Crossing her fingers, hoping for better luck

I know most of you are rolling your eyes and asking, "Why?" because of the miserable season the boys in blue are having this year, but that's just it. It's all my fault they're losing.

You see, last year they won every game I watched. This year, they won the preseason games I watched, and when I stopped watching, they stopped winning. It must be my fault.

I know that's a little superstitious, but then, so am I, and I come by it honestly. My mother, who never watched a football game in her life until long after my father died, became an ardent Vols-Titans-Colts fan in her last years. I think it was largely out of self-defense because she'd had, at certain times, two of her three sons move back in with her for a while and it was learn to love football or go crazy.

She combined the two neatly, if you count her football superstitions as crazy.

I didn't notice it until we were all over for a big Vols game one day. Every time a commercial would come on, Mom would jump up and start doing dishes, peeling potatoes, vacuuming the living room, and so on.

"What are you doing?" I yelled over the floor waxer.

"When I clean, we win!" she yelled back.

"Can we watch the game at my house next week?"

Of course, it didn't always work, but it happened often enough she stuck to her superstitious cleaning routine. If the Vols didn't get the national title that year, Peyton did get top draft pick (and should have gotten the Heisman) and the next year, the Big Orange went indeed. She swore to her dying day that if she'd started a batch of brownies during the last commercial break, Kevin Dyson would have made that last yard and the Titans would have had their Super Bowl win.

Of course, she was hardly alone when it came to mixing sports and superstition. Both rodeo riders and tennis players avoid wearing yellow while performing their sport and many golfers always start their games with only odd-numbered clubs. The Madden curse, which seems to be holding up well, foretells doom and destruction to whatever poor football player is featured on the cover of the most recent version of the John Madden video game. Sorry, Steeler Troy Polamalu and Cardinal Larry Fitzgerald of Madden 10. Polamalu sprained his MCL in the season opener. Fitzgerald is actually having a pretty good season, but he compounded the curse by catching 13 passes Sunday. Not 12, not 14, but 13.

He's doomed.

(Personally, I think there was an error at the printers and the players who were supposed to be on the new Madden game all wore light and dark blue uniforms with big Ts...)

Individual athletes have their own superstitions, too. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky tucked one side of his jersey into his pants, NBA legend Michael Jordan wore his UNC basketball shorts underneath his actual uniform, golfer Tiger Woods always wears red on Sunday and Bjorn Borg never shaved before and during Wimbledon.

I'm not really superstitious-superstitious, if you know what I mean. I don't walk under ladders, largely because I'm not crazy about things falling on my head, and I don't hold my breath when crossing bridges in the car. I got cured of that one when we lived in Lower Alabama and went to the beach a lot. There are some loooong bridges in Florida.

I do, however, occasionally knock wood (or plastic veneer cleverly disguised as wood), but that's more out of habit and humor than fear of the great hoodoo unknown. I'd been a big believer in making your own luck for a long time, and I tended to rely on myself more than four-leaf clovers. But I realized the other night that our family's recent run of really, really bad luck began about seven years ago, when my mother and brother died within a month of each other. Since then, there have been job losses and heart attacks, and wrecked cars and credit ratings.

Hmmm, seven is one of those unknown hoodoo mystical numbers, isn't it?

It had gotten so bad, we couldn't even appreciate it when good things happened because we were always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or mirror to break.

Recently, things have begin to change for the better and I'm going to enjoy those improvements, dropping shoes or no dropping shoes. If I'm not superstitious, then there's no reason to enjoy the good things and if I am superstitious, well, my seven years of bad luck must be up, right?

Knock on wood.

-- Mary Reeves is a Times-Gazette staff writer. She can be reached at mreeves@t-g.com.