This is a statue of KFC's Colonel Sanders that has been at the bottom of the Dotombori River in Osaka, Japan for more than two decades. Fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team toss him in the river after a big win for the team. Apparently, they decided that the Colonel looks like one of the players on the team, Randy Bass. So they grabbed the statue and were throwing it into the air in honor of Bass when it accidentally went over a rail into the river. From Mainichi Daily News:
The Hanshin Tigers have not won the Japan Series since 1985, a fact attributed by some to the "Curse of Colonel Sanders."
The upper body of the statue was discovered at around 4 p.m. about 200 meters away from where it plunged into the water in 1985. When the figure was being pulled up by the crane on a salvage barge, construction workers could be heard to say, "It looks like a corpse." However, when Tigers fans such as the riverside project foreman saw the statue, they exclaimed, "It's the Colonel!"
"Tigers fans hope discovery of long-lost fast-food icon will lift 'Curse of Colonel Sanders'"
