Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 20

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.