Lucky Shorts
Manny Millan / Sports Illustrated
The secret to Michael Jordan’s basketball success lay not in the aerodynamics of his well-shaven head or the springiness of his signature Air Jordan sneakers — it was all in the shorts. As a cultural geography major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jordan led his college’s basketball team, the Tar Heels, to win the NCAA Championship game in 1982. Hoping to channel his collegiate karma, His Airness wore a pair of his UNC shorts under his longer, baggier Bulls shorts for all of his NBA games.
See the Top 10 Evil Sports.
The Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx
Walter Iooss Jr. / Sports Illustrated
Whoever it was that said a little fame never hurt anybody was never on the cover of TIME’s sister magazine Sports Illustrated. Athletes have suffered precarious misfortunes after appearing on its cover since the magazine’s inaugural August 1954 issue featuring third baseman Eddie Matthews, who suffered a hand injury that forced him to miss seven games. More recently, Winter Olympic gold-medal hopeful Lindsey Vonn suffered a much publicized bruised shin shortly after her own cover in February 2010. The ‘jinx’ has even affected multiple people at once, as three of the Yankees’ ‘Core Four’ players (Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada) featured in an April 2010 issue of Sports Illustrated, all suffered injuries within a week, leaving only team captain Derek Jeter unscathed. SI tried to address the topic in a January 2002 issue. The magazine interviewed sports psychologist Jim Loehr who called the jinx “a failure to efficiently metabolize heightened expectations.” In layman’s terms, the ‘jinxed’ cover subjects merely choked under the extra attention.
See the Top 10 Fake TIME Magazine Covers.
