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.
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.
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.
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