This post is part of our series on hockey's strange side: the ghosts, curses, and rituals that make the game feel like more than a sport. The series was inspired by the book The Hockey Gods Are Real; the stories here are our own research.
Every great curse needs a villain, a spell, and a long run of bad luck. The Curse of Muldoon has all three. It also has a twist that most curses don't: we know exactly where it came from.
The Coach and the Owner
Pete Muldoon was the first coach of the Chicago Black Hawks when they joined the NHL for the 1926-27 season. The team was owned by Major Frederic McLaughlin, a wealthy coffee magnate known for meddling in hockey decisions. Muldoon lasted one season. Depending on who tells it, he was fired or he quit after clashing with the owner, but either way, he was gone.
The Curse
According to the legend, McLaughlin fired Muldoon after an argument over whether the team was good enough to finish first. Muldoon supposedly fired back that if McLaughlin let him go, the Black Hawks would never finish in first place, and that he'd put a curse on the team that would last forever.
And then, for a very long time, the Black Hawks never finished first. They won the Stanley Cup in 1934, 1938, and 1961, so the curse apparently allowed championships. But finish at the top of the regular-season standings? Season after season, decade after decade, it didn't happen.
The Confession
Here's the twist. The story didn't show up in print until 1943, when Canadian sportswriter Jim Coleman wrote about it in a column, more than 15 years after Muldoon left. Coleman later admitted that he'd made the whole thing up on a slow news day. There was no record of Muldoon ever saying it.
It didn't matter. A good curse is hard to kill, and Chicago kept not finishing first. The story got retold every time the Black Hawks came up short.
The Curse Breaks
Finally, in the 1966-67 season, the Black Hawks finished first in the NHL standings for the first time in team history: 40 years after Muldoon's lone season behind the bench. Whether you believe the curse was real or not, it's one of the best examples of how hockey stories work. A columnist invents a curse to fill space, and the Hockey Gods spend four decades making it look true.
Chicago fans aren't alone. If you like this kind of thing, read about the more modern Curse of the Presidents' Cup, where finishing first is the problem.