Choke
In sports, an individual athlete, or, more commonly, an athletic team collectively, is often said to have choked when failing to win a tournament or league championship and if certain other criteria are also met, especially if the player or team had been favored to win, or had squandered a large lead in the late stages of an event. The usage of the word "choke" in this sense is generally treated as slang.
The opposite of choking is being "Clutch," or rising to the occasion under pressure rather than collapsing under it.
Use of the term "choke" in this context is most frequently encountered in the United States, and appears to be of relatively recent origin, not becoming reasonably widespread until well into the 1960s. Some of the earliest examples of such use occurred in football, the label being pinned on such NFL teams as the Dallas Cowboys and Oakland Raiders, who perennially reached the playoffs throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, with the Cowboys not winning the Super Bowl until the one held immediately following the 1971 season and the Raiders not doing likewise until 1976. In these two examples, the two quarterbacks of the respective teams, Don Meredith and Daryle Lamonica, were singled out in particular as having "choked" — and both had retired by the time their teams finally did win the Super Bowl.
Since then, NFL teams popularly labeled chokers (or often, "choke artists") have included the Minnesota Vikings more or less throughout the 1970s, the San Diego Chargers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and, most recently, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Indianapolis Colts in the early 2000s; and in all four instances the respective quarterbacks for these teams — Fran Tarkenton, Dan Fouts, Donovan McNabb and Peyton Manning — have also been stereotyped personally along with the entire teams themselves, McNabb adding to his reputation for choking with three interceptions in the Eagles' 24-21 loss to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX after having been intercepted only eight times during the entire 2004 regular season. Manning's reputation for choking was added to due to the Colts loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Colts' first game of the playoffs in 2006, along with his record against the New England Patriots (1-7, 0-2 in postseason) in the playoffs and his 0-3 record against Florida in college.
Fewer teams qualify for postseason play in Major League Baseball than in the NFL, so the "choke" label in baseball is more frequently appended to a team that blows a substantial lead late in a pennant race. Probably the two most prominent examples of this have been the Chicago Cubs (most notably in 1969 and 1973) and the Boston Red Sox (most notably in 1978, when they relinquished a 14-game lead in their division, ultimately losing a one-game playoff for the division title to the New York Yankees after they and the Yankees had ended the regular season tied for first place). The plight of both the Cubs and Red Sox has often been attributed to a "curse" — the Curse of the Billy Goat in the former team's case and the Curse of the Bambino in the latter, although the Curse of the Bambino is widely regarded as having been broken in 2004 when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918; in what is regarded as a breathtaking role reversal, in the 2004 American League Championship Series against the Red Sox, the Yankees became the first team in professional baseball history, and only the third team in North American professional team sports history, to lose a best-of-seven series after having taken a 3-0 series lead. This "feat" has been recognized as one of the worst chokes in sports history.
Teams in other sports, such as basketball and hockey, have also had to endure allegations of choking at various times, and athletes in individual sports have not been immune either, particularly in tennis (Virginia Wade, dubbed "The Queen of the Centre Court Choke" by the British tabloid press due to her long string of late-round defeats at Wimbledon — a tournament she did eventually win), and golf (Phil Mickelson, until he finally won a "major" golf tournament in 2004 — specifically, The Masters — after a host of second- and third-place finishes in such events). Golfers Greg Norman and Jean van de Velde also have been labeled "choke artists." In 1996, Norman took a six-shot lead into the final round of The Masters, but ballooned to a 78, losing to Nick Faldo by five. Three years later, van de Velde had a three-shot lead going into the final hole of The Open Championship, needing only a double-bogey 6 to win. He proceeded to shoot a 7 and eventually lost in a playoff. Even after winning three Majors, Mickelson was not immune to choking; his collapse at the 2006 U.S. Open must be considered one of the great chokes in sports history.
Generally, if postseason play is involved, the further a team progresses without actually winning the championship, the more likely that the team will be accused of choking (a team that gets eliminated in the early rounds will usually escape the stigma). Also, whether or not the team was favored by the oddsmakers and/or had home-field advantage can be a key issue, and if a team fades in the late stages of a postseason contest or playoff series, that fact is quite often treated as evidence that the club choked.
Recidivism — that is to say, the same player or team coming close to winning the championship repeatedly without ever actually succeeding in doing so — is another aggravating factor, and indeed this condition is present in virtually all of the most proverbial examples of those castigated as chokers, notably British tennis player Tim Henman, a perennial semi-finalist at Wimbledon. However, once the competitor does win a title, the "choke" tag is typically not reapplied even if the prior pattern of falling short resurfaces: For example, baseball's Atlanta Braves are rarely characterized as chokers despite a lengthy overall record of futility in the postseason, for which they have qualified for 13 consecutive years starting in 1991, because they did manage to win the World Series once, in 1995.
