The abiding principle in compiling this list of my 100 biggest loonies is that all of the people in the following pages have either acted in a consistently irrational manner or have demonstrated that they are capable of extraordinary responses to extraordinary situations. That, I suppose, is as close to an objective definition of madness as I am willing to offer. Over and above that, all 100 of the individuals in these pages have stories that have touched me in some way, usually by prompting a macabre and wholly reprehensible freak-show fascination.
I’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible, neither dismissing individuals because their stories are so well known—Diego Maradona, Paul Gascoigne, George Best, Eric Cantona, Roy Keane, and Alex Higgins all come into that category—nor avoiding fringe figures like Rollen Stewart and Pretty Boy Shaw who exist on the very margins of sport. I was surprised, however, by the degree to which there seems to be a correlation between madness and genius. Or perhaps it’s just that the memory of crazy deeds perpetrated by sport’s colossuses lingers longer in the memory and in the archives. The other major surprise was the degree to which some unexpected sports churn out the warped and depraved, while others simply don’t. For every rugby-playing fruitcake, there are ten baseballing lunatics. As the Yanks would say, go figure.
I have also to thank those friends and colleagues who have helped me research this book or read over sections and provided feedback. Vicky Stirling deserves a medal for listening to me droning on about nutters and for providing her frank opinions on the merits of the lunatics upon whom I eventually alighted. I started off with a list of around sixty sportsmen and women who I thought would pass muster, but less than half of those made the final cut. More than twenty of the seventy nutcases I subsequently found while researching the nooks and crannies of sporting insanity were suggestions from friends and colleagues. For their input I’m truly grateful.
In particular I’d like to thank Jon Hotten, whose fascination with sport’s macabre twilight zone and whose willingness to give of his time and surprisingly deep well of knowledge was much appreciated. The following colleagues also gave up time and ideas, and deserve acknowledgement for their input: Craig Lord, Dermot Crowe, Jon Rendall, Iain Fletcher, Mark Woods, Martin Gillingham, Jeremy Hart, James Allen, James Eastham, Stuart Weir, James Hipwell, Richard Verrow, Gary Sutherland, Ciaran O’Raillaigh, Rick Weber, Mark Woods, Neil Forsyth, Rob Eyton-Jones, Gulu Ezekiel, Jonathan Dyson, Peter Roebuck, Alix Ramsay, Harry Miltner, Ivan Goldman, Neil Jameson, Phil Ball, Dan Brennan, Richard Fletcher, Stuart Cosgrove, Dominic Calder-Smith, Gregor Paul, Tom English, Alex Massie, Steve Downes, Eamon Lynch, Matt Zeysing, Michele Verroken, Bill Lothian, Alistair Hignell, Lucinda Rivers, John Huggan and Alan Pearey. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed out.
I’d also like to thank my wife Bea and beloved kids Ollie, Ailsa and Lochie,who all displayed characteristic forbearance at my continual absences during this work’s troublesome gestation. This book is for my three little nutcases.
Finally, I’d like to thank my agent Mark Stanton and my publisher Michael Doggart, without whom this book would have remained an argument between two blokes on barstools.
Richard Bath
Edinburgh
May 2006
Lady-boy killer
The Thai people might have an ambivalent attitude towards sexuality, but there’s no doubt that Thai kick boxing, or Muay Thai, is among the world’s hardest—and most masculine—of sports. That makes Parinya something of an oddity because from his first bout as a young boy aged 12 one of the most talented kick boxers in the sport’s history fought solely to get the money for a sex-change operation. As a youthful Parinya said: ‘I’ve set out to master the most masculine and lethal sport to achieve my goal of total femininity’.
As the fourth of five children of itinerant labourers, Parinya was taught to kick box by his father, who feared that his little boy—who favoured girly scrapbooks and painted nails from an early age, and spent much of his spare time with the village transsexual—would be picked upon. Although Parinya says that ‘I don’t equate femininity with weakness’, Thai kick boxing is a stoically masculine world: women are not allowed to enter a kick boxing ring, let alone fight in one.
Life was hard for Parinya, who became a monk for three years from the age of seven when his mother was jailed for illegally collecting firewood. He then survived for twelve months by wandering through villages begging alms. Throughout his youth, kick boxing was a refuge and a defence mechanism, but Parinya made his public debut aged 12 when he entered a fight in a fair because there was 500 Baht (£7.50) on offer to the winner. By the time he was 16 he had gained local notoriety, winning 20 of his 22 fights, most of them by knockout. Over the next four years he became famous for the flamboyant coup de graàce he delivered after each KO, when he would give his defeated opponent a consolation kiss as the audience roared with laughter at the sight of the humiliated loser rubbing away the lipstick. ‘The reason I kissed men after a fight is because it was my way of saying sorry,’ said a deadpan Parinya.
Parinya made his big-time debut in front of 10,000 screaming homophobes in Bangkok’s Lumpini Stadium aged 17. Wearing make-up and pink nail polish, he broke down when asked to strip for the weigh-in to prove he had the usual male accoutrements, although he was eventually allowed to climb aboard the scales wearing just black jockeys. He then promptly went out and pummelled the bejesus out of the over-confident Oven So Boonya—who had made the mistake of mocking Parinya with a camp embrace—for five bloody rounds. The end of the mismatch came when Parinya applied his trademark move, Crushing Medicine, in which he jumped in the air and brought his elbow down onto the head of the unfortunate opponent. Yet that flashy denouement hid the real secret of Parinya’s success: an adherence to the balletic rituals of the ancient sport and a daily nine-hour exercise regime which saw him go for a 10km run at dawn, followed by half an hour of rope skipping, drills of alternate slugs and kicks to a sandbag, all rounded-off by 300 sit-ups during which his coaches would pummel his belly to harden his six-pack.
The low point of Parinya’s career came in 1999, by which stage hormone therapy was beginning to have such a noticeable effect that he asked to be allowed to wear a bra when he fought. That’s when Parinya went to Tokyo and fought Kyoko Inoue, a Japanese female wrestler almost double his size, in a freak-show hybrid brawl in which the kick boxer triumphed. But then triumph was normal for Parinya throughout his five-year career as a professional fighter, a career which ended abruptly in 2000 when he had amassed enough money for an operation in which he had his genitals removed and voicebox modified.
And then he became a she, changing his name to Nong Toom and hanging up the gloves forever. Now one of Thailand’s biggest stars, Parinya/Nong was last seen earning a living as a ‘boxing cabaret artist’ and making Beautiful Boxer,a film of his/her life. (Don’t laugh, Iron Ladies, a movie about the transvestite volleyball team which won the Thai men’s championship in 1996 is still Thailand’s biggest grossing film of all time).
Finger licking bad
Mad, bad, or just dangerous to tackle? Australian rugby league hardman John Hopoate merits inclusion thanks to his predilection for slipping a rigid digit up opponents’ arses on the field of play. It happened four times—thrice against Queensland Cowboys and once against St George-Illawarra—leading to his sacking by Wests Tigers after NRL (National Rugby League) commissioner Jim Hall said that ‘in my forty-five years in rugby league, never have I come across a more disgusting act.’
Hopoate,