Luck or Timing

Do you believe in luck? Some people believe luck is a mystical force that can be controlled with magical amulets or strange rituals. Others say luck is just something people blame when they don't want to admit their own mistakes. I was friends with these two brothers in high school: one refused to wash his lucky underwear for an entire football season, the other would sit under a ladder playing with a black cat on Friday the 13th and think nothing of it. Was one brother luckier than the other?

On paper, it's silly to think that sleeping with your baseball bat will make you a better hitter. But tell that to a ballplayer whose hitting streak ends the day he loses his lucky baseball bat. In fact, baseball players are crazy superstitious. Hall of Famer Wade Boggs insisted on eating fried chicken before every one of his 2,432 games. Outfielder Moises Alou used to pee on his hands to make them tougher and luckier. And relief pitcher Turk Wendell took things to another level completely. Among his many bizarre rituals, Turk had to chew exactly four pieces of black licorice while he was pitching, could not catch a ball from an umpire without letting it hit the ground first, had to wave at his centerfielder at the start of every inning, brushed his teeth in the dugout, and would never, ever, EVER step on the foul line.

Fans often get into the good luck business, too. What do you do when your entire team is cursed, like the Red Sox with the Curse of the Bambino, or the Cubs with the Billy Goat Curse? To reverse the curse, fans took it way beyond rally caps and lucky shirts. We're talking dredging a pond for Babe Ruth's piano, marching cross-country with a billy goat, sprinkling holy water in the dugout, painting graffiti throughout an entire city, electrocuting an "unlucky" baseball.

Hey, it's only weird if it doesn't work.

Of course, athletes and sports fans aren't the only ones who try to tame Lady Luck. Writers have their own superstitions. Charles Dickens would only sleep facing North in order to unblock his creativity. Playwright Friedrich Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk drawer so he could smell them for inspiration. And British poet Edith Sitwell would lie down in an open coffin to clear her head before writing.

I find the subject of luck and superstition fascinating. That's probably why I wrote a book where the main character is obsessed with luck. But, what about me? Do I have any good luck rituals? Well, I'm not going to admit to anything, but I may have a secret jigsaw puzzle that brings my favorite baseball team good luck. And I might have a writing troll from Iceland that sits on my keyboard whenever I submit a manuscript. And it's possible that there's a good luck baseball, a horseshoe, and a lucky duck sitting on my desk right now. I'm not sure that means I actually believe in luck. I like to think that luck is mostly a matter of hard work and good timing. But maybe...just maybe...there's a little bit of magic, too. As the great Michael Scott of The Office once said: "I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious."