Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 8

French rugby props are famously nutty, but few have taken their madness to such violent extremes. Vaquerin may have been capped twenty-six times between 1971 and 1980, and he may have won more French Cupwinners’ medals (‘Boucliers’) with the all-conquering Beziers team than any man alive, but it’s for the manner of the loose-head’s departure as much as for what he did while he was here that he will be remembered.

Courageous, generous, and famously popular in his home town, Vaquerin had struggled to adapt to life after his rugby career was brought to a premature end in 1980 by a knee injury he first suffered five years earlier (his absence gave Gerard Cholley his chance and the moving brick outhouse quickly established himself as France’s premier No.1).

After his retirement, Vaquerin had thrown himself into other sports, notably hunting and deep-sea diving, and had spent six years in Mexico before coming back to his home town, where he opened a bar called Le Cardiff. A larger-than-life bull-necked bruiser with a shiny pate and Pancho Villa moustache, locals said Vaquerin ‘liked to live life at 100 kilometres an hour’.

On 10 July 1993, the 42-year-old son of Spanish immigrants organised a party in a local arena to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his first cap, won against Romania when he was just 20, making him the youngest prop ever to have played international rugby. Despite the fact that a huge crowd had turned up, Vaquerin, who had only had one aperitif, grew restless and went in search of fun.

He crossed to the wrong side of the tracks and wandered into a famously rough Beziers bar and, despite the protestations of friends, proceeded to pick a row with a fellow drinker. The exact sequence of events isn’t clear, but it seems that the poor man accidentally spilt Vaquerin’s drink, and then offered to buy him another. When the bull-necked prop refused the offer and suggested that they fight instead, the man understandably refused. This is the point at which, to the astonishment of the whole bar, he pulled out a gun from his car and offered his terrified adversary another option: to play Russian roulette with him. Unsurprisingly, the man simply turned and bolted.

Now in the process of having, er, fun, Vaquerin challenged the worried locals to take up his kind offer and join him in a sociable game of blind man’s buff with bullets. But when no one would play with him, he took matters into his own hands. Removing five of the six bullets from the chamber of his Smith and Wesson revolver and uttering the immortal words ‘if you bastards won’t play with me, I’ll play by myself’, he did just that. The sixth bullet entered his right temple, killing him instantly. Friends said he died as he had lived, in a desperate pursuit of excess.