From the bottom dark, resurrection

24th March 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was 1985, the year when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan first met, the year when Nelson Mandela spurned a conditional offer of freedom from the South African government, the year when Microsoft released Windows 1.0.

It was also the year when it really meant something to be a fan of the Hanshin Tigers. For the first time in 21 years, the team emerged champions of the Central League, one of the two professional baseball leagues in Japan.

Celebrations reached a fever pitch in the western city of Osaka and what happened next has become legend in this baseball-mad country.

The story goes that ecstatic fans gathered at the Ebisu bridge in downtown Osaka and began chanting the names of the team members. With each name called out, a supporter who resembled the player jumped into the Dotonbori river beneath.

But the team’s star slugger, American Randy Bass, proved problematic. Then someone spied the Colonel Sanders statue outside a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The mascot was bearded and Western; so was Bass. Good enough. The statue was uprooted and thrown into the river.

As with many legends, variations have crept in over the years of retelling. Another version says that the crowd was only giving the statue a victory toss in the air. They tossed too enthusiastically and it flew into the river. However it happened, the Colonel plunged into the murky depths of the Dotonbori and stayed there.

The Hanshin Tigers went on that year to win the Japan Series, the height of professional baseball in the country.

But that glory has eluded the team ever since. And in the 24 years since the Colonel sunk to the riverbed, the Hanshin Tigers have plummeted to the bottom of their league 10 times.

Some people put this down to the “Curse of Colonel Sanders” and though attempts were made to recover the statue over the years, all failed.

Then the city of Osaka decided to improve the walkways beside the Dotonbori river, which meant sending divers to check for unexploded bombs from World War II.

They didn’t find any but did turn up a barrel-like object. Arrangements were made to remove it and on March 10, at about 4pm, a crane on a salvage barge lifted it clear of the waters.

‘It looks like a corpse,’ said watching construction workers but the foreman, a Hanshin Tigers fan, cried: ‘It’s the Colonel!’

Strictly speaking, it was only half of the Colonel: the top part of the 26kg plastic statue was found about 200m away from the site of the historic toss.

The next morning, the search resumed under the eyes of workers, residents and the media. About 10 minutes after the statue’s right hand was found, a voice exploded from a speaker on the barge: ‘It’s the lower body. There’s no mistake about it.’

The onlookers cheered.

The years – almost a quarter of a century – in the sludge of the Dotonbori had not been kind to the Colonel. Not only was it badly stained, it had been broken into bits. Even though the two halves of the statue have been rejoined, it is still missing its feet and left hand. And its iconic black-rim glasses are gone too.

Not that any of this matters to Hanshin Tigers fans, who hope that now that the figure has been recalled to life, the team’s fortunes will also be resurrected.

The team management seems to be thinking along the same lines. On the day that the bottom half of the Colonel was pulled out of the river, Hanshin Tigers president Nobuo Minami told the manager of Koshien Stadium – the team’s home base in neighbouring Hyogo Prefecture – to ask for the statue.

‘The Colonel Sanders figure is a piece of Tigers history,’ said Mr Minami, adding that he would like it displayed in the museum being added to the team’s stadium.

Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan, which had thought about moving the statue to its franchise in the stadium, responded positively. ‘It’s an undeserved honour,’ it said. ‘If the Tigers make a formal request, we will certainly consider it.’

Still, the real question to thousands of baseball fans is not the statue’s future but that of the Hanshin Tigers. The Colonel may have been rescued from its river prison but will the team be able to break out of its Bastille of failure?

Defeat constrains movement and with each loss, the muddled mind is forced into a smaller and smaller cell until walls are all it knows. Winning calls for breadth of vision, a view of the future so wide and vivid it becomes the present.

But that present may take time to come and when you’re pitched to the bottom, it may be hard to see past the dark. It’s even harder if, like the Colonel, you’ve lost your glasses.

Yet when the statue was pulled out of the mud, though its paintwork had disappeared into a mottled coat of grey, its smile had not dimmed. It wasn’t the face of someone who curses misfortune or those responsible for it. Whether or not the Hanshin Tigers retake the No.1 spot, we already have a winner.

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(Go say hello to the Colonel.)