You can thank Buddha Family says statue brings Bears good luck
Whatever you do, don't touch the Buddha in the corner of the room.
Dressed in a Bears jersey, skull cap and scarf, the Buddha in a Beach Park home is responsible for the best Chicago Bears season in two decades. At least, that's the superstition.
(Marina Samovsky/News-Sun)
Only Irma Garza can change the jersey of the two-foot Buddha which peers out from its Bears regalia like a mystical ninja. If anyone else touches it, the luck it has brought will be jinxed.
"I'm the only one to touch it," said Garza, no relation to Bears player Roberto Garza.
She has collected Buddha statues for years, but no powers have been attributed to them until this football season. Having a big family of 10 brothers and sisters in the Waukegan area, more than 30 people are usually at her house watching the game on a flat-screen TV next to the Buddha. During a game early in the season, the Bears were losing, and one of her brothers threw his hat at the Buddha in frustration. Then miraculously the Bears turned the game around and won. Since then, all kinds of Bears paraphernalia has been thrown at the Buddha to turn potentially losing games into winning games.
It's always worked, except once when a particular Bears cap was thrown at the Buddha and caused a temporary downward spiral for the team after their opening undefeated winning streak.
"We have it locked up at the bottom of the closet and we won't give it back," Garza said.
Other family superstitions include her son Fernando, 20, changing Bears jerseys anytime the Bears falter during a game.
Her brothers have their own particular form of preparing for each Sunday game starting with breakfast at 7 a.m. Afterward, they drive around Waukegan in a convoy of five cars decorated in Bears flags and Bears decals soliciting honks and cheers from passersby.
They end at Oscar Cantu's house, decorated in Bears-themed Christmas lights and the words "ALL I WANT IS DA BEARS 2 WIN" written in fluorescent orange letters on the fence. He turns his wide-screen TV to face out the front window so they can tailgate and watch the pre-game outside.
"This is Bear weather," said Cantu. "We hang outside in the cold."
In time for kickoff, they head to the Garza house. Because they watched the Bears win their first game this season at the house, they can't watch the games anywhere else or it's bad luck.
To say that Cantu lives and breathes Bears blue and orange is an understatement. He's been a lifelong fan and estimates he has about 100 Bears paraphernalia between him, his wife and his four kids. Even his Chihuahua is geared up with a Bears shirt that was stripped off of a Bears teddy bear.
"Win or lose, we always root for them," Cantu said. "Anybody else is a bandwagon junky."
The only non-Bears fan in his family is his dad, who allegedly became a Packers fan only because he got a deal on some sweaters during their heyday in the mid-1990s. But he was recently seen wearing a Rex Grossman jersey.
He was afraid they were going to have to miss out on the News Years Eve game against the Packers while he and his family were visiting his mother in Monterrey, Mexico. But they found a satellite station showing the Bears vs. Packers game in Spanish and invited Mexican neighbors to the cultural experience of a true Bears fan.
"We tailgated outside my mom's house and told them this is how Bears fans do it. We got this whole crowd around us," Cantu said.
Unfortunately, the Bears lost. You don't want to make the Buddha unhappy and watch the game without him.