The JPCA “Man of The Year” Curse

In the Queens Ledger this week, Pol Position makes an interesting comparison between the Madden Curse and JPCA Man of The Year Curse. The Patriots are neither superstitious nor do we believe in curses but when it comes to Robert Holden and his civic association they have a way of making the unbelievable, believable.

Please read the article and weigh in with you comments.

Dateline: Thursday, June 28, 2007

Honor or Curse?

Juniper Park Civic Association’s Man of the Year award...it’s almost as faithful as the dreaded Madden Curse. Pardon? Oh, you don’t spend your Sunday afternoons and evenings and most Thursdays and the occasional Saturday afternoon and night watching the NFL, and the rest of your week diligently crafting your Fantasy Football starting lineup, and therefore are unaware of the Madden Curse?

The Madden Curse regularly brings not only doom and bad luck to its victim, but a horrible season to any player chosen to grace the cover of Madden’s wildly popular football video game, with the most recent victim being Seattle Seahawks’ running back Shaun Alexander, who after a stellar season was chosen as the Madden poster boy, and then suffered the following season through a string of nagging injuries.
We know, you are probably thinking that one person a curse does not make, but the evidence goes all the way back to Garrison Hearst, whose mug appeared on the first Madden cover after the best season of his career in 1998. After he was stocked on shelves across the country during the off-season, he returned in 1999, only to break his ankle in the very first game of the year.

Other victims include: Dorsey Levins, Daunte Culpepper, Michael Vick, Ray Lewis, and Donovan McNabb ,to name a few.

We know that our loyal Pol Position readers are probably wondering where all of this is going. But you might not realize that a similar curse, albeit on a much smaller scale, takes place where the world of New York City politics and civic activism intersect, and that’s the cover of the Juniper Berry, which each year features on its cover the Juniper Park Civic Association’s Man of the Year.
It generally doesn’t take too long before the Man of the Year finds himself on the wrong side of the civic association, which is really a very minor predicament relative to, say, a season-ending injury, but an interesting phenomenon nonetheless.
Take for instance the case of Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, who was once on the good side of the JPCA, only to be vilified repeatedly in print over that no-leash rule. And there is the case of former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall, who was name 2005 Woman of the Year (just to show that the curse is gender-neutral), but it wasn’t enough to keep her around, and she eventually quit.

Then there was the 2005 Man of the Year, Councilman Dennis Gallagher, a decision that the organization called a “no-brainer.” As we suspected, not a whole lot of thought went into that selection, as it turns out that the civic doesn’t really like Gallagher all that much. In fact, the phrase “blinding white hate” might be a good way to describe their feelings about the pol today.

To be fair, it hasn’t always gone sour between the civic and their honorees...Mayor Bloomberg has been named Man of the Year twice, so the curse doesn’t really carry the same weight of Madden’s, although we’ll have to wait and see how this whole congestion pricing thing plays out.

And we are hard-pressed to think of a situation that would derail the relationship of the civic with this year’s winner, Councilman Tony Avella. No we can’t really imagine perennial goo-goo Avella falling afoul of the Junipers, unless Avella began pushing legislation banning Man of the Year awards because they present some sort of conflict of interest.


Courtesy of:www.queensledger.com