I vividly remember the day that this book was born. It was in the autumn of 1993 and I was editing a small rugby magazine when I received a phone call from a French journalist, who proceeded to recount the sorry demise of Armand Vaquerin. It was, quite frankly, such an unbelievable tale of wanton lunacy that I presumed that the writer in question, keen to earn a commission, had been hamming it up in the time-honoured fashion of all freelancers. In fact, quite the opposite was true, and the tale of the French prop’s premature death remains a tragically unbeatable tale of sporting excess.
I didn’t know at that stage that Vaquerin’s folly would launch this tome, but as I discussed the story with my colleague Chris Pilling, we began to chuck around the names of sporting mentalists of every hue. As the process continued over the weeks that followed, and the ranks of Vaquerin’s challengers swelled, the extent to which sport is a breeding ground for cranks, eccentrics, obsessives, and psychopaths became increasingly obvious.
Sport spawns individualists of huge self-confidence whose desire to win is so strong that they push their minds and bodies to the outer fringes of sanity. It also provides a Peter Pan environment in which there is a temporary moratorium on the need to grow up and assume the responsibilities and social norms by which the rest of the planet is governed. Crucially, success in sports like football and baseball also provides vast wealth, endless hours to fill and the sort of uncritical adulation that ensures every top sportsperson always has someone on hand to tell him or her how great they are. In such circumstances it is little wonder that some sportsmen and women come to believe that the usual rules simply do not apply. If you don’t believe that to be the case, reflect on this: a study by the US National Institute of Mental Health found that between 1988 and 1991 more than one third of sexual assaults committed on American campuses were perpetrated by students on sports scholarships, who account for less than two per cent of students.
Like all projects, this one has mutated. It started off as a quest to find the most unhinged sporting practitioners in history but morphed as it became clear that a list of 100 Vinnie Jones-style hardmen would constitute a onedimensional bore. Anyway, in the colloquial sense madness is a subjective term which encompasses everything from outrageous heroism through extreme eccentricity to profound psychological trauma. The selection of the following 100 men and women (and despite a conscious effort to spread the net across all sports, circumstances, countries and genders, these pages are dominated by Anglophone men) represents an effort to include as many sporting forms as possible of the mental short-circuiting we know as madness.
I tried to set myself some ground-rules, although readers will undoubtedly argue that I’ve included exceptions to each of my rules, and in some cases they will probably be right. I decided, for instance, that simply doing a crazy sport—sky-diving, cave-diving, drag-racing, mountain-climbing,