By the early 1990s, Thomas was still able to raise his game for the odd last hurrah, such as when his wonderful free-kick famously helped Fourth Division Wrexham to knock champions Arsenal out of the FA Cup, but it was for his off-field antics that he was soon to become most famous. The ‘Welsh George Best’ lived up to that moniker in 1992 when Rhyl’s classiest geezer found himself down a country lane shagging his brother-in-law’s wife in the back of a car. Needless to say, the brother-in-law took a pretty dim view of proceedings and, catching the pair in flagrante delicto, plunged a screwdriver into Thomas’s backside. He then dragged the former footballing genius into the road, where he administered a going-over even more thorough than the one his wife had just received. Thomas was in hospital for a week.
It only took the Welshman a year to comfortably eclipse the notoriety gained in that incident, however. In 1993 he was caught passing dud £10 and £20 notes to the trainees at Wrexham and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Judge Gareth Edwards told him that he had ‘an image of himself as a flash and daring adventurer’ before sending him off to share a cell in Liverpool’s Walton Jail with a big bloke in dungarees who admitted on Day One that he was incarcerated for beheading his victims.
But the cheeky Welshman still got the last laugh, earning a living as an after-dinner speaker whose favourite gag remains ‘They say that Roy Keane’son fifty grand a week. Well, so I was I until they found my presses.’
Baddest granddaddy of ‘em all
Squeaky-clean NBC sports pundit Marv Albert’s popularity took a dive in 1997 when America’s favourite grandfather was charged with sexual assault and battery. He was alleged to have repeatedly bitten former girlfriend Vanessa Perhach on her bum and back (he broke the skin in twelve places) before forcing her to perform oral sex on him and forcibly buggering her. Marv initially denied the charges, but when he offered a plea-bargain and copped a guilty verdict on the charge of misdemeanour assault charges, his ratings went below zero.
Worse was to follow in 1998 when, during investigations into the murder of 58-year-old dominatrix Nadia Frey, police found Albert’s name and number among her possessions, though there is no suggestion that he was connected to her murder. Frey specialised in ‘restraining, spanking and daipering men’, and bad penny Perhach quickly popped up to allege that she and Marv had had three-way sex with New York’s most popular dominatrix, who also went under the name of Mistress Hilda.
Marv denied Perhach’s colourful assertions and although his career never quite hit the same level as it had before he was fired by NBC in 1997 after he pleaded guilty for assault on Perhach, he was allowed back at the station by 1999.
Marv is by no means the only commentator to run foul of his employers though. There have been plenty of other sports television presenters to have come a cropper Stateside, with Dallas Cowboys great, turned television pundit, Michael Irvin being one famous example of a man who gave his squeaky clean American network a dilemma when he was charged with cocaine and marijuana possession.
Things aren’t much different across the Pond. David Icke may have dominated the loony English TV presenters’ competition, but iconic English football commentators Frank Bough and Gerald Sinstadt did their best to hold their ends up, as it were. In 1989, the smooth-talking, jumper-wearing Bough was exposed by a national newspaper as a serial swinger who spiced up life with a few lines of coke while watching sex parties with his hookers. The 71-year-old was sacked by the BBC, but started to rebuild his television career in the independent sector. That all ended in 1992 when Bough was caught visiting a Miss Whiplash sex den. That was over and out, thanks Frank.
Even more disturbing—and this was akin to finding out that Dickie Davies worships Satan and cuts the heads off black cats in his garden shed—was the day when a 64-year-old Sinstadt was arrested at a hard-core porn cinema and charged with gross indecency. Which was, well, gross. Police later dropped the charge, but the damage was done.
Eamon, this is yer life
Although Marv Albert’s arse-biting and three-in-a-bed with a dominatrix probably wins him the gold medal for nutty behaviour by a commentator, epic Irish troublemaker Eamon Dunphy has devoted himself to giving marvellous Marvin a run for his money.
A pugnacious journeyman footballer in his day, the little Dubliner has established himself as the most outspoken pundit—gobshite in the local vernacular—on the Emerald Isle. From Italia ’90 onwards, when Jack Charlton’s Ireland football team was becoming the side no other wanted to meet, even famously beating Italy in the USA World Cup in 1994, Dunphy would incense fans by lambasting the national side for its lack of verve at every available opportunity. So vitriolic were his comments on the subject that Charlton would immediately leave a press conference if he arrived. Ireland’s football fans showed their anger in an equally unambiguous manner, mobbing his car in a Dublin street and then overturning it.
Still, Dunphy brought a lot on himself. During the 2002 World Cup, with Irish football in the midst of a row caused by his confidant Roy Keane’s acrimonious bust-up with manager Mick McCarthy, Dunphy went onto Irish television after another dire result, saying: ‘I want Irish soccer to fulfil its destiny. I want us to fail. I hoped that Cameroon would beat us, that Germany would beat us, and that we would go out of this tournament.’
He managed to survive the outcry over that little outburst, but he soon put his employers in an even more difficult situation. Neither the public nor the controllers of RTE, the Irish equivalent of the BBC, could believe it when Dunphy then turned up to commentate on the Japan-Russia game having had no sleep and with drink clearly taken. After stumbling through a couple of inanities at the start of the match and making no contribution while slumped in his chair, Dunphy slurred his way through the half-time analysis, and did not appear for the second half. Overwhelmed by 1,300 complaints, RTE sacked him on the spot.
Not that Dunphy reserves his ire for sportsmen or only falls out with fellas who kick a ball for a living. He even managed to become estranged from U2, whose manager, Paul McGuinness, remains one of his faithful drinking partners on his regular excursions to Dublin’s Horseshoe Bar and at the city’s trendiest nightclub, Lilly’s Bordello. Granted unfettered access to the supergroup for the book Unforgettable Fire: The Definitive Biography of U2,he failed to produce the expected hagiography, instead turning out a warts ’n’ all effort that had so many warts that only The Edge will now acknowledge him. Dunphy’s ghost-written autobiography of Keane was similarly incendiary: so lurid in fact, that Keane actually denied having made some of the most contentious revelations.
His high-profile radio talkback show and his column in a national Sunday newspaper regularly got him into even more hot water. Successfully sued on a ruinously regular basis, his high point came when Proinsias de Rossa, the then leader of the opposition, won a record £300,000 in damages from him.
Amusing one minute, acerbic the next (and often both simultaneously), Dunphy remains one of the highest-profile personalities in Ireland. Part of that is because he’s a maverick, part is because he can laugh at himself; when he was arrested for drink driving before getting off on a technicality, he quipped that ‘the problem with Dublin is that you can’t get good coke