Sports Bizarre

By the time Jimmy White was 13, he was skipping school and travelling around England in a black cab to play snooker and hustle adults out of their money. Turning professional, Jimmy quickly became the most beloved snooker player in the world while...

Completing our look at the early days of boxing, we pick up where the sport moves from having no rules whatsoever to having at least three of them. It's the nanny state gone mad. We meet the man who lends his name to these new rules, the 9th Marquess...

In the seventeenth century in England, the earliest form of modern boxing emerged, a wild free for all style of fighting that included eye gouging, hair pulling, spitting, head-butting, shin-kicking, stomping and kicking downed opponents. Out of...

If you thought Part One was crazy, Part Two is looser than a night out with John Daly. We pick up just after Daly had signed a sponsorship contract with a 'no alcohol or gambling' clause. What follows is an awful lot of drinking and gambling. Titus...

Golfer John Daly may be one of the most relatable sportspeople ever, having once said, “I don’t think I’ve ever stepped in the gym – they won’t let me smoke there.” Daly took the golfing world by storm, winning the 1991 PGA Tournament with...

Despite a valiant effort to stay on holiday forever, Mick and Titus will return in 2023, with the first episode going out on the 6th of February. Titus gives a brief overview of the year ahead and reveals the focus of episode one. Follow Sports...

It’s the final episode in our dodgy road to the Qatar World Cup series and our final show of 2022. Don’t worry, we’re back early in the new year. This episode looks at the fall of Sepp Blatter, features more arrests than an episode of The Wire...

It's part of five of our look at the beautiful corruption that is FIFA; we pick up with Sepp Blatter still ascendant, but the cracks are starting to appear.  Facing challenges for the FIFA presidency and numerous legal problems, Sepp tries to...

It’s part four of our look at the history of FIFA, which means it's time to introduce two new fun characters to our story, Chuck Blazer and Fred Warner, two men so corrupt even other FIFA delegates were shocked by them, which is saying something. We...

It’s part three of our look at the history of FIFA, and in this episode, we introduce a young man with a sparkle in his eye, Sepp Blatter. Part Bond villain, part, well actually, all Bond villain; under Blatter, FIFA made the final step towards...

It’s part two of our look at the history of FIFA, and its somewhat eccentric accounting practices. In this episode, we look at João Havelange, President of FIFA from 1974 to 1998, who brought in the money and bought the votes to be President. Titus...

With the FIFA World Cup in Qatar fast approaching, we begin a multi-episode dive into the corruption that led to FIFA thinking a country the size of the Falkland Islands, with no infrastructure and temperatures hovering around the 'too hot to play...

On 4 June 1974, the Cleveland Indians decided to host a ten-cent beer night to attract fans; beer at the stadium normally cost 65 cents, so ten cents was a real incentive.  The Indians were in a 30-year slump at the time, as was the city, their...

Frederick Charles Standish left England in 1852 under a false name and fleeing moneylenders. Landing in Melbourne, he was forced to live on the goldfields and run a sly grog business. Yet, just six years later, he would be the colony's Chief...

Timothy John Rossovich was a star defensive end and linebacker at the University of Southern California and the Philadelphia Eagles, but it was off the field where his genius shone. Rossovich was famous for surreal pranks that included chewing glass,...

Robert Standish Sievier was one of the most colourful personalities of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, a man who revolutionised bookmaking in Australia before returning to England, where his horse Sceptre won four of the five English classics....

Contracts in sports contain clauses so weird they are scarcely believable. There are clauses banning players from going to nightclubs, but there's also been a clause insisting a player got drunk after every game. Contracts have included clauses for...

In an All-Star career, Dock Ellis managed to win a World Series, pitch a no-hitter on LSD, hit every batter that came to the plate in a game and set a clubhouse on fire. But for every bit of craziness, Ellis was also ahead of his time as a...

At the 2000 Paralympic games, a new category, Basketball for the Intellectually Disabled, was to be included in the games. It got the head of the Spanish Paralympics Fernando Martin Vicente thinking, what if you could get people who weren’t...

The 1900 Paris Olympics were a disaster of planning and execution, to the point many athletes never even knew they’d participated in an Olympics. So poorly organised were the games that the discus field was too narrow and throws went into the crowd,...

In the 1930s, several English football clubs experimented with a new treatment sweeping the globe, ingesting, injecting or transplanting testicular tissue from monkeys into people.  So widespread was the practice that the 1939 FA Cup final...

Former Chicago Bull Dennis Rodman has recently offered to go to Russia to talk to President Vladimir Putin about the imprisoned WNBA star Brittney Griner. While Rodman claims somewhat falsely that "I know Putin too well," there’s one dictator he...

Sporting curses are always strange, but perhaps none is stranger than the Curse of Colonel Sanders, which has seen the Japanese baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers, suffer decades of poor performances after offending the spirit of the KFC founder....

In 1893, John Wren, unemployed and from a poor family, set up the Collingwood Tote, an illegal betting shop that would achieve mythical status, depending on who you asked, as either a den of vice ruining the lives of many or as a symbol of the working...

The 1967 Intercontinental Cup saw Scottish club Celtic and Argentinian side Racing Club face off across three brutal matches. In one match, the Celtic goalkeeper was knocked unconscious by a bottle thrown from the crowd before the game; despite this,...

Albert Griffiths, or ‘Young Griffo’ began life in the slums of Sydney as the leader of a local street gang. This proved to be the perfect training for boxing, and before he was twenty, he was the World Featherweight Champion. Moving to the United...

The 1904 Olympics in St Louis, Missouri, were a disaster in every way possible. Held over six months alongside the World’s Fair, it had a human zoo and a ‘savage Olympics’ pitting various indigenous groups against each other. But the marathon...

Days out from the 1994 US Figure Skating Championships, Nancy Kerrigan had just finished training at the Cobo Arena in Detroit when a man approached and hit her with a metal object just above her knee. Almost immediately, the FBI would identify four...

From the first Tour De France, riders were putting all kinds of things in their bodies, caffeine, strychnine, cocaine and alcohol. Drugs were so much part of the sport that the 1930 rulebook, given to all riders, reminded them that drugs would not be...

The early years of the Tour De France were a hot mess, with a spiked bottle of lemonade, itching powder put in cyclists’ shorts, riders taking rides in cars and trains, attempted murder and pitched battles between cyclists and spectators. Beginning...

On March 4, 1973, it was announced New York Yankees pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson would be holding separate press conferences that day. Both men would be announcing a trade, nothing unusual in baseball where players move around more than...

Titus O’Reily and Mick Molloy are on the hunt for the most bizarre stories to ever occur in the world of sport. Sports Bizarre delves into the history of sport to find the stories that you wouldn’t believe if they hadn’t happened. No sport is...