A cheeky monkey
For most of the week he is a quiet, studious 28-year-old called Stuart Drummond. On Saturday afternoons, however, the 6ft 4in football fanatic from the North East of England becomes a raging ball of furry testosterone which goes by the name of H’Angus and which has brought controversy to the hitherto noble art of being a football mascot.
Drummond’s weekend persona as a Hartlepool Townsupporting ape was inspired by the ‘monkey-hangers’ nickname given to the folk of his hometown, Hartlepool, by the people of neighbouring towns. The sneering reference to the stupidity of Hartlepool’s inhabitants dates from the Napoleonic Wars, during which a French ship sank off the town. The only survivor from the shipwreck was a monkey which, not altogether surprisingly, couldn’t answer the questions fired at it by the suspicious townsfolk—so they promptly hanged it as a French spy.
Since then, H’Angus has been doing his level best to prove stupidity and mayhem are still alive and well in Hartlepool. And he chooses Saturday afternoons to make his point.
The unruly mascot of Hartlepool United is regularly in trouble, mainly for assaulting other mascots—he was famously sent off for grabbing a Gladiator mascot’s privates. Other antics include being sent off for chasing a group of pom-pom girls during a game against Barnet, being sent to the stand for dropping his shorts at York, being sent to the stand for taking a corner at Darlington, being sent to the stand for smashing a guitar on the goalpost in imitation of The Who’s Pete Townshend, and being sent to the stand for spraying water over the opposition dugout.
However, H’Angus’s most shameful episode came when, just six months after facing the sack after being arrested for simulating sex with a pretty (and pretty fed up) female steward in front of 5,000 baying fans at Scunthorpe’s Glanford Park, the monkey arrived at Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road drunk and carrying a blow-up doll. He then started a fight with two ten-year-old boys before being arrested (again) and ejected from the ground. The club managed to see the funny side though. After releasing him with a reprimand, a club spokesman said: ‘he is a cheeky monkey, after all’.
Rather than find his antics embarrassing, the good folk of Hartlepool are so proud of H’Angus that, when he entered the contest to be elected as mayor of Hartlepool, he won by a landslide. Not only that, but after administering an annual budget of £150m for four years, he was then re-elected by a similarly huge margin. Of course, he did the job as Stuart Drummond. The only downside for club supporters is that his official role means he no longer has the time to don the monkey outfit on Saturdays. As avid Hartlepool fan Robin Meredith, 40, said: ‘He’sa lunatic. But when the football’s bad—which is often—H’Angus entertains us. He’ll be sorely missed but he’s got a more important role now.’
Drummond has promised to return to Hartlepool Town FC when his political career draws to a close, but he has already started a trend for bad behaviour on the sidelines. Swansea’s mascot Cyril the Swan was hauled in front of the FA for attacking Norwich City manager Gary Megson. The 9ft bird was also in trouble two weeks later during Millwall’s visit to Vetch Field, when he dropkicked rival mascot Zampa The Lion’s head into the crowd; he was once fined £1,000 by magistrates for chucking a pork pie at West Ham fans. Cyril’s party piece is abseiling down the floodlighting pylons before games.
Mascot madness has taken harmless forms, such as Robbie the Bobby, the mascot at Bury, who was arrested for mooning at rival fans, and Halifax Town’s Freddie the Fox, who was ejected from the Rochdale ground after he cocked a leg on the opposition’s goalpost and sparked a riot. But it has also resulted in its fair share of punch-ups: Wolfie, the Wolverhampton Wanderers’ lucky charmer, emerged unscathed from a fight with West Bromwich Albion’s Baggie the Bird, and was doing quite well against Bristol City’s junior mascots the Three Little Pigs, but got the mother and father of kickings when the Bristol City Cat weighed in.
However, perhaps the saddest mascot nuttiness occurred in 2002 when Freddie the Fox, the winner of the annual Mascot Grand National at Huntingdon—a once-yearly spot of fun designed chiefly to raise money for charity—was unmasked as Olympic 400-metre semifinalist Matthew Douglas and promptly disqualified.
Major League racist
Baseball fans in Cincinnati loved Reds’ owner Marge Schott, even if they were genuinely divided on the key question: was she a racist bitch or simply a misguided, eccentric little old lady? The evidence, it has to be said, points to the former.
A noted philanthropist and animal lover who took control of the Cincinnati Reds in December 1984, Marge was prone to engaging her mouth before she’d got her brain in gear. Her most famous faux pas came during an interview with the New York Times in 1992, in which Marge—a German-American (nee Unnewehr) with a sizeable collection of Nazi memorabilia—said that: ‘Hitler did some pretty good things before he went nuts’. That brought her a $250,000 fine from Major League commissioner Bud Selig, plus a year’s ban from games, a punishment which was levied again in 1996 when she stood up for Adolf once again.
Just to show she was inclusively offensive, the profane former second-hand car dealer also had her say on Asians. First she complained that ‘I don’t like it when high school-aged Asian Americans come here and stay so long and then outdo our kids. That’s not right.’ Then she claimed that she didn’t know why the use of the word ‘Japs’ was regarded as offensive. On another occasion she spoke in a mock Japanese accent while recalling a meeting with the Japanese prime minister. In 1994, she outraged the city’s gay community when she banned her players from wearing earrings because ‘only fruits wear earrings’.
Her attitude to her black players was even more worrying. She referred to ‘Martin Luther King Day’ as ‘Nigger Day’ and then claimed her use of the word ‘nigger’ was ‘a joke’. In 1991 team controller Tim Sabo sued Schott, saying she fired him because he opposed her policy of not hiring blacks, alleging that Schott called black outfielders Eric Davis and Dave Parker ‘my million-dollar niggers’. Marge issued a statement denying that she was a racist, but later that month another executive, Sharon Jones, quoted Marge as saying she would ‘never hire another nigger. I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger.’
If Marge wasn’t overly fond of black people, Asians, or gays, she did, however, love animals. She enjoyed a successful career breeding thoroughbreds and once turned up at a fund-raiser party at Cincinnati’s exclusive Queen City Club with a live dancing bear as her escort.
She also lavished her affections on Schottzie, her 15-stone St Bernard. So pampered was Schottzie that he accompanied Marge to the announcement that she’d bought her hometown team in 1984. Despite being an unfeasibly smelly heap of dogflesh, the mutt was in every team photo during Marge’s seventeen-year reign, always wearing a Reds cap. He even had his own seat next to Marge for home games, and she’d parade him around the infield and rub his fur against her players—a practice that the MLB, with whom she was in a state of continual warfare, eventually ordered her to stop after numerous complaints from Reds players.
Marge was unrepentant, though. ‘Pets are always there for you,’ said Marge in 1991 when she announced Schottzie’s passing. ‘They never ask for anything. They never ask for a raise. They’re very special.’
For all the money she gave to charity, there’s little doubt that Marge could be a tad selfish and a little tight. She refused to give left fielder Eric Davis a plane ticket home after he was hospitalised with a damaged kidney suffered after attempting a diving catch during the 1990 World Series. And in 1996, when veteran umpire John McSherry had a heart-attack in the outfield during the opening game of the season, forcing the game to be called off, Marge whined on live television: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ When that led to a wave of complaints she sent the dead man’s family a bouquet of flowers—which turned out to have been a recycled bunch sent to her earlier that day by a television