Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 5

I vividly remember the day that this book was born. It was in the autumn of 1993 and I was editing a small rugby magazine when I received a phone call from a French journalist, who proceeded to recount the sorry demise of Armand Vaquerin. It was, quite frankly, such an unbelievable tale of wanton lunacy that I presumed that the writer in question, keen to earn a commission, had been hamming it up in the time-honoured fashion of all freelancers. In fact, quite the opposite was true, and the tale of the French prop’s premature death remains a tragically unbeatable tale of sporting excess.

I didn’t know at that stage that Vaquerin’s folly would launch this tome, but as I discussed the story with my colleague Chris Pilling, we began to chuck around the names of sporting mentalists of every hue. As the process continued over the weeks that followed, and the ranks of Vaquerin’s challengers swelled, the extent to which sport is a breeding ground for cranks, eccentrics, obsessives, and psychopaths became increasingly obvious.

Sport spawns individualists of huge self-confidence whose desire to win is so strong that they push their minds and bodies to the outer fringes of sanity. It also provides a Peter Pan environment in which there is a temporary moratorium on the need to grow up and assume the responsibilities and social norms by which the rest of the planet is governed. Crucially, success in sports like football and baseball also provides vast wealth, endless hours to fill and the sort of uncritical adulation that ensures every top sportsperson always has someone on hand to tell him or her how great they are. In such circumstances it is little wonder that some sportsmen and women come to believe that the usual rules simply do not apply. If you don’t believe that to be the case, reflect on this: a study by the US National Institute of Mental Health found that between 1988 and 1991 more than one third of sexual assaults committed on American campuses were perpetrated by students on sports scholarships, who account for less than two per cent of students.

Like all projects, this one has mutated. It started off as a quest to find the most unhinged sporting practitioners in history but morphed as it became clear that a list of 100 Vinnie Jones-style hardmen would constitute a onedimensional bore. Anyway, in the colloquial sense madness is a subjective term which encompasses everything from outrageous heroism through extreme eccentricity to profound psychological trauma. The selection of the following 100 men and women (and despite a conscious effort to spread the net across all sports, circumstances, countries and genders, these pages are dominated by Anglophone men) represents an effort to include as many sporting forms as possible of the mental short-circuiting we know as madness.

I tried to set myself some ground-rules, although readers will undoubtedly argue that I’ve included exceptions to each of my rules, and in some cases they will probably be right. I decided, for instance, that simply doing a crazy sport—sky-diving, cave-diving, drag-racing, mountain-climbing, ultra-distance running and the like—couldn’t be a sign of madness on its own. Otherwise this book would just be a collection of athletes who do remarkable things rather than athletes who are themselves remarkable. It is, I feel, a crucial distinction.

The abiding principle in compiling this list of my 100 biggest loonies is that all of the people in the following pages have either acted in a consistently irrational manner or have demonstrated that they are capable of extraordinary responses to extraordinary situations. That, I suppose, is as close to an objective definition of madness as I am willing to offer. Over and above that, all 100 of the individuals in these pages have stories that have touched me in some way, usually by prompting a macabre and wholly reprehensible freak-show fascination.

I’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible, neither dismissing individuals because their stories are so well known—Diego Maradona, Paul Gascoigne, George Best, Eric Cantona, Roy Keane, and Alex Higgins all come into that category—nor avoiding fringe figures like Rollen Stewart and Pretty Boy Shaw who exist on the very margins of sport. I was surprised, however, by the degree to which there seems to be a correlation between madness and genius. Or perhaps it’s just that the memory of crazy deeds perpetrated by sport’s colossuses lingers longer in the memory and in the archives. The other major surprise was the degree to which some unexpected sports churn out the warped and depraved, while others simply don’t. For every rugby-playing fruitcake, there are ten baseballing lunatics. As the Yanks would say, go figure.

I have also to thank those friends and colleagues who have helped me research this book or read over sections and provided feedback. Vicky Stirling deserves a medal for listening to me droning on about nutters and for providing her frank opinions on the merits of the lunatics upon whom I eventually alighted. I started off with a list of around sixty sportsmen and women who I thought would pass muster, but less than half of those made the final cut. More than twenty of the seventy nutcases I subsequently found while researching the nooks and crannies of sporting insanity were suggestions from friends and colleagues. For their input I’m truly grateful.

In particular I’d like to thank Jon Hotten, whose fascination with sport’s macabre twilight zone and whose willingness to give of his time and surprisingly deep well of knowledge was much appreciated. The following colleagues also gave up time and ideas, and deserve acknowledgement for their input: Craig Lord, Dermot Crowe, Jon Rendall, Iain Fletcher, Mark Woods, Martin Gillingham, Jeremy Hart, James Allen, James Eastham, Stuart Weir, James Hipwell, Richard Verrow, Gary Sutherland, Ciaran O’Raillaigh, Rick Weber, Mark Woods, Neil Forsyth, Rob Eyton-Jones, Gulu Ezekiel, Jonathan Dyson, Peter Roebuck, Alix Ramsay, Harry Miltner, Ivan Goldman, Neil Jameson, Phil Ball, Dan Brennan, Richard Fletcher, Stuart Cosgrove, Dominic Calder-Smith, Gregor Paul, Tom English, Alex Massie, Steve Downes, Eamon Lynch, Matt Zeysing, Michele Verroken, Bill Lothian, Alistair Hignell, Lucinda Rivers, John Huggan and Alan Pearey. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed out.

I’d also like to thank my wife Bea and beloved kids Ollie, Ailsa and Lochie,who all displayed characteristic forbearance at my continual absences during this work’s troublesome gestation. This book is for my three little nutcases.

Finally, I’d like to thank my agent Mark Stanton and my publisher Michael Doggart, without whom this book would have remained an argument between two blokes on barstools.

Richard Bath

Edinburgh

May 2006

(richardbbath@yahoo.co.uk)