His victims, however, weren’t so impressed. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It felt like he made an attempt to stick his hand up my arse. I shit myself,’ said Smith. The Cowboys’ captain Peter Jones was also in no doubt that it wasn’t funny: ‘It wasn’t a wedgie. That’s when your pants are pulled up your arse. I think I know the difference between a wedgie and someone sticking their finger up my arse.’ A third victim, Paul Bowman, said that ‘if Hoppa was a man, he wouldn’t do this’, but Bowman’s coach Terry Hall thought it was all a storm in a teacup: ‘Things were much worse in my day: I’ve had blokes grab my family jewels, blokes gouge me, blokes pull my hair. Hoppa hasn’t hurt a bloke for Christ’s sake.’
One bloke who managed to see the funny side was Ian Roberts, one of Aussie Rugby League’s greats, who withdrew from the disciplinary panel citing ‘a conflict of interests…with three sweaty men and anal penetration it sounded like a gay party to me’. Roberts was, at that time, the League’s only openly gay player.
One other player took Hoppa’s example to heart. In 2002, the year after Hoppa’s strange behaviour first surfaced, 25-year-old Old Trinity Aussie Rules footballer Glen Hatfield was banned sine die for emulating his hero in a match against Melbourne High School Old Boys.
Since Hopoate was banned and then fired by Wests, things haven’t got better for the rogue. After finally getting back into the game, he was almost sacked by Manly after he was banned for abusing match officials, after which he was forced to issue a grovelling apology for abusing a ballboy during a match against the New Zealand Warriors in March 2005. He was finally sacked by Manly after he was banned for seventeen weeks for a sickening assault which laid out Cronulla Sharks forward Keith Galloway, almost ending Galloway’s playing days and killing the 30-year-old Hoppa’s career stone dead.
The botty-botherer is now pursuing a career in boxing but still can’t keep out of the news. Acting as a waterboy in a match between his teenage son’s Manly Cove side and the Western City Tigers in the Sydney Rugby League’s under-13 cup in 2005, he was banned from the touchline for abusing officials. According to officials, Hoppa first swore at the referee and touch judges before inviting all three outside for a ‘square-go’.
One madman, one bullet
French rugby props are famously nutty, but few have taken their madness to such violent extremes. Vaquerin may have been capped twenty-six times between 1971 and 1980, and he may have won more French Cupwinners’ medals (‘Boucliers’) with the all-conquering Beziers team than any man alive, but it’s for the manner of the loose-head’s departure as much as for what he did while he was here that he will be remembered.
Courageous, generous, and famously popular in his home town, Vaquerin had struggled to adapt to life after his rugby career was brought to a premature end in 1980 by a knee injury he first suffered five years earlier (his absence gave Gerard Cholley his chance and the moving brick outhouse quickly established himself as France’s premier No.1).
After his retirement, Vaquerin had thrown himself into other sports, notably hunting and deep-sea diving, and had spent six years in Mexico before coming back to his home town, where he opened a bar called Le Cardiff. A larger-than-life bull-necked bruiser with a shiny pate and Pancho Villa moustache, locals said Vaquerin ‘liked to live life at 100 kilometres an hour’.
On 10 July 1993, the 42-year-old son of Spanish immigrants organised a party in a local arena to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his first cap, won against Romania when he was just 20, making him the youngest prop ever to have played international rugby. Despite the fact that a huge crowd had turned up, Vaquerin, who had only had one aperitif, grew restless and went in search of fun.
He crossed to the wrong side of the tracks and wandered into a famously rough Beziers bar and, despite the protestations of friends, proceeded to pick a row with a fellow drinker. The exact sequence of events isn’t clear, but it seems that the poor man accidentally spilt Vaquerin’s drink, and then offered to buy him another. When the bull-necked prop refused the offer and suggested that they fight instead, the man understandably refused. This is the point at which, to the astonishment of the whole bar, he pulled out a gun from his car and offered his terrified adversary another option: to play Russian roulette with him. Unsurprisingly, the man simply turned and bolted.
Now in the process of having, er, fun, Vaquerin challenged the worried locals to take up his kind offer and join him in a sociable game of blind man’s buff with bullets. But when no one would play with him, he took matters into his own hands. Removing five of the six bullets from the chamber of his Smith and Wesson revolver and uttering the immortal words ‘if you bastards won’t play with me, I’ll play by myself’, he did just that. The sixth bullet entered his right temple, killing him instantly. Friends said he died as he had lived, in a desperate pursuit of excess.
Playing for keeps
Sport’s ability to make a difference in the most extreme circumstances was demonstrated by the ultimate pyrrhic victory in the midst of the madness that was the eastern front during the Second World War. In arguably the most savage and one-sided David versus Goliath encounters of all time, a bunch of malnourished Ukrainian footballers in rags and shoes took on the mighty Luftwaffe in what became known as The Death Match. It was the classic Catch 22: lose and they betrayed the nation, win and they would face a firing squad or worse. They won.
The ‘they’ in question was Start FC, the reassembled ashes of the 1939 Dynamo Kiev side which had been one of the best pre-war outfits in Europe, possibly the greatest of Europe’s inter-war sides. When the Nazis overran Kiev during Operation Barbarossa, many of the side were dispatched to slave labour camps; others, such as Lazar Kogen, were summarily executed.
Many Ukrainians initially doubted that the Nazis could be worse than Stalin, who had a man jailed for ten years for being first to sit down after a standing ovation and had another executed for taking down Stalin’s portrait to paint the wall behind it. Yet within a fortnight of taking Kiev, the Nazis had slaughtered 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar and the city’s inhabitants understood the horrific nature of an occupation which only 20 per cent of Kiev’s inhabitants would survive.
The highest-profile member of that Dynamo Kiev team was Nikolai Trusevich. In late 1941 the charismatic goalkeeper had just been released from an internment camp but was close to death from starvation. As the emaciated figure shuffled around looking for food to keep him alive—every cat, dog and rat in the city had already been eaten—he ran into football-mad Losif Kordik whose reward for collaborating with the Nazis was to be given charge of a large bakery. Not only did Kordik give the former Dynamo captain the job which saved his life, but he also ordered him to scour the city and employ any former team-mates he could find.
When the Nazis allowed football to be played in 1942 in an attempt to normalise life, the bakery owner asked Trusevich to form a team from his fellow workers—almost all of whom were Dynamo men—but many worried they would be seen as collaborators. Trusevich argued the opposite case passionately: ‘We may not have weapons but we can fight on the football pitch. We will be playing in the colour of our flag. The fascists should know that our colour cannot be defeated.’ And so Start FC was born.
Despite their shambolic physical state, Start beat a team of local