Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 18

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 company.