Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet

In the face of strong evidence, further notes written by Adams before she died, and unflattering testimony from two ex-girlfriends, Carruth put up a flimsy defence. In a version of events contradicted by just about every other witness, he maintained that an angry Watkins shot Adams on his own because Adams had made an obscene gesture at him from her car after he had earlier rowed with Carruth because the gridiron star had backed out of a drug deal. It cut little ice. As a nation watched transfixed, it was clear to everyone that it was an embarrassingly porous yarn. Although Carruth’s lawyers managed to get him off the death penalty that would have accompanied the first-degree murder conviction sought by prosecutors, there was little doubt about his guilt, and his lack of remorse or emotion did little to endear him to judge or jury.

Convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, of shooting into an occupied vehicle and of using a gun with intent to kill an unborn child, Carruth will be behind bars until approximately 2039. That’s if he lives that long: the numbskull has already had two spells in solitary confinement in Raleigh’s maximum security jail for his own safety after fighting with other inmates.

His son Chancellor, however, was successfully delivered by emergency Caesarian section, but still bears the legacy of his traumatic entry to the world. Despite being a very rich child, he suffers from cerebral palsy and was unable to walk, hold a bottle or spoon until he was three years of age.

MICKEY THOMAS (#ulink_f3f62426-5a1a-590e-adcc-9bfc2a6dbecf)

Cheeky chappie from the Valleys

Mickey Thomas was always a bit of a jack the lad, even to the point that for several seasons Match of the Day’s opening sequence included the bit of footage that had him smiling and winking to the camera after conning his way to a highly dubious free-kick. A gifted winger who could even run rings around Tommy Docherty, he gave a hint of the cheeky cockiness which was later to land him in deep water when Chelsea chairman Ken Bates came calling.

In 1978 Bates was desperate to sign the mercurial Welshman who was then playing for Wrexham and travelled all the way up to Wales, only to find that Thomas—who had an urgent appointment at the local bookies—was a no-show. Undeterred, Bates set up another meeting. This time Thomas turned up on the dot of 10am. Bates, determined to gain a measure of revenge for the Welshman’s earlier extraction of urine, didn’t. Thomas had the last laugh, though: when Chelsea eventually signed him six years later, it was on condition that he moved closer to London. Thomas did: he decamped ten miles down the road, moving from Colwyn Bay to Rhyl. It’s staggering that he lasted seven years in Chelsea’s colours.

By the early 1990s, Thomas was still able to raise his game for the odd last hurrah, such as when his wonderful free-kick famously helped Fourth Division Wrexham to knock champions Arsenal out of the FA Cup, but it was for his off-field antics that he was soon to become most famous. The ‘Welsh George Best’ lived up to that moniker in 1992 when Rhyl’s classiest geezer found himself down a country lane shagging his brother-in-law’s wife in the back of a car. Needless to say, the brother-in-law took a pretty dim view of proceedings and, catching the pair in flagrante delicto, plunged a screwdriver into Thomas’s backside. He then dragged the former footballing genius into the road, where he administered a going-over even more thorough than the one his wife had just received. Thomas was in hospital for a week.

It only took the Welshman a year to comfortably eclipse the notoriety gained in that incident, however. In 1993 he was caught passing dud £10 and £20 notes to the trainees at Wrexham and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Judge Gareth Edwards told him that he had ‘an image of himself as a flash and daring adventurer’ before sending him off to share a cell in Liverpool’s Walton Jail with a big bloke in dungarees who admitted on Day One that he was incarcerated for beheading his victims.

But the cheeky Welshman still got the last laugh, earning a living as an after-dinner speaker whose favourite gag remains ‘They say that Roy Keane’son fifty grand a week. Well, so I was I until they found my presses.’

MARV ALBERT (#ulink_488309b6-93cc-51a8-afd1-7c051f3846ec)

Baddest granddaddy of ‘em all

Squeaky-clean NBC sports pundit Marv Albert’s popularity took a dive in 1997 when America’s favourite grandfather was charged with sexual assault and battery. He was alleged to have repeatedly bitten former girlfriend Vanessa Perhach on her bum and back (he broke the skin in twelve places) before forcing her to perform oral sex on him and forcibly buggering her. Marv initially denied the charges, but when he offered a plea-bargain and copped a guilty verdict on the charge of misdemeanour assault charges, his ratings went below zero.

Worse was to follow in 1998 when, during investigations into the murder of 58-year-old dominatrix Nadia Frey, police found Albert’s name and number among her possessions, though there is no suggestion that he was connected to her murder. Frey specialised in ‘restraining, spanking and daipering men’, and bad penny Perhach quickly popped up to allege that she and Marv had had three-way sex with New York’s most popular dominatrix, who also went under the name of Mistress Hilda.

Marv denied Perhach’s colourful assertions and although his career never quite hit the same level as it had before he was fired by NBC in 1997 after he pleaded guilty for assault on Perhach, he was allowed back at the station by 1999.

Marv is by no means the only commentator to run foul of his employers though. There have been plenty of other sports television presenters to have come a cropper Stateside, with Dallas Cowboys great, turned television pundit, Michael Irvin being one famous example of a man who gave his squeaky clean American network a dilemma when he was charged with cocaine and marijuana possession.

Things aren’t much different across the Pond. David Icke may have dominated the loony English TV presenters’ competition, but iconic English football commentators Frank Bough and Gerald Sinstadt did their best to hold their ends up, as it were. In 1989, the smooth-talking, jumper-wearing Bough was exposed by a national newspaper as a serial swinger who spiced up life with a few lines of coke while watching sex parties with his hookers. The 71-year-old was sacked by the BBC, but started to rebuild his television career in the independent sector. That all ended in 1992 when Bough was caught visiting a Miss Whiplash sex den. That was over and out, thanks Frank.

Even more disturbing—and this was akin to finding out that Dickie Davies worships Satan and cuts the heads off black cats in his garden shed—was the day when a 64-year-old Sinstadt was arrested at a hard-core porn cinema and charged with gross indecency. Which was, well, gross. Police later dropped the charge, but the damage was done.

EAMON DUNPHY (#ulink_50c3a746-5dcb-5658-9234-ad9ee50f06cc)

Eamon, this is yer life

Although Marv Albert’s arse-biting and three-in-a-bed with a dominatrix probably wins him the gold medal for nutty behaviour by a commentator, epic Irish troublemaker Eamon Dunphy has devoted himself to giving marvellous Marvin a run for his money.

A pugnacious journeyman footballer in his day, the little Dubliner has established himself as the most outspoken pundit—gobshite in the local vernacular—on the Emerald Isle. From Italia ’90 onwards, when Jack Charlton’s Ireland football team was becoming the side no other wanted to meet, even famously beating Italy in the USA World Cup in 1994, Dunphy would incense fans by lambasting the national side for its lack of verve at every available opportunity. So vitriolic were his comments on the subject that Charlton would immediately leave a press conference if he arrived. Ireland’s football fans showed their anger in an equally unambiguous manner, mobbing his car in a Dublin street and then overturning it.

Still, Dunphy brought a lot on himself. During the 2002 World Cup, with Irish football in the midst of a row caused by his confidant Roy Keane’s acrimonious bust-up with manager Mick McCarthy, Dunphy went onto Irish television after another dire result, saying: ‘I want Irish soccer to fulfil its destiny. I want us to fail. I hoped that Cameroon would beat us, that Germany would beat us, and that we would go out of this tournament.’

He managed to survive the outcry over that little outburst, but he soon put his employers in an even more difficult situation. Neither the public nor the controllers of RTE, the Irish equivalent of the BBC, could believe it when Dunphy then turned up to commentate on the Japan-Russia game having had no sleep and with drink clearly taken. After stumbling through a couple of inanities at the start of the match and making no contribution while slumped in his chair, Dunphy slurred his way through the half-time analysis, and did not appear for the second half. Overwhelmed by 1,300 complaints, RTE sacked him on the spot.

Not that Dunphy reserves his ire for sportsmen or only falls out with fellas who kick a ball for a living. He even managed to become estranged from U2, whose manager, Paul McGuinness, remains one of his faithful drinking partners on his regular excursions to Dublin’s Horseshoe Bar and at the city’s trendiest nightclub, Lilly’s Bordello. Granted unfettered access to the supergroup for the book Unforgettable Fire: The Definitive Biography of U2,he failed to produce the expected hagiography, instead turning out a warts ’n’ all effort that had so many warts that only The Edge will now acknowledge him. Dunphy’s ghost-written autobiography of Keane was similarly incendiary: so lurid in fact, that Keane actually denied having made some of the most contentious revelations.

His high-profile radio talkback show and his column in a national Sunday newspaper regularly got him into even more hot water. Successfully sued on a ruinously regular basis, his high point came when Proinsias de Rossa, the then leader of the opposition, won a record £300,000 in damages from him.

Amusing one minute, acerbic the next (and often both simultaneously), Dunphy remains one of the highest-profile personalities in Ireland. Part of that is because he’s a maverick, part is because he can laugh at himself; when he was arrested for drink driving before getting off on a technicality, he quipped that ‘the problem with Dublin is that you can’t get good coke in this town’.

H’ANGUS (#ulink_a1651001-b388-5b0d-8e2e-0fd4a7802487)

A cheeky monkey

For most of the week he is a quiet, studious 28-year-old called Stuart Drummond. On Saturday afternoons, however, the 6ft 4in football fanatic from the North East of England becomes a raging ball of furry testosterone which goes by the name of H’Angus and which has brought controversy to the hitherto noble art of being a football mascot.

Drummond’s weekend persona as a Hartlepool Townsupporting ape was inspired by the ‘monkey-hangers’ nickname given to the folk of his hometown, Hartlepool, by the people of neighbouring towns. The sneering reference to the stupidity of Hartlepool’s inhabitants dates from the Napoleonic Wars, during which a French ship sank off the town. The only survivor from the shipwreck was a monkey which, not altogether surprisingly, couldn’t answer the questions fired at it by the suspicious townsfolk—so they promptly hanged it as a French spy.

Since then, H’Angus has been doing his level best to prove stupidity and mayhem are still alive and well in Hartlepool. And he chooses Saturday afternoons to make his point.

The unruly mascot of Hartlepool United is regularly in trouble, mainly for assaulting other mascots—he was famously sent off for grabbing a Gladiator mascot’s privates. Other antics include being sent off for chasing a group of pom-pom girls during a game against Barnet, being sent to the stand for dropping his shorts at York, being sent to the stand for taking a corner at Darlington, being sent to the stand for smashing a guitar on the goalpost in imitation of The Who’s Pete Townshend, and being sent to the stand for spraying water over the opposition dugout.

However, H’Angus’s most shameful episode came when, just six months after facing the sack after being arrested for simulating sex with a pretty (and pretty fed up) female steward in front of 5,000 baying fans at Scunthorpe’s Glanford Park, the monkey arrived at Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road drunk and carrying a blow-up doll. He then started a fight with two ten-year-old boys before being arrested (again) and ejected from the ground. The club managed to see the funny side though. After releasing him with a reprimand, a club spokesman said: ‘he is a cheeky monkey, after all’.

Rather than find his antics embarrassing, the good folk of Hartlepool are so proud of H’Angus that, when he entered the contest to be elected as mayor of Hartlepool, he won by a landslide. Not only that, but after administering an annual budget of £150m for four years, he was then re-elected by a similarly huge margin. Of course, he did the job as Stuart Drummond. The only downside for club supporters is that his official role means he no longer has the time to don the monkey outfit on Saturdays. As avid Hartlepool fan Robin Meredith, 40, said: ‘He’sa lunatic. But when the football’s bad—which is often—H’Angus entertains us. He’ll be sorely missed but he’s got a more important role now.’

Drummond has promised to return to Hartlepool Town FC when his political career draws to a close, but he has already started a trend for bad behaviour on the sidelines. Swansea’s mascot Cyril the Swan was hauled in front of the FA for attacking Norwich City manager Gary Megson. The 9ft bird was also in trouble two weeks later during Millwall’s visit to Vetch Field, when he dropkicked rival mascot Zampa The Lion’s head into the crowd; he was once fined £1,000 by magistrates for chucking a pork pie at West Ham fans. Cyril’s party piece is abseiling down the floodlighting pylons before games.

Mascot madness has taken harmless forms, such as Robbie the Bobby, the mascot at Bury, who was arrested for mooning at rival fans, and Halifax Town’s Freddie the Fox, who was ejected from the Rochdale ground after he cocked a leg on the opposition’s goalpost and sparked a riot. But it has also resulted in its fair share of punch-ups: Wolfie, the Wolverhampton Wanderers’ lucky charmer, emerged unscathed from a fight with West Bromwich Albion’s Baggie the Bird, and was doing quite well against Bristol City’s junior mascots the Three Little Pigs, but got the mother and father of kickings when the Bristol City Cat weighed in.

However, perhaps the saddest mascot nuttiness occurred in 2002 when Freddie the Fox, the winner of the annual Mascot Grand National at Huntingdon—a once-yearly spot of fun designed chiefly to raise money for charity—was unmasked as Olympic 400-metre semifinalist Matthew Douglas and promptly disqualified.

MARGE SCHOTT (#ulink_a9d34c30-3d54-5a53-8306-efa7ebf23f52)

Major League racist

Baseball fans in Cincinnati loved Reds’ owner Marge Schott, even if they were genuinely divided on the key question: was she a racist bitch or simply a misguided, eccentric little old lady? The evidence, it has to be said, points to the former.

A noted philanthropist and animal lover who took control of the Cincinnati Reds in December 1984, Marge was prone to engaging her mouth before she’d got her brain in gear. Her most famous faux pas came during an interview with the New York Times in 1992, in which Marge—a German-American (nee Unnewehr) with a sizeable collection of Nazi memorabilia—said that: ‘Hitler did some pretty good things before he went nuts’. That brought her a $250,000 fine from Major League commissioner Bud Selig, plus a year’s ban from games, a punishment which was levied again in 1996 when she stood up for Adolf once again.

Just to show she was inclusively offensive, the profane former second-hand car dealer also had her say on Asians. First she complained that ‘I don’t like it when high school-aged Asian Americans come here and stay so long and then outdo our kids. That’s not right.’ Then she claimed that she didn’t know why the use of the word ‘Japs’ was regarded as offensive. On another occasion she spoke in a mock Japanese accent while recalling a meeting with the Japanese prime minister. In 1994, she outraged the city’s gay community when she banned her players from wearing earrings because ‘only fruits wear earrings’.

Her attitude to her black players was even more worrying. She referred to ‘Martin Luther King Day’ as ‘Nigger Day’ and then claimed her use of the word ‘nigger’ was ‘a joke’. In 1991 team controller Tim Sabo sued Schott, saying she fired him because he opposed her policy of not hiring blacks, alleging that Schott called black outfielders Eric Davis and Dave Parker ‘my million-dollar niggers’. Marge issued a statement denying that she was a racist, but later that month another executive, Sharon Jones, quoted Marge as saying she would ‘never hire another nigger. I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger.’

If Marge wasn’t overly fond of black people, Asians, or gays, she did, however, love animals. She enjoyed a successful career breeding thoroughbreds and once turned up at a fund-raiser party at Cincinnati’s exclusive Queen City Club with a live dancing bear as her escort.

She also lavished her affections on Schottzie, her 15-stone St Bernard. So pampered was Schottzie that he accompanied Marge to the announcement that she’d bought her hometown team in 1984. Despite being an unfeasibly smelly heap of dogflesh, the mutt was in every team photo during Marge’s seventeen-year reign, always wearing a Reds cap. He even had his own seat next to Marge for home games, and she’d parade him around the infield and rub his fur against her players—a practice that the MLB, with whom she was in a state of continual warfare, eventually ordered her to stop after numerous complaints from Reds players.

Marge was unrepentant, though. ‘Pets are always there for you,’ said Marge in 1991 when she announced Schottzie’s passing. ‘They never ask for anything. They never ask for a raise. They’re very special.’

For all the money she gave to charity, there’s little doubt that Marge could be a tad selfish and a little tight. She refused to give left fielder Eric Davis a plane ticket home after he was hospitalised with a damaged kidney suffered after attempting a diving catch during the 1990 World Series. And in 1996, when veteran umpire John McSherry had a heart-attack in the outfield during the opening game of the season, forcing the game to be called off, Marge whined on live television: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ When that led to a wave of complaints she sent the dead man’s family a bouquet of flowers—which turned out to have been a recycled bunch sent to her earlier that day by a television company.

TY COBB (#ulink_2ce2d6db-65d1-5b93-8fa7-8e2f7139c0af)

‘Ty Cobb is a prick’