Of witch doctors and old curses in the shadows of Williams-Brice

(The following piece contains an excerpt from A Gamecock Odyssey: University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era, published by USC Press)

In the spirit of this haunted season, I bring you a surreal story of the preternatural, of curses and the dark arts, and of an honest-to-God exorcism that took place in the shadows of Williams-Brice Stadium some 32 years ago. 

It all happened on a balmy Friday afternoon in early September 1992. It was an odd setting at the outset of what would prove to be an exceedingly odd season – the University of South Carolina’s first as a member of an all-sports conference since leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference some 21 years prior. 

The environs around Williams-Brice Stadium have softened over the years since, thanks to the greening and beautification efforts of Springs Brooks Plaza, leafy residential and tailgating developments nearby, and the verdant Gamecock Village, once the site of an aging and ramshackle state farmers market. Stately red brick columns, wrought iron gates, and a budding urban forest of hundreds of trees have replaced the heat-blasted asphalt apron that formerly surrounded the stadium. 

A more spartan scene awaited the Gamecocks’ SEC debut those many years ago, set as it was amongst an industrial corridor south of campus, replete with machine shops and warehouses and dusty parking lots – the kind of hardscrabble setting that made one ponder if their tetanus vaccine was current. 

Against this gritty backdrop that September day appeared Archibald Thibeaux, a lanky native of New Orleans and self-proclaimed witch doctor then residing in Blythewood. With his billowing brown suit, stovepipe hat, and voodoo face paint, Thibeaux certainly looked the part. 

As a late summer sun radiated off the hotplate asphalt slab near the west-side stadium gates, a hundred or so curious onlookers formed a semi-circle around Thibeaux. They watched as he tossed carefully procured ingredients into a bubbling cauldron – a recipe designed to exorcise the dreaded “Chicken Curse.”

First into the pot was “magic dust,” or perhaps ashes from Thibeaux’s fireplace, mused The State’s David Newton. Then, a dash of something green and a pinch of something orange, followed by “something black from a jar.” Finally, a dramatic flurry of, (what else?), chicken feathers. 

Smoke billowed from the cauldron as those in attendance, more familiar with Methodists than mystics, stood with uncomprehending gazes, arms crossed, hands on hips, not quite sure what to make of the bizarre spectacle. 

“Back to where you belong!” Thibeaux chanted, his long arms extended and fingers splayed, dramatically imploring the removal of that bedeviling spirit. “Chicken Curse be gone!” 

As the smattering of onlookers looked on with a mix of bemusement and disbelief, perhaps not top of mind was the origin story of the Curse itself. 

A fowl curse

Across the ages, followers of Gamecock sports have often bemoaned the sometimes bewildering array of misfortunes their teams have suffered. Consider this scant offering of few such reversals in fortune:

* John Roche’s ankle sprain in the 1970 ACC tournament semifinal win versus Wake Forest. Roche, Carolina’s all-everything guard, was hobbled in the championship game, and the powerhouse Gamecocks lost by three in a slow-down affair versus an inferior NC State team. The loss was devastating for South Carolina’s greatest basketball squad, a team that went 14-0 during the regular season in conference play in an era when only the conference tournament champion received an NCAA bid. To compound the loss, the Carolina Coliseum had been named a host site for the 1970 NCAA East Regional, which would have provided the Gamecocks a compelling home-court advantage in rounds one and two, and an inside track to a Final Four birth.

* The 1984 Gamecock football squad bolted to a 9-0 start and #2 ranking following a nationally-televised thrashing of Florida State. A trip to Annapolis to face a struggling 3-5-1 Navy team, coming off a 29-0 defeat to Syracuse the prior week, and the annual rivalry game versus Clemson were all that remained of the regular season. An Orange Bowl bid and the opportunity to play for a national championship all but certainly awaited the Gamecocks should they manage to win in Annapolis. Gamecock fans had become so confident of the possibility they had taken to throwing oranges on the field during the prior week’s FSU game. Pride cometh before a fall…The fall was biblical in scope, as the Midshipmen played inspired football, dominating the Gamecocks 38-21. Adding salt to the wound, first-ranked Nebraska lost the same day to Oklahoma, which would have… should have… propelled South Carolina to its first-ever number 1 ranking.

* In a 1988 Metro Conference matchup versus powerhouse Louisville at Carolina Coliseum, the Gamecocks held a seemingly insurmountable 14-point lead, 72-58, with 1:22 remaining. After the Cardinals hit a three-point bucket to cut the lead to 11 with 1:06 remaining, South Carolina’s Darrell Martin and Louisville’s Pervis Ellison became tangled under the basket. Martin threw a punch and a wild brawl ensued in which a Gamecock fan came out of the stands, hitting Louisville’s Herbert Crook. It took 10 minutes for security and Columbia Police to restore order and officials to sort out the various transgressions. When the dust settled, officials tagged USC with three technical fouls and Louisville two. Gamecock coach George Felton was ejected due to fan interference, along with Martin and Terry Gould for fighting. Two Louisville players were ejected as well. Louisville connected on six of eight free throws for the three technical fouls and one personal foul called prior to the fight, cutting Carolina’s lead to a scant five points. Meanwhile, Carolina’s best player, Terry Dozier missed three of four free throws, leaving the Gamecock lead at 73-67. Louisville managed to tie it with a last-second three-pointer, sending the game into overtime, and the Cardinals ultimately left Columbia with an improbable double-overtime win.

* Consider, too, Carolina’s 0-8 bowl record prior to 1995, and a 43-year drought between men’s basketball NCAA tournament wins, including devastating first-round losses as a No. 2 seed in 1997, and as a No. 3 seed in 1998.

Taken as individual occurrences, any one of these events is explainable. Upsets happen. Injuries are commonplace. Great players miss free throws. But viewing them cumulatively over the course of years and decades, one starts to wonder if something larger and more sinister might be at play. When logical answers fail to explain accumulated emotional trauma, one begins to search the mystical and the paranormal. An otherwise rational being might begin to ponder hexes, sorcery, and the darker arts. A long-suffering fan might look in the mirror and wonder aloud, ‘Are we cursed?’

Some began to see patterns of futility in the larger sports world anytime a Gamecock letterman or South Carolina native was involved in improbable losses. In an October 1977 Columbia Record article, columnist Doug Nye noted that that season’s Chicago Cubs, who boasted a commanding eight-and-a-half game lead in the National League East standings halfway through the season, did not begin to falter until signing former Gamecock pitcher Randy Martz. The Cubs suffered one of their greatest collapses, finishing fourth in the division with an 81-81 record. 

Similarly, the 1978 Boston Red Sox took a fourteen-and-a-half game lead over the rival New York Yankees into mid-July when the Sox called up former Gamecock Gary Hancock as a reserve outfielder. Almost from the moment Hancock was signed, the team’s commanding lead began to melt away. By season’s end, the Yankees had tied the Red Sox, forcing a one-game playoff to determine the division title, which the Yankees won on the strength of a Bucky Dent three-run homer. The Yankees went on to win the World Series, relegating Red Sox fans to a long, cold off-season. 

Nye pointed to the 1972 US Olympic men’s basketball team as further evidence. The US team had won gold every year since basketball was introduced as an Olympic sport in 1936, compiling a 63-0 record heading into the 1972 final versus the Soviet Union in Munich. The Soviets presented a strong if decidedly underdog rival, and in the context of the US-Soviet geopolitical rivalry, the gold medal game took on greatly enhanced significance. The US team ultimately lost by a point in the final seconds in what remains the most controversial game in Olympic basketball history. Prominent on the roster? Gamecock great Kevin Joyce. 

In a tongue-in-cheek explanation for these and other misfortunes, Nye proposed the existence of a “Chicken Curse,” and it resonated with Gamecock faithful. In a follow-up article about the theory in 1990, he explained, “a major weapon of the Curse is its damnable tendency to tease – to take Gamecock fans to the brink, make them think that their team is about to accomplish the ultimate, and then hit ‘em with a dream-shattering slam to the gut.” 

The Chicken Curse entered popular culture in South Carolina, and many have speculated about its origins. One theory goes back to “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, former US senator and agrarian populist governor of South Carolina (1890-1894), who was instrumental in the establishment of Clemson University. It is widely known that Tillman was disgruntled with USC’s meager agricultural offerings and indignant after the state legislature blocked his early efforts as governor to fund a new agricultural institution. Legend holds that he drove a pitchfork into the ground on the USC Horseshoe, which sits just a stone’s throw away from the State House. According to the tale, Tillman declared that a curse would befall the University of South Carolina henceforth. 

Some think the curse goes back even further, cosmic payback upon the state’s flagship institution for South Carolina’s firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, which sparked the American Civil War. 

Others see impacts of the curse well beyond the sports world, pointing to the fall of the Alamo in 1866, in which the Texas garrison was led by South Carolina native William Travis. Commander of US troops during the heaviest fighting of the ill-fated Vietnam War was South Carolina native William Westmoreland. Elvis Presley died just a few months following his concert at Carolina Coliseum in 1977, though his famously indulgent lifestyle may have been more to blame. Gary Hart, a US senator from Colorado, was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 before revelations surfaced of an extramarital affair with Dona Rice, who was a Columbia native and former Gamecock cheerleader. 

Speculation about the curse’s origins and reach go on. 

Vanquishing the Curse at the dawn of a new era

As USC approached the 1992 football season, its first as a member of the mighty Southeastern Conference, fans who believed in such things were eager to vanquish the Chicken Curse once and for all. USC booster Floyd Bowie, Jr. arranged for a public exorcism to be held outside the gates of Williams-Brice Stadium the day before USC’s season-opening matchup with old nemesis Georgia. “We are tired of the curse rearing its ugly head,” Bowie told Dave Moniz of The State. Bowie, who was assistant general manager of marketing for the minor league Columbia Mets, was no stranger to generating publicity in his professional role. 

Bowie reportedly asked the witch doctor if the curse could be “redirected.” “He said yes, so we’re going to redirect,” Bowie said. Asked where they might redirect the Chicken Curse, Bowie quipped, “Upstate.”

When the ceremony concluded, Thibeaux declared, “The Curse is gone. We will be victorious. Call me if it doesn’t work, but we will win.” Thibeaux cited a 98.5 percent success rate for lifting curses. It’s hard to argue with a witch doctor who employs metrics to track performance. 

Thibeaux likely changed his number; however, as USC began the 1992 season 0-5 and head coach Sparky Woods had to quell a growing player revolt. 

Curses are stubborn things. 

But those 1992 Gamecocks eventually did get their grove back, securing their first win of the season and first-ever SEC victory over No. 15-ranked Mississippi State in Columbia on a memorable mid-October afternoon. That game also marked the first-ever start for then-freshman Steve Taneyhill, who provided a much-needed injection of confidence into the beleaguered Gamecock locker room. 

Behind its brash, young quarterback, the ’92 Gamecocks rose Lazarus-like, winning five of their last six games, including a thriller at home versus No. 16-ranked Tennessee, and coming oh-so-close to defeating No. 11-ranked Florida in Gainesville. Carolina finished the season with a cathartic 24-13 win at Clemson. 

Maybe, for one afternoon in Death Valley anyway, that old Curse was redirected after all. 

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