Finally! Andy Murray’s Wimbledon victory on Sunday against Serbia’s Novak Djokovic marks the end of a 77-year drought for Britain. Maybe 77 is Murray’s lucky number, since also he also returned 77 percent of serves. And he’s learned from last year’s defeat to Roger Federer at Centre Court—which devastated the whole nation—that he called the hardest of his career. In this year’s final, Murray defeated top seed Djokovic (whom he had also defeated at the U.S. Open in New York last year). As for Sunday’s victory, Murray said, “I just don’t know that I will ever top” it—and said “whatever I do know, I won’t have that same pressure, that same expectation.” It’s a feeling shared by all of Britain. And even though the country celebrated Murray’s victory, be careful not to call him English—a mistake The New York Times learned the hard way.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Thought Congress couldn’t get anything done? Washington’s football team puts them to shame, having a 25-season drought from 1946 to 1970, during which the team changed head coaches eleven times. To top it off, they went from 1956 until 1968 without a winning season. There was light at the end of the tunnel though: when they brought in former Los Angeles Rams coach George Allen, they recovered in the decades that followed, making the playoffs 13 times, playing in five Super Bowls, and winning three of those five between 1971 and 1992, though the ’90s were another period of decline for the team.
Matt Slocum/AP
New Orleans certainly knew the blues when it came to football. The New Orleans Saints suffered a 20-season-long postseason drought, lasting from the team’s inception until 1987, and never won in the playoffs until 2000—making it 33 years before a victory. The late New Orleans sportscaster Buddy Diliberto once said, “When you go to heaven after you die, tell St. Peter you’re a Saints fan. He’ll say, ‘Come on in, I don’t care what else you’ve done. You’ve suffered enough.’” But the Saints, once so offensively terrible that their performance inspired fans to wear paper bags on their heads, won the Super Bowl during their first appearance in 2009, inspiring thousands of men to march through the streets of New Orleans in dresses, as Diliberto had promised he would if the Saints ever won the Super Bowl.
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The Los Angeles Clippers might be one of the NBA’s ultimate underdogs, numbering among only seven franchises to never have appeared in the NBA finals and boasting the longest playoff-appearance drought in the history of the NBA (the team made no playoff appearances for 15 seasons from 1977 to 1991). Though the Clippers share Los Angeles’s Staples Center with the Lakers, it’s just kind of a sad, really, since it’s been said that calling the dynamic between the two teams a rivalry is giving the Clippers way too much credit—and that the Celtics are the Lakers’ real rival. But the tide may finally be turning for the Clippers, who claimed their first-ever Pacific Division title in the 2012-13 season. With former Celtics coach Doc Rivers at the helm of the Clippers and Dwight Howard set to leave the Lakers for the Houston Rockets, the rivalry could be about to heat up.
Reed Saxon/AP
The Los Angeles Clippers have a lonely friend in the West without a championship: the Phoenix Suns, who have never won a championship after 45 years in the NBA. This makes it the oldest NBA franchise that has never won a championship, and the team's last appearance in the finals was in 1993. But what makes it all the more tragic for fans it that the franchise has one of the best all-time winning percentages in the NBA, and has won the most games of any franchise without an NBA championship title.
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Former Cubs manager Herman Franks described the teams’ fans as “the greatest in baseball. They’ve got to be.” Why? Because it’s been a long, long time since they’ve seen the beauty of a World Series ring: 105 years, to be exact. The last time the Cubs won a World Series was in 1908—before the NBA, NFL, and NHL even existed. It seems that behind every great baseball drought, there is a curse, and the Cubs are no exception. Urban legend holds that the Cubs suffer from “the Curse of the Billy Goat,” cast in 1945 when P.K. Wrigley forced pub owner Billy Sianis to leave Wrigley Field because of the smell of his pet goat and an offended Sianis said “The Cubs ain’t gonna win no more!” Since then, Cubs fans have tried in vain to break the curse with attempts involving severed goat heads, touring goats named Wrigley, and appearances by Sianis’s nephew, Sam, goat in tow. It’s all been in vain—and the Cubs this year seem to be off to a rocky start, with at 38-48 record a week before the All Star break. But just ask fans of the Mudville Nine: hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Morry Gash/AP
The Cubs’s drought has gone on longer, but unless you were living on another planet, you know about the Boston Red Sox’s famous 86-year stretch without a World Series victory. In 2004, the Boston Red Sox ended an 86-year drought by winning their first World Series since 1918. The victory ended the “Curse of the Bambino,” believed to have begun when the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, beginning a period of decline for the Red Sox while the rival Yankees enjoyed decades (and decades) of victories. And the following World Series was just as sweet in Chicago: the White Sox, after an 88-year drought, won the ring.
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San Diego sometimes calls itself “America’s finest city,” but it’s probably one of the worst cities in America to be a sports fan. No San Diego team has won a major championship since the Chargers won the AFL in 1964. The Chargers have never won a Super Bowl, only playing in one, in 1994, and the Padres have never won a World Series. (although at least they have the chicken, right?) The Clippers and Rockets both had losing records over their time in San Diego, the Rockets setting what was then a record for losses in their inaugural 1967 season, a dismal performance that only began looking up slightly with the team’s move to Houston. And now the Rockets now have Dwight Howard, so those San Diego days must seem so far away.
Mark J. Terrill/AP
Is the longest national championship drought in all of college football that of UC Berkeley’s California Golden Bears, who haven’t claimed a national championship since 1937? No, because that was a really long time ago. But don’t abandon the poor Golden Bears yet: their record improved under the coaching of Jeff Tedford, with eight consecutive winnings seasons, offering some hope for a team whose state is plagued by budget cuts and whose namesake animal has long been extinct. After being named the Western Athletic Conference’s Coach of the Year in 2011 for his time at Louisiana Tech, Sonny Dykes took over as coach of the Golden Bears in December 2012.
Eric Risberg
The world of horse racing hasn’t seen a U.S. Triple Crown winner since Affirmed, the eleventh triple-crown winner, who claimed his victories in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes in 1978. Affirmed was born to be a fighter; the race horse was a descendant of the 1937 Triple Crown winner, War Admiral. It seemed like a golden opportunity in 2008, when Big Brown won the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby—but the horse didn’t ultimately deliver, failing to win at Belmont.
David Pickoff/AP
It turns out tennis isn’t Britain’s only dry spell. In 2012 Olympics in London, Britain won its first equestrian team jumping gold in 60 years after the initial rounds had the team tied with that of the Netherlands. Great Britain was the most successful equestrian competitor in the 2012 Olympics overall, with three golds, one silver, and one bronze. Peter Charles, a member of the gold-winning British jumping team, later sold the horse he rode to victory to Bruce Springsteen.
Alex Livesey
It took Queensland 68 years to claim a victory in the Sheffield Shield, Australia’s first-class cricket competition—which might not seem that long until you consider that only six teams played in the competition. The team finally achieved victory in the 1994-95 season after finishing in last place the year before and adopting the mascot and nickname of the Bulls. The Sheffield Shield was introduced as Australia’s national first-class cricket tournament in 1892, but Queensland wasn’t admitted until 1926, and it was many decades later that the team would first win what’s been described as “its version of the Holy Grail.”
Robert Prezioso
Why would anyone ever want to be in Hufflepuff? The Sorting Hat described the Hogwarts house thusly: “You might belong in Hufflepuff / Where they are just and loyal / Those patient Hufflepuffs are true / And unafraid of toil.” Despite the hidden message that Hufflepuffs work their butts off because they don’t have brains or skill, the House has never had a recorded Quidditch Cup. So hard work pays off in the end and nice guys always win, huh Harry Potter? Ravenclaw, the smarty-pants house, even won in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry was unconscious in the hospital. And Ravenclaw had Cho Chang, the resident Hogwarts hottie. Poor Hufflepuff, the least they could have is a Quidditch Cup victory or two.
