Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet

Ty Cobb, otherwise known as the Georgia Peach, is probably the nastiest bastard on this whole list, and certainly one of the most talented. One of the most sublime baseball batters of all time, the Detroit Tiger was also such a racist, misogynist, and violent drunk that his hand-picked biographer, Al Stump, later called Cobb ‘the most violent, successful, thoroughly maladjusted personality ever to pass across American sports’. Ernest Hemingway was a bit more succinct: he described Cobb as ‘a total shit’. Babe Ruth was most succinct of all: ‘Ty Cobb is a prick’.

A baseball Hall-of-Famer, Cobb was so utterly unpleasant that despite over twenty years at the top before hanging up his bat in 1928, not one former teammate turned up at his funeral in 1961. Not that anybody was surprised: he fought with team-mates and opposition alike, spiked fellow players, hit them, screamed at them and once even tried to fight fellow Hall-of-Famer Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees’ peerless (and peerlessly behaved) batsman. So unpleasant was Cobb that when the team played away and travelled by train he insisted upon having his own compartment and slept with a gun under a pillow because he was obsessed with the idea that one of his team-mates would murder him given half a chance. He was probably right to worry.

But if Cobb hated his team-mates, it was as nothing compared to the bile he reserved for the fans. A notorious and open racist, at various stages he stabbed a black groundskeeper, grabbed his wife by the throat, and pushed a black chambermaid down the stairs. In one particularly appalling incident in 1912 at New York City’s Hilltop Park, Cobb jumped into the stands and relentlessly battered a fan he said had verbally abused him. Nobody else had heard the fan, who happened to be black and handicapped—he had no fingers—say anything untoward.

Nobody was safe from Cobb’s psychopathic temper. In 1921, by which time he had become the Tigers’ playermanager, he confronted umpire Billy Evans under the stands after a game. After lambasting the poor official, and then telling him that ‘I only fight one way, to kill’, Cobb went berserk and repeatedly slammed the umpire’s head against a slab of concrete until Evans lost consciousness. As he had already beaten-up several newsmen, the incident was kept under wraps.

A millionaire many times over, Cobb lived in a huge mansion but refused to have it connected to the national grid because he thought the electric companies charged too much for their services.

Given his fondness for wanton violence, his love for filthy lucre, and the fact that he always carried a handgun, it must have been a brave man who’d try to mug him, yet in 1912 someone was stupid enough to attempt to steal Cobb’s wallet. The man was, naturally enough, pistol whipped by his intended victim, who then stabbed him to death. Cobb got off on the basis of self-defence, but was soon in trouble again. Later that same year, he was the chief suspect in a murder which took place in broad daylight outside of Boston’s Fenway Park. The unfortunate man had been beaten to death with a baseball bat, but despite several witnesses, not one was willing to identify Cobb, who was never charged.

Few sportsmen have been more despicable human beings than Cobb, as Ron Shelton, a former minor league player who wrote and directed the film Cobb, which examined the darker sides of the Georgia Peach’s life, was the first to admit. ‘All the bottled rage he seems to have on the field, the fights, the incidents with fans, the social dysfunction—that’s all Cobb,’ said Shelton.

The man himself was utterly unrepentant though. ‘They were all against me, tried every trick to cut me down,’ said Cobb shortly before he died. ‘But I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.’

UDAY HUSSEIN (#ulink_55c29bce-71bf-54d5-8fe8-ce2449d39ce8)

Football manager from hell

At the height of the fight against apartheid, Nelson Mandela memorably declared that: ‘Sport can never be normal in an abnormal society’. Thousands of miles away in Iraq, a psychopath named Uday Hussein, son of Saddam, was energetically proving him right—jailing, torturing, and killing underperforming athletes. According to Issam Thamer al-Diwan, who played volleyball for Iraq between 1974 and 1987 before defecting, ‘dozens of athletes and leaders in the Iraqi sports movement’ had been executed because ‘Uday cannot stand to think that someone in Iraq could be smarter or more famous than him’.

Rumours of football players having the soles of their feet whipped with piano wire had done the rounds, with FIFA, world football’s governing body, sending two investigators to Baghdad in 1997 to question members of the Iraqi national team who had allegedly had their feet caned by Uday’s henchmen after losing a World Cup qualifying match to Kazakhstan. Needless to say, none of the players were keen to talk about the episode.

If was only after the fall of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime that the excesses of Uday could be fully chronicled. The first piece of evidence came when the building housing the Iraqi Football Association was overrun. Inside, American troops found a sarcophagus-shaped ‘iron maiden’. Over seven-feet high, three-feet wide and deep enough to house a man, the device had long spikes fixed to the inside of the door so the victim was impaled as it closed. The spikes were blunt from use.

Virtually all of the violence in Iraqi sport was instigated by Uday, and he’d often mete out punishments himself. A man who didn’t let his lack of prowess stand in his way as a player—he was selected for Iraq on several occasions—he was also the manager from hell. Midfielder Saad Keis Naoman was unlucky to be playing in a side managed by Uday when he was red-carded for questioning the referee’s parentage. Unimpressed, Uday decided to teach Naoman a lesson and sentenced him to a month in the infamous al-Radwaniya jail, where he was beaten daily on his back with a wooden cane until he lost consciousness. He was then dragged behind a jeep before being submerged in a sewage tank to infect his wounds.

That, with minor variations, was the standard penalty for incurring Uday’s displeasure. ‘Every single day I was beaten on my feet, and was not allowed to eat or drink,’ said Sharar Haydar, a defender, who went through the first of four spells of imprisonment and torture when Iraq was beaten 2-0 by Jordan in 1993. Soon after he told Uday that he didn’t want to play for Iraq against the USA the next year, he was whipped and dragged through filthy water until the cuts became infected. His scariest moment was in the lead-up to the 1994 World Cup in America when, after a series of bravura performances in the qualifiers, Iraq only had to beat lowly Qatar to qualify for the finals. Sitting in the dressing room, a call came through from Saddam’s youngest son: ‘Uday rang to give us a message: “If you don’t win I will kill you”.’ Unsurprisingly, they lost. Uday had a set system of punishments for mistakes that occur routinely—a defensive error brought three days inside, a missed penalty three weeks—and after three more spells in jail, Haydar fled the country in 1998.

‘Uday decided everything, which clubs you played for, everything,’ said Haydar. ‘You kept your mouth shut or you were killed, but Iraqi fans loved abusing [a club called] al-Rasheed. They couldn’t tell Uday what they thought of him so they yelled at his team. Saddam didn’t like that, so he shut down the club.’

Uday died during a firefight with American marines in 2004.

TONYA HARDING (#ulink_04368593-c12b-5762-b8a9-9d085eaebaa8)

Trailer trash on ice

Leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, ice-skating was so big that the US federation had just signed a ten-year $100m television deal to bring it into the top rank of non-team sports. A major reason for its popularity was the forthcoming confrontation between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. For most viewers Stateside the two American ice dancers were virtually assured of the gold and silver medals, it was just a question of which finished first and which came second.

Kerrigan versus Harding was the sort of contest on which America would love to gorge at every Olympics. It was a clash of opposites: Harding, the brash, white trailer trash from Portland, Oregon, versus Kerrigan, the refined Ivy League sorority queen from the American equivalent of the Home Counties. Skating was well-established as one of the blue ribband events of the games and with two Yanks ruling the roost, the contest pushed all the right buttons for the public and their networks in the land of the free.

Happy to prevail by fair means or foul, Harding chose the latter. As the then 21-year-old said the year before the Olympics, ‘I’ve had to overcome many obstacles, but I’ve never given up hope. I didn’t come with a silver spoon in my mouth. I’ve had to work for what I have. This is for anybody. If you have a dream, go for it. There’s always a way to make it come true.’ And that way was to cheat. Harding had been beaten regularly by Kerrigan in the run up to the Games and set out to ensure it didn’t happen again. She had decided that, one way or another, it would be her face leading the news headlines after the medal ceremony. In that, if in nothing else, she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

The incident which would make Harding endure in sporting infamy was caught live on video tape on 6 January 1994 at the US National Trials. Kerrigan was just about to climb onto the ice when a low blur appears from rightfield and the brunette skater goes down, screaming. As onlookers rushed to Kerrigan, who was holding her right knee in agony, a figure makes a hasty exit. Quickly apprehended, he was identified as Shane Stant.

The conspiracy began to unravel at once. Stant, along with his uncle-cum-getaway-driver Derrick Smith, ‘bodyguard’ Shawn Ekert, and Harding’s on-off husband Jeff Gillooly, formed a none-too-bright four-strong team of conspirators who aimed to put Kerrigan out of action ahead of the Olympics in the next month. In that they failed as the injury sustained by Kerrigan from the assault was relatively minor. Initially kicked off the US team, Harding threatened a $25m lawsuit and made the plane to Norway amid fevered media interest.

In the event, neither skater won gold—that honour went to unsung Oksana Baiul of Ukraine—but the long arm of the law soon caught up with Harding. Gillooly got two years, with the other conspirators getting eighteen months each and the judge roundly condemning them as ‘greedy, dishonest, even stupid’. Although the hatchetfaced caravan-dweller continued to insist that she was innocent of all charges m’lud, that quickly wore thin; she changed her plea to guilty to conspiracy to hinder prosecution in an attack on Kerrigan, copping three years’ probation, $160,000 in fines, and 500 hours of community service.

Banned for life from skating for the USA, Harding has tried various means of scraping a living. There was topless ice skating in Vegas, appearing as a skating Santa Claus, minor league ice hockey, a walk on role in the low-budget movie Breakaway, a boxing career that saw her appear on a Mike Tyson undercard, wrestling in Japan, and even an abortive attempt to skate for Norway or Sweden. (‘With her blonde hair and blue eyes, she looks Norwegian or Swedish,’ said agent David Hans Schmidt. ‘My client would still like to win the gold medal she never got. If it has to be as a Norwegian or Bolivian, that’s fine with us.’)

But mainly there was trouble. She was arrested for throwing a hubcap at her live-in boyfriend before repeatedly punching him in the face, leaving him needing hospital treatment. She even claimed to have been abducted at knifepoint outside her home by a ‘bushy-haired stranger’, although no one was ever arrested.

VINCE COLEMAN (#ulink_cca16daf-bc3c-580a-b615-c0fd9bd6fd6c)

Light the blue touch paper

What do you do if you’re a 32-year-old baseball player earning $3m a year when you’ve seen better days and you’re playing for a club whose fans think you’re one of the laziest no-goods ever to pull on their famous shirt? Simple: you give them a cast iron excuse to fire you.

That’s exactly what former New York Mets batsman Vince Coleman did before he was unceremoniously turfed out of the Big Apple. Just for good measure, Coleman made sure he got successfully sued by a two-year-old fan.

Coleman had already been in bother at the Mets before that fateful day at Los Angeles’ Dodgers Stadium in July 1993. Despite claiming to be ‘a loving, caring, sharing guy who wants the best for everybody’, there had been the incidents where he had taken a four-iron to the Mets’ star pitcher Doc Gooden, the confrontation with coach Mike Cubbage in his first year at the Mets and the rape charges in Florida (later dropped when prosecutors decided the victim’s testimony did not hold up).

But the coup de grâce came when the team was playing in Los Angeles and Coleman hooked up with an old friend, Eric Davies, and two other Dodgers players. Screeching around the stadium in Davies’ Jeep Cherokee with the music up and the windows down, Coleman was leaning out of the window when he realized that he ‘just happened’ to have a couple of firecrackers in his pocket ‘left over from Thanksgiving’.

Spotting a crowd of autograph hunters huddled together waiting by the back entrance to the ground in the players’ parking lot, Coleman decided the best thing would be to announce his arrival in grand style. So he lobbed a couple of the little explosives in the direction of the waiting fans before fleeing the site giggling maniacally. Unfortunately, although the court was later to hear that the incendiary devices only cost $1.50 each, they weren’t run-of-the-mill firecrackers, but bangers described on the packaging as an ‘M-100 explosive device’.

By the time two-year-old Amanda Santos, 11-year-old Marshall Savoy, and 33-year-old Cindy Mayhew reached hospital, they had sustained second-degree burns to cheek and damage to an eye and finger; a badly bruised leg; and an acute ear injury. Coleman, who later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of possessing an explosive device, and received a one-year suspended jail sentence, three years’ probation, a $1,000 fine, and 200 hours of community service, was diagnosed as having a missing brain. He was also missing a good chunk of money after settling out of court, and his job went AWOL—the New York Mets fired him on the spot.

Coleman blamed the New York media for demonising him, saying that he was merely following his team-mates’ lead. In a move calculated to win friends in the dressing room,he said: ‘Look at [pitcher] Bret Saberhagen. He shot bleach on reporters on purpose. He threw firecrackers at reporters intentionally.’ Just for good measure, he acted as his own character witness. ‘I’m a good guy. I’ve been misconstrued. I think it’s been blown out of proportion. I just thought it was a joke. We were just having fun.’

JOHN LAMBIE (#ulink_17428366-ac6a-5e63-8557-53132def16de)

‘Tell him he’s Pele’

A long-term manager of Glasgow’s ‘other’ side, Partick Thistle, John Lambie is a singular man of outrageous contrasts and mind-boggling inconsistencies. He’s a bornagain Christian who brings a chaplain into the dressing room before matches and then goes on to deliver prematch tirades with a ‘fuck’ quotient that would have Peter Reid scurrying for cover. He’s a die-hard Rangers fan who is a living legend at a club which has a rejection of the Old Firm and their sectarian attitudes at its core value. He’s a renowned disciplinarian who hands out more fines in an average week than the Strathclyde constabulary’s motorised division, yet is a father figure who once served his players champagne before they went out to play Rangers at Firhill in 1992 (beating them 3-0).

Lambie is defined by the unique sense of humour, one which saw Partick become a haven for loonies of every hue during his tenure. His ready wit is legendary, but there’s one story which beats all the others. It dates from the day when striker Colin McGlashan was involved in a clash of heads and emerged from the Firhill turf dazed and confused. Told by the physio that McGlashan had concussion and didn’t know who he was, Lambie replied: ‘Great. Rattle that sponge about his face, tell him he’s fucking Pele and get him back on the field.’

Lambie comes from the hard former mining town of Whitburn, in the heart of the area known as Wild West Lothian. Hewn from the same background as men like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, he qualifies as a true berserker mainly because of his penchant for signing players with (at best) questionable approaches to discipline. ‘Former Clydebank chairman Jack Steedman says that whenever he wonders where all the nutters in Scottish football have gone, that he looks at Partick Thistle and realizes I have them all under my roof,’ said Lambie in the mid-’90s. ‘There would be nothing worse than goody-goody players sitting in the dressing room like dummies. That’s not my way. Guys like Chic Charnley, Albert Craig, Allan Dinnie, and Don McVicar kept me alive. They had that bit of badness about them that all winners must have in their make-up.’

It’s no surprise that Lambie should mention Charnley in particular. In an episode as famous as Lambie’s Pele outburst, Charnley (who was sent off a record seventeen times in his career) secured his status as Scottish football’s premier league nutcase during a training session at Ruchill Public Park off Glasgow’s Maryhill Road, an area which is very much in the wrong part of town. Halfway through the warm-up, two samurai sword-wielding hooligans invaded the park intent upon sorting out the Partick players. In one of the most chilling manoeuvres since the Charge of the Light Brigade, Charnley rushed headlong at them, armed with nothing but a bad attitude, dodgy tattoos, a row of missing teeth, and a traffic cone, seeing the interlopers off before insisting the session was restarted. The legend of Lambie’s crazy gang was complete.

A compulsive gambler in his youth (‘if I won at the horses, I was away to the dogs at night and if I won at the dogs, I was away at the horses next day’), Lambie knows all the tricks. He has levied so many fines that he once took the team for a pre-season break on the back of the previous season’s fines. But Lambie does whatever works, no matter how unorthodox. He has left players fighting in the changing room at half-time, employed a club chaplain to talk to the players and drawn inspiration from American self-help guru Joyce Meyer, a regular on Evangelical TV programme Godslot.

After one particularly dismal first-half, fanatical pigeon-fancier Lambie unveiled a revolutionary concoction designed to re-invigorate flagging doos (the Scottish word for pigeons). Under duress, each player swallowed sachets of the rancid brew. It was a placebo, but they won. Nobody fancied taking the stuff the next week. Then there was the attention-grabbing episode when Lambie became celibate in protest at the team’s limp form. Only when they started scoring did Mrs Lambie start smiling again. Lambie had a bulldog poster on his door which said simply ‘Piss Off’. No wonder his players thought the sun shone out of him.

MIKE DANTON (#ulink_7c2409a9-7a88-5f82-afc8-841fa6f438ec)

Love-hate lunacy

The circumstances in which NHL (National Hockey League) star Mike Danton was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for trying to have his agent killed are bizarre in the extreme. In fact, so twisted is the Canadian ice hockey forward’s relationship with David Frost, the agent and mentor who Danton paid $10,000 to have assassinated, that the truth may never really be known. ‘I do not believe in over 18 years on the bench I have been faced with a case as bizarre as this one,’ said federal Judge William D. Stiehl.

Danton first met Frost as a ten-year-old, while the coach was 25, and over the years the two hockey-obsessives formed an unnaturally close bond. Eventually, the teenage player, alienated and estranged from his parents, was persuaded by Frost to move out of his parents’ house and move in with Frost and three other promising young players in what the court later heard was a cult-like atmosphere. Frost even persuaded the player to change his name from that of his parents, Jefferson, to Danton, which was the name of a kid at hockey camp. Frost, who was under police investigation for the sexual exploitation of three 16-and 17-year-old girls and would later come under investigation for punching one of his players while he was on the bench for an NHL side, had already banned Danton from hugging his parents after matches, and Danton now cut off all contact with his worried mother and father.

Eventually, Danton began to spread his wings and, by the time he established himself as a forward for the St Louis Blues, Frost was struggling to maintain control of a player who was gorging on booze and groupies. In an effort to keep his grip, Frost put pressure on Danton to pay back $25,000 he owed his agent (ie Frost), implying that he would tell the Blues about Danton’s promiscuity, his mis-use of painkillers and sleeping pills, plus his drink-problem, if he didn’t. That’s when Danton, never the most stable of souls, snapped.

Using his unwitting 19-year-old girlfriend Katie Wolfmeyer as a go-between, Danton offered a would-be hit man $10,000 to remove Frost from the face of the earth. Only later, after hit man Justin Jones went to the police—not too difficult as he was a police dispatcher—did it emerge that Danton had already tried to hire an assassin on two previous occasions. After initially pretending that he only wanted to have Frost beaten up, Danton came clean and admitted his guilt.