May's 10: Sporting kiss and tell's | Sport (original) (raw)

1) Des Lynham

A confirmed ladies' man ('I love the company of women, love toying with the best looker at the party'), Lynam had been divorced for five years when his eye was taken, in 1979, by Caroline Cossey, a smooth-skinned model who measured 37-24-37. Yet Cossey had a secret. She had once been a man called Barry. 'He was the most wonderful, passionate kisser,' Cossey told the tabloids shortly after Lynam ended their relationship. 'He was very touchy-feely and very physical.' Des, meanwhile, appeared to be suffering from amnesia. 'Unless I was absolutely psychotic,' he said, 'I don't ever remember making love to her.'

2) Boris Becker

The German tennis star lived up to his 'Bonking Boris' tag of the Eighties by getting trainee investment banker Angela Ermakowa pregnant inside the broom cupboard of the fashionable London eaterie Nobu, in 1999. 'To stop him when he was so excited was as impossible as stopping a high-speed train,' she confided, exclusively, in the Daily Mail. 'I felt like Cinderella... Boris was like a radiant German knight.' After a paternity test proved that Becker was the father (he had originally accused Angela of stealing his sperm), the German countered: 'It wasn't even an affair. It was an act that lasted five seconds.' He isn't known as 'Boom Boom' for nothing.

3) Sven Goran Eriksson

Having already had Ulrika Jonsson describe his technique in the Daily Mail ('There was no sense of hesitation about him, just a calm, gentle loving'), Sven was back under the spotlight following his affair with FA secretary Faria Alam. Predictably dubbed 'Svengate' by the News of the World (sample headline: 'Sven had me on a four-poster') the story was sensational enough to command a Tonight With Trevor McDonald special. Alam signed up with PR guru Max Clifford and, within hours, her detailing of the finer points of Sven's lovemaking ('It was beautiful. He didn't use a condom, he was not concerned about me getting pregnant. Then he pulled on some cotton pyjama bottoms before returning to bed') had earned her a reported £300,000.

4) Stan Collymore

While most footballers use their autobiographies to talk about their success, Stan Collymore used Tackling My Demons to show the notches on his bed post. TV presenters Ulrika Jonsson and Davina McCall both rated a mention, as did DJ Sara Cox and model Sophie Dahl. But it was another television presenter, Kirsty Gallacher, who commanded special attention: 'She did things with chocolate fingers that have stopped me looking at them in the same way since,' he wrote. Gallacher strongly denied this, but then Collymore is alleged to have bragged about the affair to former Bath team-mates of her new beau, rugby player Paul Sampson, in a bar in Dublin. Although Stan spent the next day in hospital with a broken nose and bruised ribs, no charges were ever brought following the fracas between him and the Bath team.

5) Wayne Rooney

If the teenage superstriker (recently voted the man most women have a secret crush on) was going to cheat on his shopaholic girlfriend, Coleen McLoughlin, it would surely be with someone he would consider leaving her for, right? Wrong. Rooney's penchant for prostitutes was revealed when he was caught on CCTV shouting 'I'll shag you for £50' outside a brothel in Liverpool. In a Sunday Mirror exclusive, 37-year-old brunette Gina McCarrick, dressed in her favoured cowgirl outfit, said: 'Wayne didn't turn me on at all. He was ugly. He had a face like a smacked arse.' Rooney later confessed to having visted the den around 10 times.

6) Ian Botham

After brushing off claims by former Miss Barbados Lindy Field that, during England's 1986 tour of the West Indies, she and Beefy, or 'Botty' as she called him, had taken cocaine and had sex so wild they broke a bed, Ian Botham was unable to issue a denial when Australian waitress Kylie Verrells told of her affair with the England all-rounder in a News of the World exclusive. They met in Sydney in 1999, she said. Beefy wooed her with an email: 'Babe, you ain't seen nothing yet! The mighty Beefy sword awaits ... and that's just for starters.' In January 2001, Botham was forced to make a public apology to his three children and wife Kath.

7) Steve Davis

Snooker's 'Mr Interesting' finally became just that to the tabloids when he was exposed as cheating on his wife, Judith, with 19-year-old Cheree Palla during a tournament in 1995. After the fling ended Palla opened her heart to the Mirror about how, when they first met, she had asked Davis for an autograph at a Bristol hotel. The blonde dancer revealed how Davis would make love to her up to seven times a night in a hotel bedroom. 'He was the best lover I'd ever had,' she reflected. 'He did things to me I didn't even know you could do.'

8) Dean Holdsworth

Every footballer's wife's nightmare, teenage glamour model Linsey Dawn McKenzie used her 36GG charms to beguile Dean Holdsworth in 1996. One al fresco liaison took place on the bonnet of the then Wimbledon striker's £83,000 BMW. The romance ended swiftly when the young 'stunna' discovered that Holdsworth was married. 'I was gutted,' Linsey told the People. 'He was fit, good-looking and wore stylish designer clothes.' Holdsworth's wife, Samantha, was in forgiving mood and took the striker back ('for the sake of the kids'). She would later try to reinvent herself as a pop singer. As for Linsey Dawn, she is now plying her trade on the hard-core porn circuit in America. And Holdsworth, who missed out on the chance to make headlines for the right reasons when he blazed a shot over the Wembley bar that would have taken Bolton to the 2000 FA Cup final, was last seen turning out for MK Dons.

9) Martin Edwards and Douglas Hall

The footballing equivalent of dumb and dumber. It was while attending the Champions League draw in Geneva in 2002 that the bungling Manchester United and Newcastle chairmen got together with prostitutes Nadine Mercier and Houaida Shahine. Unfortunately for them, Sunday Mirror investigators were already on the scene (Houaida: 'It was a wild night, Doug was all over me.' Nadine: 'He [Edwards] was old and like a grandfather.') You would have thought Edwards would have known better. Just two years earlier, while in Brazil for the World Club Championship, he secured the services of prostitute Maria Elves. 'I thought I had tried every fantasy a woman could dream of,' she told the Mirror, 'but it took four hours to make love and it wasn't very good.'

10) John McEnroe

In his autobiography, Serious, McEnroe was surprisingly frank about his tempestuous eight-year marriage to Tatum O'Neal. He met the Oscar-winning actress at a party in the Hollywood Hills: 'The way she smelled when she leaned close was sexy.' McEnroe recalled the first time they made love, having taken drugs: 'We were high and it was terrible ... not an especially good start.' Tatum has since spoken of the 'slow-burn kind of cruelty dished out by John Patrick McEnroe. The book is bullshit.'

Rationale

This month's 10 was selected by OSM's Alex Gibbons. Here he justifies his choice:

One day, the press will do away with the faux outrage. Instead of the screaming headlines and the obligatory 'Exclusive!' stamp that accompany the weekly exposés of sordid sporting indiscretions, we might actually get a genuine 'Man bites dog' story. Something like 'Footballer remains faithful to wife'?

Readers will soon notice that there is a very modern skew to those exposed here. It is not that sportsmen have only recently started thinking with their underpants - they always have. No, it is the growth of a tabloid culture of the sting and honey trap. You'll hear players of yesteryear grumbling that they never received the same financial rewards as their latterday successors. Which is true, of course. But then again, when George Best, Frank Worthington and the rest of those Seventies rogues hit the King's Road, they didn't have to worry that their belle for the evening might be mentally negotiating herself a six-figure deal with the red tops (take a bow, Ms Loos and Ms Alam).

The competition for the final list was as fierce as for any 50-50 ball. Footballers dominate, but while it could have been filled with glamour models and serial offenders (Emma Padfield, a-not-so-shy-and-retiring blonde, tried to bed most of the Leeds team in the late Nineties, succeeding with Lee Sharpe, Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate, the last two together), only the shocking or unexpected are included.

Dishonourable mention should also go to Shane Warne whose steamy phone conversations with two women other than his wife were nearly enough to make the grade. But, for once, Warnie was all mouth and no trousers. And, as any sportsman will tell you, it's all about performance.

Have your say

Disagree with our selection? We thought so. Write and tell us who or what should be in there instead, justifying your choice in no more than 50 words. Send your cards to: 10 Kiss and Tells OSM, 3-7 Herbal Hill, London EC1R 5EJ or email us: osm@observer.co.uk