Bizarre with Mick Molloy and Titus O’Reily

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 does know well, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Between 2013 and 2018, Rodman made numerous trips to North Korea, calling Jong-un a ‘friend for...

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. Attempts to lift the curse have included fans apologizing to KFC store managers and making offerings to the statues of the Colonel outside of restaurants....

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 class fighting back against discriminatory laws. In its twenty years of operating, the police attempted to raid the tote so many times and failed to...

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, the game still went ahead with a very nervous backup keeper. Reuters described another match as "a bar-room brawl with soccer skills abandoned for sw...

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 States, Young Griffo would become one of the greatest boxers of all time, despite never training and rarely fighting sober. In a career spanning 232 figh...

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 would be the biggest mess; competitors were refused water, runners were chased off course by dogs, there was cheating, several near deaths, and the first rec...

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 men as behind the attack, all linked to Kerrigan’s main rival, Tonya Harding. Titus and Mick look back on the motley crew that carried out the attack,...

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 provided by the organisers. Titus O’Reily and Mick Molloy look at the use of doping in the Tour De France from 1903 until the Festina Affair in 1998,...

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 in 1903 as a marketing exercise to boost the circulation of the newspaper L’Auto, the first was won by Maurice-François Garin, who knocked an opponent...

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 children in the back seat of a car. The assembled media got ready to learn where each of them was being traded. Mike Kekich explained the trade to the m...

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 off-limits, athletics, swimming, rugby, American Football, cricket, baseball, badminton, motorsports, tennis and even that sport on the ice with brooms Follo...