Narrative No More! Braves Kill Curse in City That Haunts Atlanta Sports the Most.
Before the World Series, Braves shortstop Dansby Swanson was asked a question that he did not particularly want to answer.
In addition to playing a sport with a historic, bone-deep inclination toward superstition, he had a personal tendency toward it: At the end of April, for example, after his team had gotten off to a scuffling start, Swanson was seen burning sage in the clubhouse. (The Braves won their next three games.) If you took that action to mean that he placed stock in curses, or vibes, or some other nebulous forms of energy, it was natural to ask him how he felt about the Braves’ playing for the championship in Houston, which happened to be the site of a certain local football squad’s notorious demise four short years ago.
Did the return to Houston have him ready to break out the sage again?
"I can’t even answer that," Swanson says.
He shouldn’t have had to: There was, of course, no logical connection between the 2021 Braves and the ’16 Falcons or any of the history that had given Atlanta its reputation as a tortured sports city. But it was easy to see how people could feel otherwise. Atlanta’s championship record in big-four men’s sports seemed too absurd, too personal, to feel as if it was anything but cursed.
The Braves had not taken home a title in a generation, despite the fact that they had won more games than any other team in the National League from 1996 to 2020. The Hawks had made almost three dozen playoff runs since moving to town half a century ago, but they have never reached an NBA Finals, let alone won one. The Thrashers appeared in one NHL playoff series in their 11 seasons in town before relocating to Winnipeg. Then there are Swanson’s beloved Falcons, authors of the toughest loss of all. The young shortstop had traveled to Houston in 2017 for Super Bowl LII, and he saw his team blow that 28–3 lead to the Patriots.
None of that history had any bearing on the 2021 Braves—or, at least, none of it rationally should have. ("This is a few years later and a completely different sport," Swanson says of playing for a championship in Houston, taking pains to spell out just how silly the whole thing sounded.) But the infielder, who grew up in Marietta, Ga., understood the psychic wounds behind the reporter’s question. And whether or not the idea of an Atlanta title curse made sense, it didn’t change how a World Series loss—or, for that matter, a World Series win—would be received by fans.
To lose would be to offer yet another data point in this tale of futility. To win, meanwhile, would be to kill the narrative.
Swanson knew that. So when the Braves had won the World Series and he stood before the cameras after Game 6 at Minute Maid Park, soaked in champagne, grin plastered to his face—he could not help but to circle back to the football game that he had watched in this city four years earlier.
"It kind of feels like no better story could be written than God making us come back here and winning the World Series in Houston," he said. "Everything comes full circle."