Borrowed Magic and Beautiful Nonsense

The last stop in our long tour of sports rituals, where the crowd stops watching and becomes part of the story.

We just watched a crowd turn itself into a boat. Norway’s Viking Row is barely a year old, and it works for one reason: It gives every person in the stands a way in.

The Viking Row belongs to a larger, stranger family. If athletes’ pregame rituals are private machines for control, the ones a crowd builds together are public machines for belonging. And a crowd has more than one way in.

Myth and ritual sit at either end. A myth is a story a crowd shares and keeps retelling, a goat at Wrigley or a birthright sold to New York. A ritual is a thing a crowd does in unison and keeps repeating, a song in the stands or an octopus on the ice. Superstition lives in the space between them, a belief that some small act bends the outcome, story and gesture fused into one. The three blur constantly, and they still aren’t the same thing.

What ties them together is how they move. They get passed around, from one crowd to the next and from one country to another. And they get passed down, from parents to kids who inherit a grief or a chant they had no hand in starting. Some arrived fully formed. Most didn’t. A few were borrowed, a few were accidents the stands refused to let die. All of them are ways of refusing to watch from the outside.

The Curse Everyone Agrees To

Begin with a goat. In 1945, a tavern owner named William Sianis arrived at Wrigley Field for a World Series game with a ticket for himself and a ticket for his pet goat, Murphy. The goat, by all accounts, smelled, and Sianis was asked to remove it. Insulted, he declared that the Chicago Cubs would never win another World Series. They didn’t win one for the next seventy-one years, a championship drought stretching to 108 years total, and an entire fanbase organized its grief around a bad-tempered man and his odorous goat (USA Today, ESPN). When the Cubs finally won in 2016, fans insisted they weren’t just winning a trophy. They were lifting a hex.

The Cubs weren’t alone in their cursedness. Across the country, the Boston Red Sox spent eighty-six years convinced they’d doomed themselves by selling Babe Ruth, “the Bambino,” to the New York Yankees in 1919. The curse didn’t actually exist in the public mind for most of those decades. It was largely invented by the Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, whose 1990 book, Curse of the Bambino, gave the drought a name and a villain. The idea caught because the fans needed it to. As one historian put it, the curse “gives the fanbase another identity and a unifying aspect to rally around” (ESPN). Boston broke it in 2004 with one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, against, fittingly, the Yankees.

This is the first secret of the communal myth: it doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be shared. The curse is a way for thousands of strangers to feel the same thing at the same time, to convert decades of random misfortune into a single coherent narrative with a beginning and, eventually, a cathartic end. It is the purest kind of passing down, a grief handed to kids who weren’t alive when it started.

Rituals Made from Nothing

The same impulse runs through the rituals fans invent out of thin air. Consider baseball’s rally cap, a superstition that hardened into a ritual: the act of flipping your hat inside out or backward to summon a late-inning comeback. There’s no mechanism here, no theory of how a turned cap moves a baseball. Its origin is genuinely murky. Some trace it to the 1945 Detroit Tigers, but the version we know didn’t take hold until Mets fans started flipping their caps inside out at Shea Stadium in the mid-1980s. It got seared into the national memory during the frantic Game 6 comeback of the 1986 World Series (Wikipedia). The rally cap survives on decades of fans insisting they’ve seen it work too many times to stop now.

Superstition with a Body Count

And then there’s the gloriously morbid logic of NASCAR, where superstition has a body count. Green cars are bad luck, a belief traced to the 1920 death of Indianapolis 500 champion Gaston Chevrolet in a crash while driving one. And peanut shells are banned outright from the pits, supposedly because shells were found in the wreckage of fatal 1937 crashes, even though contemporary reports never actually mentioned them (Sports Illustrated, NASCAR Hall of Fame). The facts barely matter. The taboo persists because in a sport where the worst can genuinely happen, forbidding a rumored talisman of bad luck feels like armor.

The Songs a Crowd Borrows

Some of the most powerful crowd rituals are not gestures at all. They are songs, and the strange part is how few of them were ever written for the terraces. They were borrowed from somewhere else entirely and made sacred by repetition.

Before every home match at Anfield, tens of thousands of Liverpool supporters raise their scarves and sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The song has been sung by fans for so many decades that it’s been literally carved into the stadium, with the words sitting in wrought iron over the Shankly Gates. But the song is a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, written to comfort a grieving woman on stage. It reached the Kop only because a local band, Gerry and the Pacemakers, took it to number one in 1963, and fans who sang along to the day’s hit records simply never stopped (Liverpool FC, FIFA). It has since traveled to Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Feyenoord, and clubs as far away as Tokyo. A song of consolation turned into a wall of sound unifying football fans. It’s a notoriously difficult melody too, wide and slow and unforgiving without a band behind you, which makes a full Kop carrying it in unison all the more improbable.

Across London, West Ham fans sing something even stranger. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” began as a number in a 1918 Broadway revue, a wistful little waltz about dreams that rise and burst. A working-class club in East London adopted it, and today machines around the stadium pump thousands of real soap bubbles into the air while grown adults sing about fragile hope drifting away (West Ham United, FourFourTwo). It should be ridiculous. Instead, it is one of the most moving sights in English football, a whole crowd agreeing to believe in bubbles.

How a Ritual Travels

The strangest thing about these crowd rituals is how they travel, leaping from one fanbase to another. In Detroit, the tradition of throwing an octopus onto the ice was born on April 15, 1952, when two fish-market-owning brothers, Pete and Jerry Cusimano, hurled a cephalopod from the stands, its eight tentacles representing the eight wins then needed for a Stanley Cup. The Red Wings swept to the title that night, and seventy years later, fans are still flinging octopuses. The team has even created a building-sized octopus mascot named “Al.” This ritual proved so infectious that it spawned imitators. When the Nashville Predators wanted their own totem, they began throwing catfish (NHL, VICE).

Iceland’s mesmerizing “Viking Thunderclap,” the slow, building, synchronized clap punctuated by a guttural “HUH” that stunned the world at Euro 2016, wasn’t drawn from ancient Scandinavian heritage at all. Icelandic supporters appear to have adapted it from existing European fan culture. The Scottish football club Motherwell is often cited as one influence. Iceland may have picked up the chant after a 2014 match against Motherwell, then carried it home and made it their own (SPORF, InnerDrive).

The Poznań traveled even further. It began with supporters of the Polish club Lech Poznań, who turned their backs to the pitch, linked arms, and bounced in unison. When six thousand of them did it inside Manchester City’s stadium in 2010, the home fans were baffled at first, then hooked, and made it their own (Manchester City, The Independent). From there, it kept jumping. Charlotte FC opens every home match with it; Western Sydney’s supporters claimed it for the eightieth minute, and by 2025 the band Oasis had whole concert crowds doing it between songs. A dance from one Polish terrace had become a global reflex.

The Accidents That Stuck

Some of the most enduring rituals were never planned at all. They were accidents the crowd refused to let die. On December 26, 1993, in sub-zero cold at Lambeau Field, Green Bay safety LeRoy Butler scooped up a lateral and scored, then, on pure impulse, launched himself into the arms of the fans behind the end zone. “He stuck to the wall like Velcro,” teammate Robert Brooks marveled. The “Lambeau Leap” was born in that instant, popularized by Brooks the following season, and is still performed more than thirty years later (ESPN, Packers.com).

A continent away, Cristiano Ronaldo did something similar by accident. After a goal at a 2013 friendly in Miami, he leapt, spun in the air, landed in a wide stance, and shouted “Sí,” Spanish for “yes.” He hadn’t planned to repeat it. The crowd’s roar of “Siuuu” decided otherwise, and the yelp became the most imitated celebration on Earth, copied by athletes in every sport and kids in every schoolyard (ESPN).

Calculated Rituals

Most of these rituals were accidents or borrowings. In Los Angeles, one was engineered on purpose, and the fans built it into the architecture. LAFC’s supporters section is called the 3252, named for the exact number of standing spots in the North End behind the goal. Add up the digits, and you get twelve, the number that the sport of soccer reserves for the fans themselves, considering them to be the twelfth player on an eleven-man team (MLSsoccer.com, The 3252).

Everything about the section is designed for participation. Capos stand on raised platforms and lead the chants by hand. Drummers hold the whole end on one beat, and flags move down the rows so even a first-timer gets a turn waving one. The signature chant, “Jump for LAFC,” was borrowed from supporters in Australia, who had borrowed it themselves from South America and Europe, and it has since bounced back out to clubs as far away as the Norwegian First Division. After every win, the players walk to the North End, take a megaphone, and lead a slow call-and-response with the crowd until the two sides are singing as one voice. Even the club’s co-owner, Will Ferrell, has been known to grab the megaphone and start the chant himself.

Beautiful Nonsense

These traditions endure because they do something the scoreboard can’t. They bind a crowd into a congregation. They turn private hope into a shared language of belief. In the most affectionate sense, this is beautiful nonsense, and that is exactly why it lasts.

Athletes tighten their laces in the same order before every match, reaching for control. A Norwegian crowd pulls imaginary oars in unison, reaching for each other. Cursed fans wait decades for release. The faithful raise borrowed songs over the beat of a drum.

Underneath all of it runs one instinct, older than any tradition it produces.

We are never satisfied to watch the story from the outside.

We always want a way in.