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.
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.’
‘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