Carlos Kaiser, football’s greatest conman
One team became so frustrated with Kaiser’s injuries that they called in a witch doctor; Kaiser brusquely informed him there are some things even black magic cannot cure and sent him packing. He would do anything to avoid playing or win favour. He paid youth-team members to clatter him in training so that he could fake injury, and gave watching spectators money to sing his name when the club owner was around. Long before Stephen Ireland came up with the idea, Kaiser was committing grannycide: his grandmother was regularly killed off to help him avoid his inanimate nemesis, the football.
17 November 1993
The final night of the old World Cup qualifying system was a sensory overload of drama that included death, ‘murder’, illegal aliens – and Jack Charlton almost chinning Tony Cascarino
Magnificent men and their flying bobsled
The four rattling riders leaned over, helpless, straining, gasping for breath against the wind. They were hardly in control at all. Blinded by spray, tears streamed from their eyes as they raced towards Shady corner. The sled was doing 70mph when it hit the top of the incline. 500 pounds of steel and oak, it smashed through the top of the bank. Four bodies hurtled through the air, and disappeared into the ravine alongside the track.
Betty Wilson and the women’s Ashes
“From this time onward I shall steadfastly refrain from saying that ‘so and so’ batted or bowled ‘like an old woman’”
The Marciano v Muhammad Ali Super Fight
Muhammad Ali could talk and jive all he liked: his opponent, far bigger than any he had faced in the ring, was pulverising him. During a few feverish months in 1967 Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title, slung into jail and had his boxing license ripped up; all for the crime of refusing to take a single forward step – the step that signalled willing induction into the US army. Ali insisted he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong but much of white America, particularly in the south, did with him. They roared for his blood.
The Man had taken his title, his liberty and his livelihood. And then a machine spat in his face.
The world’s best baseball stadium – that was never built
Contemporary is always dangerous when building stadiums. Montreal got contemporary when it built Olympic Stadium for the 1976 Olympics and turned it into the Expos’ home for 27 years. Olympic Stadium was a dreary relic to a modernist view of a sports facility, a monument of concrete and garish yellow seats, covered by an enormous overhang that was supposed to be topped with a retractable roof that never worked. The roof was supposed to fold up into a tower that looms over the stadium. Eventually a permanent blue roof covered Olympic Stadium and the tower remains, awkwardly arcing over the stadium like a huge decapitated swan.
Les Carpenter in Montreal
