Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 22

What do you do if you’re a 32-year-old baseball player earning $3m a year when you’ve seen better days and you’re playing for a club whose fans think you’re one of the laziest no-goods ever to pull on their famous shirt? Simple: you give them a cast iron excuse to fire you.

That’s exactly what former New York Mets batsman Vince Coleman did before he was unceremoniously turfed out of the Big Apple. Just for good measure, Coleman made sure he got successfully sued by a two-year-old fan.

Coleman had already been in bother at the Mets before that fateful day at Los Angeles’ Dodgers Stadium in July 1993. Despite claiming to be ‘a loving, caring, sharing guy who wants the best for everybody’, there had been the incidents where he had taken a four-iron to the Mets’ star pitcher Doc Gooden, the confrontation with coach Mike Cubbage in his first year at the Mets and the rape charges in Florida (later dropped when prosecutors decided the victim’s testimony did not hold up).

But the coup de grâce came when the team was playing in Los Angeles and Coleman hooked up with an old friend, Eric Davies, and two other Dodgers players. Screeching around the stadium in Davies’ Jeep Cherokee with the music up and the windows down, Coleman was leaning out of the window when he realized that he ‘just happened’ to have a couple of firecrackers in his pocket ‘left over from Thanksgiving’.

Spotting a crowd of autograph hunters huddled together waiting by the back entrance to the ground in the players’ parking lot, Coleman decided the best thing would be to announce his arrival in grand style. So he lobbed a couple of the little explosives in the direction of the waiting fans before fleeing the site giggling maniacally. Unfortunately, although the court was later to hear that the incendiary devices only cost $1.50 each, they weren’t run-of-the-mill firecrackers, but bangers described on the packaging as an ‘M-100 explosive device’.

By the time two-year-old Amanda Santos, 11-year-old Marshall Savoy, and 33-year-old Cindy Mayhew reached hospital, they had sustained second-degree burns to cheek and damage to an eye and finger; a badly bruised leg; and an acute ear injury. Coleman, who later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of possessing an explosive device, and received a one-year suspended jail sentence, three years’ probation, a $1,000 fine, and 200 hours of community service, was diagnosed as having a missing brain. He was also missing a good chunk of money after settling out of court, and his job went AWOL—the New York Mets fired him on the spot.

Coleman blamed the New York media for demonising him, saying that he was merely following his team-mates’ lead. In a move calculated to win friends in the dressing room,he said: ‘Look at [pitcher] Bret Saberhagen. He shot bleach on reporters on purpose. He threw firecrackers at reporters intentionally.’ Just for good measure, he acted as his own character witness. ‘I’m a good guy. I’ve been misconstrued. I think it’s been blown out of proportion. I just thought it was a joke. We were just having fun.’