John Constantine battles the Chicago Cubs’ “Billy Goat Curse”
Last month, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, ending the baseball team’s 108-year championship drought. Some Cubs fans superstitiously attributed the team’s heart-breaking past setbacks to a 1945 curse placed on the team by an indignant fan upset at the disrespect shown to his pet goat.
In December 2008, in the pages of DC Comics’ Hellblazer #250 (an anthology issue showcasing the holiday adventures of DC’s mystic antihero John Constantine), the creative team of writer Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets, Wonder Woman) and artist Rafael Grampá (Mesmo Delivery) — with colorist Marcus Penna and letterer Jared K. Fletcher — pitted Constantine against this legendary “Billy Goat Curse” in the story “All I Goat for Christmas.” In honor of the Cubs’ recent victory and the upcoming holidays, MEANWHILE looks back at Constantine’s efforts to end the biggest curse in sports history.
Curse of the Billy Goat
For some context, the Chicago Cubs had won two back-to-back World Series championships in 1907 and 1908, and in 1945 Cubs fans were excited at the prospect of winning a third championship as they faced the Detroit Tigers that year. The Cubs were leading the Tigers heading into Game 4; many excited Cubs fans attended that game at Wrigley Field, one of whom was William Sianis, who brought his goat to the game.
A Greek immigrant and proprietor of the Billy Goat Tavern, Sianis had rescued the goat after it had fallen from a truck, and adopted the goat as his pet and the tavern’s mascot. Sianis proudly went to Game 4, with the goat draped in a banner reading “WE GOT DETROIT’S GOAT.” According to various versions of the legend, Sianis’ goat was either outright barred admission to the park or later asked to leave the stands due to complaints from other fans about its smell; an upset Sianis cursed the Cubs to never again win the World Series because of the insult to his goat.
Cursed or not, the Cubs would not win another World Series championship until November 2016.
“The Inglishmin”
The conceit of “All I Goat for Christmas” is that it is a poem written by a Cubs fan and relayed to the comic’s creative team; the introductory caption declares the work “A Poem by JIMMY PRZESKA, Local 432 (as told to Azzarello & Grampá).” The crude, misspelled verse and the narrator’s identification as a union worker suggest the poem’s blue-collar provenance.
The poem reveals that Przeska and his friends have taken steps to end their team’s bad luck:
“THE PLAN WE HATCHED, ‘MIT DRUNKENLY, O’ER A ROUND OF CHRISTMAS CHEER. AL KNEW A GUY, WHO KNEW A GUY… CALLED THE INGLISHMIN TO HERE.”
The recruitment of “the Inglishmin” John Constantine for the task is fitting. Created in 1985 by writer Alan Moore with artists Stephen Bissette and John Totleben as a supporting character in the pages of DC’s horror comic The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Constantine (whose appearance was inspired by the pop star Sting) became a popular leading character in the long-running Hellblazer comics series; the character also appears in other media such as film, television, and prose novels. Constantine is a cunning, chain-smoking, British working-class wizard with flexible moral standards — just the sort of guy that a group of Cubs fans could hire to break an irksome curse.
It is worth noting the real-world precedents for Przeska and his pals’ supernatural effort to remove the curse. Sianis reputedly lifted the curse before his death in 1970 with no change in the team’s fortunes, so the Cubs’ management allowed Sianis’ nephew to parade goats across Wrigley Field on multiple occasions and even invited a Greek Orthodox priest to sprinkle holy water on the diamond in 2008, the same year that “All I Goat for Christmas” was published. It is fun to speculate that Azzarello’s story was inspired by these efforts to remove the curse, but the writer does not credit these activities as an inspiration in an interview with the Chicago Tribune about the comic.
After receiving his fee, Constantine arrives at the Billy Goat Tavern with a sacrificial goat in tow. The warlock informs his customers that they will have to assist in the curse-breaking ritual by eating the goat:
“‘I’LL BREAK YEA CURSE,’ HE SLYLY GRINNED, ‘THO’ AID I’LL NEED TO BEAT IT!’ WE SWALLOWED HARD, WHEN THEN INFORMED — LIKE SINS WE’D HAVE TO EAT IT.”
Grampá’s lush, stylized art, complimented by Penna’s colors, provides an eerie cartoonish beauty to the story as the ritual transforms the goat into a monstrous beast, a dangerous physical manifestation of the curse to be battled and defeated by Constantine and his clients. Interestingly, Grampá’s renderings of the bar were aided by photographs of the actual tavern. Discussing the story with the Chicago Tribune, Azzarello states that he contacted the Sianis family about setting the story in the tavern and, with the family’s blessing, Azzarello’s wife sent Grampá photos of the tavern for reference.
The story ends with the ritual completed in a disgusting manner, and the narrator’s grim hope that it was all worth it.
The Scapegoat
In Azzarello’s narrative, the ritualistic use of the goat acknowledges the mythic origin of the curse. But the goat, and the poem’s specific reference to sin (“LIKE SINS WE’D HAVE TO EAT IT”), suggest another ancient occult practice — a“scapegoat” upon which the sins of a community were symbolically placed, before the animal was driven away along with everyone’s sins. Today, the term indicates a person or thing unfairly blamed for bad outcomes.
Perhaps Azzarello is slyly suggesting that the curse legend is unfair to the goat and Sianis. After all, as noted by the site History.com, some historians believe that the curse story was fabricated:
“Newspaper reports from October 1945 mention Sianis and his goat being asked to leave Wrigley Field, but talk of a hex didn’t crop up until years later. According to Cubs historians Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson, the curse was actually a joke started by the Chicago sportswriters who frequented the Billy Goat Tavern. Sianis, always eager for publicity, simply played along.”
Regardless of whether the “Billy Goat Curse” caused the Chicago Cubs’ longtime competitive misfortunes prior to the 2016 World Series, the curse is an interesting sports legend that once provided a worthy and unique challenge to an iconic comics character.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING:
- “All I Goat for Christmas” and other holiday stories featuring John Constantine can be found in Hellblazer #250; copies of this issue may be available at your local comic shop or an online retailer.
- The site History.com has more details on the legend of the “Billy Goat Curse” here.
- The Chicago Tribune writes about the comic book effort to break the curse here.
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