The Curse of the Colonel

On October 16, 1985, the Hanshin Tigers won the Central League pennant in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball. It was their first title since 1964, and the city of Osaka lost its mind.

Thousands of fans gathered at Ebisu Bridge in the Dotonbori district, the commercial heart of the city. As each player's name was called out, a fan who bore some resemblance to that player leapt off the bridge into the Dotonbori River. This went on for 25 players without incident. Then someone called the name of Randy Bass.

Bass was the Tigers' best player, an American slugger from Lawton, Oklahoma, who had spent six seasons in the major leagues with five different teams before his contract expired and he wound up playing in Japan. He was tall, bearded, and obviously foreign. In a crowd of Japanese fans on a bridge in Osaka in 1985, nobody looked anything like him.

The crowd improvised. There was a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant near the bridge, and standing in front of it, as KFC statues do in every location in Japan, was a life-sized fiberglass Colonel Sanders. He was foreign. He had facial hair. Close enough.

The fans seized the Colonel, dressed him in a Tigers jersey, carried him to the bridge, and threw him into the river.

The Hanshin Tigers would wait 38 years before winning another Japan Series.

The Tigers went on to beat the Seibu Lions in the 1985 Japan Series, their first championship in 21 years. Then the bottom fell out. Over the next 18 seasons, the team posted just one winning record. They finished last or next-to-last for most of the late 1980s and 1990s. Fans started talking about a curse.

The logic was clear enough, in the way that sports superstition logic is always clear enough. The Colonel's spirit was angry about what had been done to his statue, and the Tigers would suffer until the statue was recovered and the insult undone.

Fans apologized to the KFC store manager, divers searched the river, and dredging operations came up empty. The statue was gone.

In 2003, the Tigers surged back to the Japan Series. KFC locations across Osaka brought their Colonel statues inside for safekeeping. Thousands of fans jumped into the river anyway. The Tigers lost the series in seven games. The curse lived on.

On March 10, 2009, workers dredging the Dotonbori River during a construction project pulled something from the bottom. They initially thought it was a large barrel, then a human corpse, before Hanshin fans at the scene identified it as the upper half of the long-lost Colonel Sanders statue.

The right hand and lower body were found the next day. The Colonel was still missing his glasses and his left hand. He had been standing upright on the riverbed for nearly 24 years. "He was apparently found standing upright, which is fitting," said a KFC Japan spokesperson, "because although he was a nice man he could also be very strict and demanding."

A priest performed a blessing, and KFC Japan reclaimed the statue, now fitted with replacement glasses and a new hand, and placed it at company headquarters.

But the recovery didn't immediately fix anything. The Tigers made the Japan Series again in 2005 and 2014, losing both times. Believers cited the missing original glasses and left hand as the reason the curse persisted.

In 2023, the Tigers finally broke through. They defeated the Orix Buffaloes in a seven-game series to win the Japan Series for the first time since 1985. The celebration at Dotonbori was massive but more controlled. Police had deployed 1,300 officers. The original KFC near the bridge had closed years ago. Every other KFC in the area had locked its Colonel statues inside weeks in advance. Despite all precautions, seven fans managed to break through the barricades and jump into the river. One of them was dressed as Colonel Sanders.

The curse, if it existed, lasted 38 years. In that time, it became the most famous sports superstition in Japanese history, a direct parallel to the Curse of the Bambino in American baseball. Both involved a long-suffering franchise, a beloved tradition, and a collective willingness to believe that something beyond the game was at work. The Red Sox broke their curse in 2004. The Tigers broke theirs in 2023. In both cases, the winning team's fans celebrated as though something larger than a baseball game had finally been resolved. Maybe it had.