Oh, as a Cubs fan, I know this all too well. I’d say Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS. Not the the Bartman incident itself, but everything that happened immediately after that, as the Cubs apparently just psychologically collapsed and completely forgot how to play baseball. Cubs were 5 outs away from a World Series when a little incident involving a foul ball and perceived fan interference rattled them so much that the batter was walked, a wild pitch was thrown, what should have been an easy inning-ending double play got muffed, and, next thing you know, instead of being up 3-0 or 3-1 going into the bottom of the 8th, the Cubs were down 8 to 3.
That’s rubbish. The shortest boundary at Eden park is 51 metres.
Under 12s in Sydney play on a 45 metre oval. Eden Park would still be legal for under 14s games, but not under 16s. Although I do note the rules say “If grounds permit,” before listing the dimensions, so presumably having a stand in the way would be a sufficient excuse to hold junior cricket at Eden park.
World heavyweight champion (and seemingly unassailable badass) Mike Tyson losing to Buster Douglas back in 1990.
The unbeaten 1990-91 UNLV Running Rebels losing in a national semifinal to Duke, the team they’d obliterated by 30 points (to this day I believe THE most lopsided NCAA men’s basketball final, ever) a year earlier in the national championship game.
The New York Yankees losing a 3 - 0 lead in their best-of-7 series against hated archrival Boston in the ALCS a few years back.
The Soviet men’s ice hockey team losing to the U.S.'s entry in the medal round of the 1980 Winter Olympics. A Soviet machine that had won something like 5 of the previous 6 Winter Olympic gold medals and that had humiliated the same U.S. team right before the Olympics that year, 10 - 3.
Two of the biggest ones of all: at the 1950 World Cup in Brasil, in the first round the English team, thought of by many at the time to be the best national team in the world (but testing itself for the first time in World Cup play) losing to a “team” (and I use the term loosely) of amateurs and semi-pros representing the U.S., 0 - 1, sending shock waves throughout the soccer (football) world.
5)a) Then that same year’s “final”, hosts Brasil vs. tiny Uruguay, in a game that the Brasilians (due to the unique format of that year’s World Cup) needed only draw in order to lift the trophy, losing a 1 - 0 lead and falling 1 - 2, leaving their legions of fans in despair.
As a Cardinals fan I hate to empathize with a Cubs fan, but we had the same experience in the 1985 World Series. Three outs to go, then a bad call by the ump. Then everything went to hell – misplayed foul ball, single, passed ball, intentional walk, single and suddenly the Royals won, setting the stage for Game 7.
As a Rangers fan, the Rangers were leading the Cards by two runs and were twice just one strike away from their first World Series title, in 2011. Nightmarish outcome, but congratulations to St Louis for one of the greatest comebacks in baseball.
There are different kinds of chokes. The Colts choked because they were so heavily favored before the game even started. The Jets exploited a mismatch between their offensive line and the Colts’ defensive line, and they ran ran ran the ball on Baltimore. Shula was clearly outcoached. The Colts choked big time, it was a massive upset and a big surprise Jets win.
Did Baltimore play notably subpar? Or was the performance of their opponents too good on the day? If its the former, then I think its a choke.
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The problem is that RSA now have a reputation of choking in semi-finals, and they’ve genuinely done it at least twice. I don’t think if a different team - India, say - had been beaten by NZ in exactly the same way that people would be saying that India had choked. But because it’s South Africa, they were always going to be called chokers if they’d lost.
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I would say that if India had done what RSA did in the first SF, people would have said they choked.
I would also say that India choked yesterday. Got half a dozen chances and did not take them.
. . . that when the pressure is on, there are three types of athletes and this can even spread like a contagion to teams:
—Winners, who just do what they normally do in any situation, and deliver the goods because they are good and of stable mindset and in a groove
—Losers, who just aren’t talented enough to deliver the goods in any situation
—No-good Choking chokers, the lowest form of manhood, who despite their enormous talent either tighten up and turtle up and become overly conservative under pressure, or panic and make wild irrational decisions under pressure, and either way, lose every time. They have a psychological defect that is often undetected until they are placed in the highest of high pressure situations, during which they manifest themselves under the worst of circumstances.
Donovan McNabb, Peyton Manning, Phil Rivers, Greg Norman, are all examples of flawed human beings and athletes that just fall to shreds when its time man up, call upon everything your life has lead up to that point in time, and deliver the big prize. Just disgraceful.
The only good thing about that game was that I was living abroad at the time, so I was spared the torture and potential cardiac event of watching it as it happened. I only saw the score the next morning and didn’t even get a chance to read the misery that unfolded until later in the day. So I actually was pretty calm through this, thinking, well if the Marlins beat Prior no Wood, they deserve it. I’m not sure I’d’ve been as calm or alive were I in Chicago.
Peyton Manning is a Super Bowl champion, is he not?
I mean, it seems to me if someone is naturally a choker, that can’t happen. There’s just no way Manning, if he’s unable to deliver when it matters, could have won a Super Bowl at all, ever.
Indeed, I would question if it’s reasonable to conclude any athlete you’ve ever heard of can be a choker. After all, Donovan McNabb could not possible have become an NFL quarterback at all if he choked when everything was on the line. When he was a high school quarterback he played key games in front of college scouts, the biggest games of his life, that would determine if he went to college to play football, and he succeeded. Then in college he had to play well enough to be successful, in the biggest games of his life, in order to get drafted, and he succeeded. Then he had to have success in the NFL regular season to hold on to his job at all, and he succeeded. McNabb passed any number of “choke” tests just to get to the point that he’d be famous enough for an armchair quarterback on the Internet to even know who he was to call him a choker because he didn’t play well in the Super Bowl.
Including of course one where they won a playoff game in which they were losing 35-3 and had their starting QB hurt, which if I recall correctly is the biggest comeback in the history of the NFL, playoff or regular season. That hardly sounds like a pack of losers.
The Bills lost those Super Bowls because they were beaten by superior teams, there’s no shame in that.
(bolding mine)
That is a key concept in the choke-ology of team sports - psychological contagion. Excellent example in the last world cup when Brazil got walloped 7-1 by Germany. They conceded 5 goals in 20 minutes of the first half - total mental collapse that was transmitted like a virus throughout the entire Brazilian team. It was men against boys all over the park. The consequences of that humiliation will propagate far into the future, but could have been avoided entirely if they’d had 3 or 4 leaders on the day (they were always getting beat, but it could have been a routine 2-0 affair).
Seen it plenty of times in football. Games are usually quite tight, so when 2 goals get banged in quickly a weak team can succumb to the choke sickness.
That was 20 years ago. And 20 years before that, we had the only team to win 3 straight conference championships, the Dolphins. Nobody else has done that either. What the Bills did was pretty spectacular.
If only Norwood wasn’t wide right, they’d have won that first one.
