practices aren’t new. Yogis developed Box Breathing over 5,000 years ago, originally calling it Sama Vritti Pranayama.

Despite their very real effects, breathing exercises like Box Breathing and 5-in-5-out don’t quite fit within traditional academic “science.” They exist in that murky space between folk wisdom, practical ritual, and physiological effect.

I’ve always loved the idea of trying to cheat chance and manifest luck. Whether it’s for tests, sports, or life in general, it’s only human to strive for perfection and victory by any means necessary—no matter how strange.

Basketball Free Throws

Text: The informant would dribble five times before shooting a free throw when she played basketball for her high school. She performed this ritual because she believed it would help her make more of her free throws.

Context: The informant noticed that she would make a higher percentage of her free throws when she performed this ritual, although she says it was probably because of a placebo affect more than anything else. She started this ritual when she first joined the team and realized that her teammates all had pre-free-throw rituals of their own.

Analysis: For the informant, creating her own ritual was a way of becoming a true part of the team, since everyone else had their own rituals. Additionally, this is an example of the power of belief, and how thinking can actually influence one’s physicality. Just because she believed that her ritual was helping her score more points, it actually was.

Sports Ritual — Certain Victory

Background:

Informant (P) is a student studying computer science with a minor in linguistics.

Main Piece:

I: Can you tell me about the words we had on our hands?

P: Yeah, it was 必赢 (bì yíng). We basically both had one of the words and we both wrote it on each other’s hands, with a pen, since we’re both right-handed. It means “certain victory” even though we definitely did not win all of our matches. But it’s fine, it was our special little thing. Better than when people did the racket hitting after they won a point.

Context:

The informant was my doubles partner throughout high school badminton. We wrote the words before each match that we played.

Analysis: This is an example of a ritual that my informant and I created and performed. Writing down the words on our hands was something we both saw from a sports show where a duo did the same thing, and we decided to incorporate it into our pre-match traditions as well. Sports rituals are a common practice—the outcome of a game or match is always unknown, so many athletes consistently perform some sort of ritual as a way to control the uncertain and connect with a non-human, sacred realm. In our particular case, as we were both right-handed, we had the words on our right hand (though this didn’t happen all the time). This act is an example of contagion magic, since the hand with the word would be in contact with the racket to further “strengthen” the power of this belief.

Dropping the Baton sports belief

Nationality: USA
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 3/27/18
Primary Language: English

The following interaction illustrates a folk belief relating to a former student-athlete in high-school track & field relating coach/student view that dropping a relay baton during practice will bode ill for the actual race.

 

For convenience, the interviewee has been marked as ‘A’, and the documenter has been marked as ‘Q.’ The interaction proceeded as such:

 

A., I don’t know if this is true for every track and field team, but if you drop the baton like if you were on the relay team and you dropped it any time during the week before the track meets, during practice. Then you’d have to run a mile, because then for sure if you drop the baton during practice then for sure you were gonna drop the baton during the actual race.

 

My coach really believed it, and she would get like severely distraught any time someone dropped the baton, because it was…sacred.

 

…

I also dropped the baton and had to run a mile.

Actually, I dropped the baton multiple times. People really shame you for that.

Q. You learned all this from your coach?

A. Yeah.

Q. What does it mean to your coach?

A. What does it mean to my coach? It means we’ve just lost.

 

I thought it was just that particular coach, too. But we had 3 different coaches in 4 years when I was there, and all of them were like ‘you drop the baton, you go run a mile.

 

And I’m like, what? There’s no correlation.

I get the whole ‘practice the way you perform’ thing, but I also think that just because you drop the baton during practice that doesn’t mean you’re gonna drop it during the race.

 

The caution surrounding and seemingly arbitrary enforcement of a folk belief on the part of the coaches illustrated here pulls back the deep-seeded roots of those that inhabit the field of sports, in which the beliefs can take a limitless amount of forms.

 

As indicated here, most of them center on the matter of luck and future implications of success/victory/winning, along with their mirror image counterparts. The matter of keeping the baton in one’s hand does not determine whether one will win, but dropping it will certainly determine if the team should lose.

 

The most interesting aspect is the enforcement of the belief from multiple coaches throughout the years who, presumably, would not have colluded with each other for something so trivial. However, such consistency across rotation highlights the strength of certain sports beliefs no matter who or where.

The OJ Simpson Metaphor

Nationality: American
Age: 54
Occupation: Financial Analyst
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 25 2016
Primary Language: English

The informant (A.H.) comes from a Black Christian family. A.H. does not identify with Christianity.

Now well retired from the game at 54 years old, A.H. played football in the NFL from 1983 to 1987; first drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, then transferred to the Seattle Seahawks, and finally the San Francisco 49ers. Since then he has coached youth football teams, and works now as a financial analyst. A.H. was over house for dinner one Monday evening, and after our meal I interviewed him for football specific occupational folklore. I asked about the superstitions, traditions, and legends A.H. had come across during his career as a professional player.

A.H.: “I remember growing up I was a huge OJ Simpson fan. I think every kid my age that grew up in my area that wanted to be a running back wanted to be OJ. And I remember reading in an article somewhere that he never ate before games. He had said somewhere that he wanted to know what it was like to be hungry, and he thought that it would transfer over into games. I think I might have been in high-school when I read that. It affected the way that I ate, like I would never eat the night before the game or morning before the game. The interesting thing is when I coached, I passed that on to the players that I used to coach. He said something like, if you didn’t eat it would make you like a hungry dog. You would play better. Every guy has his superstition before the game… So I saw one of the kids on Facebook that I used to coach… A lot of those kids are coaches, and they’re passing that stuff on now.”

I found A.H.’s story compelling, because what began as Simpson’s individual superstition was perpetuated by his success, and eventually A.H.’s success. As seen with the OJ Simpson metaphor, a young generation of football players dons the occupational superstitions of their predecessors as a rite of passage in the hopes to achieve similar success on the field. A.H. was well spoken, and seemed to enjoy revisiting memories of his time in the game. He was equally, if not more enthusiastic about the legacy he left behind as a coach.
Not only does A.H.’s story provide an occupational superstition, but also a new interpretation of a popular metaphor. Specifically, in English speech, ‘hunger’ serves as a metaphor for desire or motivation. In this particular superstition, the hunger metaphor is associated with the desire to win the game. For a popular example of the hunger used as a metaphor for motivation, see Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games.