Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet

The really spooky bit came during the trial when Frost, despite overwhelming evidence, continued to deny that he was the intended target of the hit man. ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t me. It was a hit man. He hired a hit man because he thought a hit man was coming to get him.’ Even spookier was the fact that Frost had to be barred from talking to Danton, so assiduously was the svengali trying to coach his young charge to engineer a plea of diminished responsibility. If someone had tried to have you killed three times, would you help them get off the murder rap?

Danton still hasn’t changed his name back and refuses to speak to his parents or answer their letters. He is, though, still in the throes of a truly bizarre love-hate relationship with his mentor Frost.

JACK JOHNSON (#ulink_eb990683-bf2d-55d1-9ea4-175f2140bcfa)

Mister unconventional

Context is everything, and while the vast majority of today’s heavyweight boxers are black and bling, when Jack Johnson was growing up at the turn of last century, being loud and proud was a life-threatening state of mind. That was true in all of America, but was especially the case in the Deep South in Galveston, Texas when Johnson, the son of a sharecropper, was growing up.

Yet Johnson was never one to be restrained by convention. Having come up through the Battle Royals—where young blacks would fight pell-mell while whites watched—Johnson was old beyond his years. After he was arrested in 1903 (boxing was technically illegal in Texas and mixed-race boxing was definitely illegal across the whole of the south) he moved to Chicago and by 1907 he defeated former world champion Bob Fitzsimmons before going on to beat Canadian world champion Tommy Burns the next year.

However, the outrageous behaviour of the first black heavyweight of the world ensured that there wouldn’t be another for almost twenty-five years. Jack Johnson managed to offend every section of contemporary white American society, and many parts of black America weren’t exactly bursting with pride. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he showed no deference to whites or white society, Johnson had three wives, all of them white, and consorted openly with white prostitutes. When his first wife, nightclub owner Etta Duryea, blew her brains out, Johnson was already having an affair with another white woman, Lucille Cameron, whom he married shortly afterwards.

Johnson was clearly enjoying thumbing his nose at the social conventions of the time. One of his favourite tricks, for example, was to wind several feet of bandages around his member before going out to spar in tight shorts, which made him look absurdly well-hung. Almost as bad, he gloated about his victories and taunted his white opponents—white boxers did it all the time, but it was unheard of from a black man.

White society was appalled, and called for Johnson’s head. James J. Jeffries, who had never been knocked down in an illustrious career, was brought out of retirement to be the original Great White Hope, but when Johnson beat him in front of 22,000 spectators in Reno, Nevada, on American Independence Day in 1910, race riots erupted in thirty-nine cities across America, with more than a dozen people losing their lives in the process. Footage of Johnson winning was banned in virtually every southern state, including Texas, on the grounds of public safety.

Unable to beat him in the ring, White America pursued him out of it, invoking an obscure piece of legislation called the Mann Act, which was supposed to combat vice. When former girlfriend Belle Schreiber was forced to testify that Johnson had moved Cameron across state borders for immoral purposes, he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for an offence that was usually treated as a minor misdemeanour. Johnson, reasonably fearing he wouldn’t last such a sentence, promptly fled the country.

A bloated and out-of-condition 37-year-old, he eventually lost his title to Kansan Jess Willard in 1915, losing in forty-five rounds in Havana.

ERIC CANTONA (#ulink_090d4d4c-082d-5198-a8f7-7097ef70fb96)

Kung fu fighter

Gav, a misguided mate of mine who’s a Manchester United supporter, has a picture of Eric Cantona on his wall. It’s not a usual pose for a star of the beautiful game, though. The Frenchman isn’t exactly laid-back, although he is horizontal—he’s hurtling through the air kung fu style towards a Crystal Palace fan who has had the audacity to badmouth him from the stands. The fans in the photograph are slack-jawed and wide-eyed, waiting for the moment when the budding martial artist will connect with the fan’s chest. Taken in 1995, it remains the most famous picture in English football since Gazza cried at the 1990 World Cup.

For that assault at Selhurst Park Cantona was banned for eight months and given 120 hours of community service. (When asked to explain why he did it, he told the assembled journalists that ‘When the seagulls…follow the trawler…it’s because they think…sardines will be thrown…into the sea’). But at least he didn’t retire (again) after Alex Ferguson talked him out of it. For observers of the self-proclaimed gifted one, that at least was a major surprise because by that stage Eric already had a well-worn track record of spitting the dummy.

In fact, if he hadn’t retired from football in his native France at the tender age of 24, he would never have been at Selhurst Park on that damp night in south London. The French weren’t remotely surprised by his antics. After all, this was the same Cantona who went on television in August 1988 to call Henri Michel, the then manager of the French national side, a ‘shit bag’ (actually ‘un sac de merde’) and was promptly banned. He was sacked by Marseille for throwing his shirt to the ground after being substituted during a match against Torpedo Moscow, and then fined and suspended for fighting with Montpellier team-mate Jean-Claude Lemoult. Finally, he was banned for three matches for throwing the ball at the referee while captaining Nimes. When he shouted ‘idiots’ (best said in a very Freeeench accent) in the face of each of the three members of the disciplinary panel at the French FA from twleve inches or so, they doubled his ban to two months. Cue Eric’s first retirement in December 1991.

So when his trawler hit rocky seas across the Channel, no one was too surprised. After helping Sheffield Wednesday to the first division title and then doing the same in the Premiership with Leeds United, Cantona moved to the club Leeds fans hate above all others, Manchester United. (The move came amid scurrilous but untrue rumours that Cantona had been too friendly with a team-mate’s wife at Elland Road, hence the cry from Manchester United fans when Leeds came to Old Trafford: ‘He’s French/He’s Flash/He’s been up Leslie Ash/Cantona! Cantona!’, a reference to the other half of Leeds’ star centre-forward). Even there, under the nose of the disciplinarian Ferguson, he managed to skirt close to the wind, particularly in Istanbul in 1993 when he took on Istanbul’s baton-wielding riot police single-handedly after one of them cracked him over the head as he walked from the pitch having been sent-off.