‘Ty Cobb is a prick’
Ty Cobb, otherwise known as the Georgia Peach, is probably the nastiest bastard on this whole list, and certainly one of the most talented. One of the most sublime baseball batters of all time, the Detroit Tiger was also such a racist, misogynist, and violent drunk that his hand-picked biographer, Al Stump, later called Cobb ‘the most violent, successful, thoroughly maladjusted personality ever to pass across American sports’. Ernest Hemingway was a bit more succinct: he described Cobb as ‘a total shit’. Babe Ruth was most succinct of all: ‘Ty Cobb is a prick’.
A baseball Hall-of-Famer, Cobb was so utterly unpleasant that despite over twenty years at the top before hanging up his bat in 1928, not one former teammate turned up at his funeral in 1961. Not that anybody was surprised: he fought with team-mates and opposition alike, spiked fellow players, hit them, screamed at them and once even tried to fight fellow Hall-of-Famer Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees’ peerless (and peerlessly behaved) batsman. So unpleasant was Cobb that when the team played away and travelled by train he insisted upon having his own compartment and slept with a gun under a pillow because he was obsessed with the idea that one of his team-mates would murder him given half a chance. He was probably right to worry.
But if Cobb hated his team-mates, it was as nothing compared to the bile he reserved for the fans. A notorious and open racist, at various stages he stabbed a black groundskeeper, grabbed his wife by the throat, and pushed a black chambermaid down the stairs. In one particularly appalling incident in 1912 at New York City’s Hilltop Park, Cobb jumped into the stands and relentlessly battered a fan he said had verbally abused him. Nobody else had heard the fan, who happened to be black and handicapped—he had no fingers—say anything untoward.
Nobody was safe from Cobb’s psychopathic temper. In 1921, by which time he had become the Tigers’ playermanager, he confronted umpire Billy Evans under the stands after a game. After lambasting the poor official, and then telling him that ‘I only fight one way, to kill’, Cobb went berserk and repeatedly slammed the umpire’s head against a slab of concrete until Evans lost consciousness. As he had already beaten-up several newsmen, the incident was kept under wraps.
A millionaire many times over, Cobb lived in a huge mansion but refused to have it connected to the national grid because he thought the electric companies charged too much for their services.
Given his fondness for wanton violence, his love for filthy lucre, and the fact that he always carried a handgun, it must have been a brave man who’d try to mug him, yet in 1912 someone was stupid enough to attempt to steal Cobb’s wallet. The man was, naturally enough, pistol whipped by his intended victim, who then stabbed him to death. Cobb got off on the basis of self-defence, but was soon in trouble again. Later that same year, he was the chief suspect in a murder which took place in broad daylight outside of Boston’s Fenway Park. The unfortunate man had been beaten to death with a baseball bat, but despite several witnesses, not one was willing to identify Cobb, who was never charged.
Few sportsmen have been more despicable human beings than Cobb, as Ron Shelton, a former minor league player who wrote and directed the film Cobb, which examined the darker sides of the Georgia Peach’s life, was the first to admit. ‘All the bottled rage he seems to have on the field, the fights, the incidents with fans, the social dysfunction—that’s all Cobb,’ said Shelton.
The man himself was utterly unrepentant though. ‘They were all against me, tried every trick to cut me down,’ said Cobb shortly before he died. ‘But I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.’
Football manager from hell
At the height of the fight against apartheid, Nelson Mandela memorably declared that: ‘Sport can never be normal in an abnormal society’. Thousands of miles away in Iraq, a psychopath named Uday Hussein, son of Saddam, was energetically proving him right—jailing, torturing, and killing underperforming athletes. According to Issam Thamer al-Diwan, who played volleyball for Iraq between 1974 and 1987 before defecting, ‘dozens of athletes and leaders in the Iraqi sports movement’ had been executed because ‘Uday cannot stand to think that someone in Iraq could be smarter or more famous than him’.
Rumours of football players having the soles of their feet whipped with piano wire had done the rounds, with FIFA, world football’s governing body, sending two investigators to Baghdad in 1997 to question members of the Iraqi national team who had allegedly had their feet caned by Uday’s henchmen after losing a World Cup qualifying match to Kazakhstan. Needless to say, none of the players were keen to talk about the episode.
If was only after the fall of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime that the excesses of Uday could be fully chronicled. The first piece of evidence came when the building housing the Iraqi Football Association was overrun. Inside, American troops found a sarcophagus-shaped ‘iron maiden’. Over seven-feet high, three-feet wide and deep enough to house a man, the device had long spikes fixed to the inside of the door so the victim was impaled as it closed. The spikes were blunt from use.
Virtually all of the violence in Iraqi sport was instigated by Uday, and he’d often mete out punishments himself. A man who didn’t let his lack of prowess stand in his way as a player—he was selected for Iraq on several occasions—he was also the manager from hell. Midfielder Saad Keis Naoman was unlucky to be playing in a side managed by Uday when he was red-carded for questioning the referee’s parentage. Unimpressed, Uday decided to teach Naoman a lesson and sentenced him to a month in the infamous al-Radwaniya jail, where he was beaten daily on his back with a wooden cane until he lost consciousness. He was then dragged behind a jeep before being submerged in a sewage tank to infect his wounds.
That, with minor variations, was the standard penalty for incurring Uday’s displeasure. ‘Every single day I was beaten on my feet, and was not allowed to eat or drink,’ said Sharar Haydar, a defender, who went through the first of four spells of imprisonment and torture when Iraq was beaten 2-0 by Jordan in 1993. Soon after he told Uday that he didn’t want to play for Iraq against the USA the next year, he was whipped and dragged through filthy water until the cuts became infected. His scariest moment was in the lead-up to the 1994 World Cup in America when, after a series of bravura performances in the qualifiers, Iraq only had to beat lowly Qatar to qualify for the finals. Sitting in the dressing room, a call came through from Saddam’s youngest son: ‘Uday rang to give us a message: “If you don’t win I will kill you”.’ Unsurprisingly, they lost. Uday had a set system of punishments for mistakes that occur routinely—a defensive error brought three days inside, a missed penalty three weeks—and after three more spells in jail, Haydar fled the country in 1998.
‘Uday decided everything, which clubs you played for, everything,’ said Haydar. ‘You kept your mouth shut or you were killed, but Iraqi fans loved abusing [a club called] al-Rasheed. They couldn’t tell Uday what they thought of him so they yelled at his team. Saddam didn’t like that, so he shut down the club.’
Uday died during a firefight with American marines in 2004.
Trailer trash on ice
Leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, ice-skating was so big that the US federation had just signed a ten-year $100m television deal to bring it into the top rank of non-team sports. A major reason for its popularity was the forthcoming confrontation between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. For most viewers Stateside the two American ice dancers were virtually assured of the gold and silver medals, it was just a question of which finished first and which came second.
Kerrigan versus Harding was the sort of