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Michael Jordan wouldn't step on the basketball court without his lucky shorts.
Wayne Gretzky put his equipment on in the exact same order, tucking in only the right side of his jersey. In the locker room, he drank, in order, a Diet Coke, glass of ice water, Gatorade and another Diet Coke before returning to the ice.
And, Sonny Lubick insists that his players and coaches run onto the field in the same order every game.
Superstitions - lucky shorts, game-day ritual or routine - whether real or perceived can provide the kind of mental edge that often makes the difference between success and failure at the highest levels of athletic competition, say sports psychologists.
With sports superstars believing in superstitions, it's no wonder athletes at all levels are prone to believe strongly in their effects.
"Superstitions, at the heart, are emotionally stabilizing," said Dr. Richard Lustberg, a noted New York sports psychologist who has worked with professional and amateur athletes for more than 17 years. "They provide confidence; they provide assurance."
Superstitions generally are defined by Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary as "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation."
“We are superstitious, as a staff,” Lubick said.
“One time, against San Diego State my freshman year, I did (my hair) in two braids, and we lost, so I never did that again,” Downs said.
There were plenty of other routines that couldn’t be altered, either, said Downs and Heather Kennedy, an assistant sports information director who travels with the volleyball team.
Players had to take the same positions on the floor for warm-ups; sit in the same seats on buses or vans during road trips and room with the same teammates.
“You have to be in the same place, or else it’s just bad news,” Downs said.
“I’ve actually never thought of it as superstition,” Kloppe said. “But I’ve always done the same routine. Whenever we go through an infield, we’re always in the same order in our infield line, we always take the same number of grounders and, when we huddle and stuff, we always say the same thing in the first inning and in every inning.”
Kloppe said the Rams changed their fourth-inning saying last year in an effort to change their luck.
“It always seemed like in the fourth inning, that’s when other teams jumped on us and started scoring,” she said.
So, did it help?
“Not a whole lot,” Kloppe said.
That’s one of the inherent problems with beliefs in superstitions, said Lustberg, the sports psychologist.
“They don’t have to happen every time, especially for athletes,” he said. “They only have to be intermittently successful.”
Baseball, Lustberg said, offers a prime example. A player might get three hits in 10 at-bats and believe some routine or good-luck charm made that happen while ignoring the fact that it didn’t work seven out of 10 times.
That’s the approach CSU basketball player Freddy Robinson takes when it comes to his uniform number, 13. Despite a spate of injuries that caused him to miss two of the past three seasons and six of the Rams’ first eight games this season, he refuses to blame it on his chosen uniform number.
“I’ve had some good games with No. 13, so I don’t think it’s the number really,” Robinson said, noting that Steve Nash wore No. 13 while winning an NBA most valuable player award last season. “There’s a lot of good players who wear No. 13.”
Still, Robinson said, some of his teammates have urged him to switch as CSU softball pitcher Megan Masser did a few years ago.
Masser wore No. 13 her first two years at CSU and had a number of injuries and other problems. At the urging of an assistant coach, she switched to No. 5 for her final two seasons and was a first-team, all-Mountain West Conference selection in 2003-04, going 32-12 with a 1.86 ERA after posting an 8-25 record with a 3.08 ERA the previous two years.
“A lot of my teammates say the reason I hurt my knee and Achilles and stuff is because it’s a ‘bad-luck number,’ ” Robinson said. “I always say, ‘No, it isn’t.’ ’’
Nevertheless, Robinson admitted even he had to wonder about the luck of his number after trying a different one out for a game last month in Hawaii.
Because injuries had kept him out of the previous four games, equipment managers forgot to pack Robinson’s uniforms when the Rams traveled to the Rainbow Classic in Hawaii.
So the junior guard-forward wore one of the team’s extra uniforms, No. 5, in a first-round game against Western Michigan and finished with 11 points, four assists and two steals in an 87-69 CSU victory. The next day, Robinson’s uniforms were shipped to the team’s hotel, allowing him to wear his usual number in a semifinal game against host Hawaii.
“I went back to No. 13; and the next day, I was hurt,” Robinson said. “So when I was in Hawaii, I said maybe I do need to change my number.”
The injury this time was minor, and he played the following night in the championship game against Iowa State, scoring three points and grabbing one rebound. He hasn’t missed a game since, although he has yet to match the 11 points and four assists he had in his one game wearing No. 5.
“It’s just random chance happening,” Lustberg said. “Every game he played, he didn’t get hurt in No. 13. It’s just a way of explaining the unexplainable.”