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Should We Erect a Statue of Ken Sanders?

G-Fafif Mar 12 2009 12:28 PM

Hanshin Tigers look to unconditionally release [url=http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i-e_W59IAzdk-EgwZ3RvorUzOaoA]their demons[/url]. ]TOKYO (AFP) — Japanese baseball fans in Osaka hope to have lifted "the curse of Colonel Sanders" when a statue of the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder rose from the sludge of a local river after a quarter century. When the city's Hanshin Tigers won the national championship in 1985, ecstatic fans hurled the fast food icon into a river to honour their team's bearded US slugger and home run king Randy Bass, saying he resembled the Colonel. Baseball lore in the western city recalls how the drunken supporters "liberated" the bespectacled figure from a restaurant and threw him from a bridge into the grey waters of the Dotonbori river, hours after their first ever victory. Since that crazy night the team's fortunes have sunk as fast as the life-sized statue. The Tigers have failed to sign promising rookies and never won another national championship, in a streak of ill fortune that has become known as "the curse of Colonel Sanders" across baseball-obsessed Japan. Local fans now hope all of that will change after construction workers in a surprise find this week recovered the statue -- minus his glasses, but just in time for the start of the baseball season next month. The upper body of the grandfatherly character was found Tuesday, and the legs and right hand unearthed on Wednesday in sediment -- a discovery celebrated in national headlines and television news bulletins. The find "should brighten up Osaka residents and pep up the Tigers," said Toshio Motoda, an Osaka city government spokesman and devout Tigers fan. Ichiro Takatsuki, a spokesman for the American fast food chain known by the initials KFC, said: "We want it to go to someone who will take good care of him -- maybe to be displayed at the (Tigers) Koshien Stadium."

Edgy DC Mar 12 2009 12:35 PM

If you threw garbage on him, Ken Sanders would still have style.

Centerfield Mar 12 2009 12:49 PM

I feel like Boston did something similar to this with Babe Ruth's piano.

Number 6 Mar 12 2009 02:23 PM

I love this story. Before I left for Japan last summer, I did some reading about Hanshin, as I knew I was going to see them in a game against Yokohama and I wanted to know of any backstory. Glad to see that they've exhumed their Kentucky-Fried demons. As an aside, Hanshin fans are nuts. They were crazy in their cheering section. The night before the game, they taped hand-illustrated signs to the ground in a long line, where the queue for game-day tickets was going to start the next day, presumably to clinch good seats. Some of the signs were elaborate and well-done, and I'm stupid for not having taken a photo of them.