The picture from the fateful textual content displaying Gerard DeCosta with the flag he stated he buried below the sphere at Allegiant Stadium.

Tommy White

conceal caption

toggle caption

Tommy White

The picture from the fateful textual content displaying Gerard DeCosta with the flag he stated he buried below the sphere at Allegiant Stadium.

Tommy White

The Kansas City Chiefs are undefeated at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, and Gerard DeCosta, a building employee who lives in Hawaii, says that will have one thing to do with him.

DeCosta lives virtually 4,000 miles from Kansas City, however he is a serious Chiefs fan and the Chiefs nurse an extended and bitter rivalry towards the Las Vegas Raiders. Late in 2017, his firm assigned him to work on a brand new stadium the hated Raiders have been constructing in Las Vegas.

“As soon as I got the opportunity, I knew what I had planned already,” DeCosta recollects.

The plan: Bury a “Chiefs Kingdom” flag below the rival workforce’s residence area. Plant a curse in enemy territory.

A tweet went up picturing DeCosta in his white hardhat, standing on the building web site, holding the cheerful pink and gold banner. The tweet stated the flag was now encased in concrete below the center of the taking part in area.

All hell broke free.

“When this first happened, I get the phone call from the president of the Raiders. He’s like, ‘Did you see what’s going on, you know, social media? Did they really plant this flag at the stadium?'” remembers Tommy White, the enterprise supervisor and secretary treasurer of Laborers Union Local 872 in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas Laborers Union chief Tommy White with the flag he says he took from Gerard DeCosta

Tommy White

conceal caption

toggle caption

Tommy White

White tried to reassure Raiders proprietor Mark Davis that such a factor was not possible. Then he set about figuring out and confronting this Chiefs flag troublemaker who was digging round the place he wasn’t purported to.

“I tracked him down, and I was like, ‘Gerard, did you really dig this flag up?’ And he is like, ‘I’m not gonna say I did, or I didn’t.’ I was like, ‘Listen, it’s important because they’re gonna can you from the site.'”

White demanded the offending flag. DeCosta produced a flag similar to the one within the picture. (Similar flags at the moment promote for about $14 on eBay, so it isn’t as in the event that they’re briefly provide.) But DeCosta is cagy about what he did with The Flag. When pressed, he says he is “pleading the Fifth.”

Nevertheless, the Raiders have by no means crushed the Chiefs at residence since Allegiant Stadium opened in 2020. So, if there’s curse, it is working, and so far as a variety of Boston and Chicago followers are involved, it would not be the primary time.

For Boston, there was the Curse of the Bambino. Babe Ruth dropped it on the Red Sox when the baseball workforce made a cope with the Yankees sending him to New York in 1920. The Red Sox had been one of many winningest groups in baseball however it was 86 years earlier than they might have fun one other nationwide championship.

The Chicago Cubs suffered the Curse of the Billy Goat in 1945. A tavern proprietor was kicked out of Wrigley Field for bringing his smelly goat right into a World Series sport. “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more,” he shouted on his manner out. The Cubs blew a two-game lead and misplaced the collection. When they did lastly win the World Series in 2016, that ended a 108 12 months drought.

White is definite Allegiant Stadium is curse free, although he understands why so many individuals yearn for magic from below the sod.

“Everybody wants to believe in a conspiracy theory, right? I would love to turn around and say that, um, uh, the Raiders should have won some of those games. I mean, they come on, they lost four games in their home stadium, right? Against the Chiefs. But at the end of the day, the Chiefs had a better team,” he says.

White says the Chiefs cannot rely on any particular good luck within the large sport. In truth, he says if there are any little planted curses energetic in Allegiant Stadium on Sunday, they will in all probability be working towards the Chiefs.

After all, Kansas City might be utilizing the Raiders’ locker room and the Raiders’ area as they attempt to beat the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 58.