Let us start with a cracker of its despicable genre.
Which figure, a knight of the realm, was asked by a young journalist the innocent question of how he would spend his summer break, only for him to retort, erroneously, as it happens: ‘Where are you spending yours? You should stay out of those gay bars?’
Before we answer that, a bit of background. It has been said that political correspondents are like most of the politicians they write about but still pretend to hate them. And that with sports journalists it is the other way around.
I’m not necessarily won over by that rationale, but I remember the admonishing note sent by his editor to the greatest American sportswriter of his day, Red Smith. He was asked rhetorically: ‘Why, Red, do you keep Godding-up all those damn ballplayers?’
Well, there is no bug-eyed admiration here today, the occasional sentiment of my trade’s indulgence stripped away from our subjects, and I want to name and shame some of the vile characters, some of them ‘Godded-up’ beyond belief as a result of their prowess and power, who, when away from the scrutiny of the TV cameras, have tongues like vipers, and hearts like stone.
Sport is a selfish business and winning is everything to many of them, or that is how it seems.
There are some good guys and girls, decent folk, kind and thoughtful. Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, how could anyone be more genuinely down to earth?
Sir Ben Ainslie, our greatest sailor, is one such shining knight. Sir Steve Redgrave is not. He is a bore and big-headed, and as his rival for Olympic supremacy Daley Thompson posited to me: ‘Was he even the best in his own boat?’
There was a lot more than bullying that went into the genius of Ferguson, a preternatural sensitivity to the needs of his players that was empathetic in excess of what could be learned across a million sports science degrees
Three times Mercedes Formula One boss Toto Wolff, or an apparatchik, wrote to my sports editor to get me in trouble, or worse sacked, for writing truths he found unhelpful
Yes, he was, but not by the time, fighting colitis and diabetes, he pulled off the phenomenal feat of winning his fifth Olympic gold medal in Sydney so bravely aged 38.
Sir Alex Ferguson was a brilliant football manager, perhaps the greatest ever, even beyond his hero Jock Stein, of Celtic and Scotland legend. But impressive though he was it was Fergie who made the ‘gay bars’ barb.
Now there was a lot more than bullying that went into the genius of Ferguson, a preternatural sensitivity to the needs of his players that was empathetic in excess of what could be learned across a million sports science degrees.
But there was still that immutable streak of the bully, made worse by his position of pre-eminence at Old Trafford, combined with a chippiness when he travelled south of the border to plant his name in the story of the world’s most popular sport.
Sure, he could be nice to journalists, but preferably if you were older and ideally northern or Scottish. Then he would not stint in affection, and was especially considerate to the ill, or in commemoration of the dead, whose funerals he would attend in genuine, as well ambassadorial, remembrance.
But if you were a twenty or thirty-year-old-something journalist, it was his way and no other way. Hence the comments recorded above made to my younger colleague on another paper.
At Manchester City’s Christmas party, Joey Barton stubbed out a lit cigar in the eye of youth player Jamie Tandy, for which he received a suspension of six months’ wages
Barton was stripped of the QPR captaincy for elbowing Carlos Tevez in the face in the final match of the 2012 season against Manchester City
He could fall out with others easily. Hugh McIlvanney ghost-wrote Ferguson’s first biography, but their relationship fractured, even though the affinity was forged out of the same west of Scotland mining heritage. Ferguson did not show up at Hughie’s funeral.
For all the rampaging success of Manchester United, the artistry is sullied by the image of Ferguson snarling, gum-chewing a prop to his malevolence, at the dugout. Officials, the opposing team, the media were all targets of his ire, often foul-mouthed, self-serving, and seething, and buttressed by his corporal-in-chief Gary Neville.
Again, Fergie’s ability to fall out with his supposed friends, his take-it-or-leave-it character, was evident in the dispute over Rock of Gibraltar, the fabulous racehorse he owned with John Magnier and JP McManus, who were United shareholders and co-owners of Coolmore, the world’s foremost breeding operation.
A monumental feud over breeding rights ensued. Ferguson believed he had a stake in them and sued his club’s own directors. An out-of-court settlement was reached.
How different the course of United in recent years might have been but for this, you can only wonder. (McIlvanney sided with Magnier and McManus, incidentally, explaining the point made about their fraternity foundering.)
A word out of place from the Press and Ferguson would respond in the manner he did when asked by an agency reporter, now on Sky, about Ryan Giggs’ importance to an imminent Champions League match. Ferguson whispered to an aide: ‘We’ll get him. Ban him on Friday.’
Nice touch, Sir Alex.
Another twerp of the highest order with whom I have clashed is that brat in excelsis Nick Kyrgios, the Australian tennis player who is not quite as good as he thought he was
Just as it was at an airport baggage carousel one day at the time of the Glazer takeover. Ferguson was approached by a group of United fans at the end of a European trip and asked about his support of the incoming American owners. He told them: ‘F*** off, and support Chelsea.’
Charming. He also took a dim view of the Manchester Evening News covering the matches of FC United, the breakaway club prompted by the Glazers’ takeover. He didn’t speak to the Evening News for a while.
I have experienced a ‘ban’ a few times.
Three times Mercedes Formula One boss Toto Wolff, or an apparatchik, wrote to my sports editor to get me in trouble, or worse sacked, for writing truths he found unhelpful. Lewis Hamilton may have had a hand in the attempted knife wielding.
We have since made up, Toto and I, and I stopped him in the paddock to thank him for writing his third letter of complaint. ‘You have done me a great favour,’ I told him, tongue in cheek. ‘No self-respecting editor could sack me now.’
Another ban came much earlier, ahead of the Olympic Games in London, when an American sprinter Tiffany Porter, who came to the British team because she couldn’t hit the grade in her more competitive home nation, was made captain of her adopted land by the preening coach, the Dutchman Charles van Commenee.
It was a deliberately provocative move by Van Commenee, a sensitive man actually, and one whom I liked. I asked Porter at a press conference if she knew the words of the National Anthem – the British one, that is, which didn’t seem an unreasonable possibility for the, er, British captain.
Born in Michigan, Porter declined to answer. All hell broke loose. I was banned by those sensitive souls of the track.
Some colleagues were cock-a-hoop – ‘Mail man banned’ – glee abounding! A colleague at another paper was making hay out of this, sharing his glad tidings on Twitter.
His gloating was cut short abruptly when his own sports editor phoned him as he sat trackside, grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘We’d rather you weren’t tweeting this, but instead had asked the question yourself,’ he was informed. Silence on Twitter from then on.
Van Commenee, a hired gun who brought rigour to British athletics, was however right in his dealings with that self-righteous idiot triple jumper Phillips Idowu.
The two fell out because Idowu was a rebel without a cause, a surly individual in my experience, too. But Van Commenee tried to mend fences and I watched as he offered him a hand of reconciliation in an airport lounge in Daegu, South Korea, where Idowu had lost his world championship title.
Idowu rudely sat on his backside and rejected the attempted ceasefire.
Another false icon is Sir Mo Farah, who has always struck me as money mad. Of course, he knew nothing of his coach Alberto Salazar’s involvement in performance-enhancing drugs.
But Farah, transformed by Salazar, was the kind of person who sued a journalist for £30,000 for a misplaced word in a tweet.
He was managed by Ricky Simms, as was Usain Bolt. I turned up at Arsenal’s Emirates one day to interview Farah. Simms growled: ‘Seeing as it’s you, the interview is off.’ I had written something he had found disobliging about Bolt – an accurate story that the superlative Jamaican sprinter had visited the Munich clinic of Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, the unorthodox doctor who injected patients with calf’s blood.
Another twerp of the highest order with whom I have clashed is that brat in excelsis Nick Kyrgios, the Australian tennis player who is not quite as good as he thinks he is.
Now, he can play some lovely tennis, a languid arm in his stroke. But he was a snarler dressed up by his apologists as a character the sport could not live without.
You might take that if he didn’t swear at ball boys and girls for being too slow proffering him a towel. Or, as he did at Wimbledon, swear incessantly at the umpire.
Sir Mo Farah was the kind of person who sued a journalist for £30,000 for a misplaced word in a tweet
Or blaspheme if a mobile phone went off in the crowd. Not good that the ring disturbed him, I agree (oops!), but hardly the end of the world.
He was boorish in his response to journalists’ questions, a punky little poseur who thought he could do what he wanted. We clashed at the press conference after he had sworn like a sailor. He asked if I had ever sworn. Of course I have and I must admit that, as deadline approaches in newsrooms across Fleet Street, industrial language is rife.
But to make such a prolonged exhibition of himself with tirades on Centre Court is not something of which to be proud, as he wished to make it seem.
Of course, John McEnroe changed the landscape on the acceptable in the Eighties with his foul-mouthed anger. He has since turned into an erudite pundit, his intelligence winning out in the end.
But back briefly to Kyrgios. When he didn’t win the Newcombe Medal as Australia’s player of 2022, losing out to Ash Barty, who had claimed her home Grand Slam, the third of her major titles, he was apoplectic. He had reached the Wimbledon final, plus a doubles title in Australia (never winning a singles Slam, for the record). He posted: ‘LOL. No respect at all. I don’t give a f***.’
Clearly not, mate.
Speaking of Aussies, on to Eddie Jones, the one-time mercenary coach of the England rugby team. He would phone players and staff at 4am, barking mad. An intimidator by nature.
Ian Chappell, since the supreme Richie Benaud’s death, is seen as the Godfather of Australian cricket, and has been a fine, incisive commentator in his native land.
Tyson Fury once said, before claiming, wrongly, that he’d been misquoted: ‘There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia.’
He fell out with Sir Ian Botham, and they have never made up, nor will they. When our own sports diarist Charles Sale reported a confrontation in a car park between the pair Down Under, Chappell was incandescent.
‘You are dead from the neck up,’ he diagnosed of Sale. He called him a ‘muppet’. Chappell went on Adelaide Radio and further lambasted Sale and Botham as ‘two masters of fairytales’.
I was in the Oval press room when Merv Hughes came in, moustache twitching, to confront Sale over something he had written in his unmissable column about a remark Hughes had made at a corporate event.
Hughes vented his fury and left. We all looked at each other grimacing. Hughes stormed back in and said menacingly: ‘So you think it’s funny, do you, Charlie?’
And there was the England hooker Brian Moore, whose skills as an ersatz journalist Sale had questioned in print. Moore sent Sale a lovely email after he (Moore) had written a piece that garnered a lot of positive comments on the Telegraph website, saying: ‘Now tell me I am not a f****** journalist you fat f****** c***.’
Back in football, Jude Bellingham is a decent player, but bad for team spirit, a fact Sir Gareth Southgate well registered in his last weeks as England manager. It was never Jude’s fault. An ego as big as Australia.
As Southgate’s successor, Thomas Tuchel, observed, tellingly: ‘If he smiles, he wins everyone. But sometimes you see the rage, you see the hunger and the fire, and it comes out in a way that can be a bit repulsive. For example, for my mother, when she sits in front of the TV, said I see that.’
Mother is always right.
Joey Barton! Where to start on his disgraces? A serial and serious delinquent who, at Manchester City’s Christmas party, stubbed out a lit cigar in the eye of youth player Jamie Tandy, for which he received a suspension of six months’ wages.
By then, in 2005, he had broken the leg of a 35-year-old pedestrian while driving his car at 2am in Liverpool city centre.
Jailed for affray in his time, he beat up his wife in 2021 and received a 12-week suspended sentence.
He is a thug of the first order, who dropped his shorts in an insult to home fans at Goodison Park and was warned by the FA for his stupid posturing.
And, like the great author he thought he was, who later tried to justify his own misconduct in print himself, he blasted would-be colleagues who published their books after the latest of several unsuccessful World Cup campaigns in 2006.
‘England did nothing in the World Cup, so why are they bringing books out?’ argued the bard from Huyton, Merseyside. ‘”We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like s***, here’s my book.” Who wants to read that? I don’t.’
This football ‘god’ made his England debut the following year against Spain, joy of joys, replacing the excellent Frank Lampard, who is a decent man, and who had, in fact, produced one of Barton’s castigated tomes.
Barton’s crime sheet is almost biblical. He was arrested on suspicion of assault and criminal damage involving a taxi driver, in 2007. He ripped out, so it was alleged, the taxi driver’s radio because he would not wait at a McDonald’s drive-through.
He was found not guilty on this occasion. His cousin, Joshua Wilson, 19, admitted he had caused the damage.
Then, one of several training ground incidents of criminality. His Manchester City team-mate Ousmane Dabo pressed charges. Barton admitted assault and in July 2008 was handed a four-month suspended jail sentence and sentenced by the FA to a six-game ban.
He fell out with Stuart Pearce on moving to Newcastle for £5.8million. But he cited a ‘relationship breakdown’ between them, Pearce, his manager, a fair person.
Barton sat out Newcastle’s Boxing Day game, but somehow managed to go out drinking in Liverpool city centre afterwards, got into a ruck, straddling his victim and punched him repeatedly in the face. He spent the New Year behind bars – and got his 74 days in Manchester’s Strangeways prison.
He also made a racist slur against Aston Villa’s Gabriel Agbonlahor, though no action was taken in this case.
QPR took him up on a four-year deal, a pitiful folly. He rewarded them by smashing Blackburn’s Morten Gamst Pedersen in the face. But he was not done with his transgressions. He called Newcastle owner Mike Ashley a ‘fat mate’.
He ridiculed the FA as an ‘Orwellian organisation’ in need of a ‘drastic shake-up’, which was the brightest comment ever uttered by this deluded, self-declared, spectacles-wearing ‘intellectual’.
He was stripped of the QPR captaincy for elbowing Carlos Tevez in the face in the final match of the 2012 season against Manchester City. He was also later found guilty of kneeing Sergio Aguero from behind, before headbutting Vincent Kompany. And, final insult to his lunacy, he called the inoffensive Germany midfielder Dietmar Hamann, a Champions League winner indeed, a ‘maggot’ and a ‘dog’.
In an echo of this tradition, last week in Marbella, I heard, Kylian Mbappe, who wants to be heir to Lionel Messi, rejected at his dinner table an approach from a couple of kids for his autograph, a couple of minders a deterrent to the little ones’ hopes. In their limousined seclusion, this was Kylian’s welcome to the world of the multi-millionaire footballer of today.
And there is Tyson Fury, a ‘Christian’ and purveyor of the noble art of boxing.
He argued homophobically, before claiming, wrongly, that he had been misquoted (a fact at odds with the verbatim transcript): ‘There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia.’
Lester Piggott was brusque. Nick Faldo thanked the press who had chronicled his Major-winning supremacy ‘from the heart of my bottom’.
There are tremendous people in sport. Most of them are. Kind individuals. Volunteers at grassroots. Salt of the earth. There are champions with decorum. It has given so many of us so much enjoyment as participants and observers.
Yet even before our time, the august WG Grace, who pioneered the supposed game of gentlemen, was a ‘shameless cheat’, as an article in cricket’s gospel Wisden depicted him. The bearded, ha, Godded-up, star of Victorian England, second only in global fame to the Queen Empress herself, was clean bowled one day – and he put the bails back on.
One version of events describes Grace as saying: ‘They have come to see me bat, not you bowl.’
Which proves that brattishness in sport is almost as old as sin itself.
