Someone great once said that laughter prolongs life. If we follow ordinary logic, the inability to laugh shortens that very life. Athletes spend much more time with each other than the workforce of a shop or a bank. They spend long periods at training camps, live in hotels, ride in buses and trains, fly on airplanes, and train. They spend no less time in the team than outside it. One can probably only imagine how much they get on each other's nerves during two weeks of training camps somewhere abroad, when the daily routine is the same every day – wake-up, breakfast, training, lunch, sleep, training, dinner, lights out. It is no accident that those skilled at joking are very popular in teams; it is around them that the team is formed.
Usually pranks happen in the locker room, where it is common to have tied shoelaces on shoes or rubber bands stretched between doors. For example, such devices are made of special medical rubber and are much better than homemade loops. Moreover, such homemade creativity often leads to injuries. But outside the locker rooms, there are no limits to the flight of fancy. For instance, one coach's charges decorated his car with signs that unambiguously indicated that it was a taxi. Unsurprisingly, the driver was perplexed for a long time by the huge number of people wanting to flag down his car.
Athletes are public figures, and they often have to give interviews. Good comrades often make a clever move and hang up a selection of the chosen victim's revelations on the walls of the training base, sticking newspaper and magazine clippings in the most unexpected places.
Hockey players who play overseas in the NHL have a lot of interesting stories to tell. Among them, it is considered normal to smear someone's towel with shaving cream, toothpaste, or shoe polish. God forbid you wipe yourself with that! Someone might put on skates that the jokers have filled with a potent mixture of ketchup, the same toothpaste, and something else just as 'pleasant.' There are frequent cases when someone is late for practice, rushes into the locker room at great speed, gets dressed and puts on skates at the same speed, and then discovers that the laces of his skates have been cut with scissors (if you have ever laced skates, you can imagine the 'joy' of the victim).
In the Pittsburgh hockey team, the main joker was the famous Czech forward Jaromir Jagr. Once, for example, he pranked his teammate John Mullen, who played with a special shield protecting an injured neck. Jaromir came out to one practice wearing a... toilet seat around his neck. And another time, he trained with fake sideburns and a small beard made of electrical tape, mocking the fashionista Petr Nedved.
You won't get bored in a team. Recently in England, they pranked a footballer from London's Arsenal – young Spaniard José Antonio Reyes. A radio host called the player live on air and introduced himself as Real Madrid's sporting director Jorge Valdano. The fake Valdano offered Reyes a move to Real, praising the Spaniard's football talent in every way and claiming that Arsenal didn't appreciate him. The young guy took it all at face value and for a long, long time complained live on air to all of England about life at the London club. Naturally, when he found out he had been the victim of a prank, he was incredibly indignant and hastened to apologize to his Arsenal teammates, who were already aware of the 22-year-old Spaniard's comments about themselves.
It is worth noting that this is not an isolated example. Many clubs joke in a similar way, but in the vast majority of cases, pranks do not go beyond the club's base. Athletes call each other and send faxes with invitations from other teams and national teams.
Many authors of such jokes gradually become legendary figures. People try to watch them more closely and notice their latest inventions. One such world-famous author is the English footballer Paul Gascoigne, also known by the nickname Gazza. Gascoigne was a great footballer, but he was not averse to drinking and joking, often combining one with the other. Unfortunately, he never managed to fully realize himself in football, but in the field of humor, Gazza was unrivaled. One can only imagine how much fun his teammates had, among whom, by the way, were some of our players. For example, former Dynamo Kyiv forward Oleg Salenko, who played with Gascoigne at the Scottish Rangers. Below I will give a few of Gazza's most striking antics, which have been considered classics for years. However, after listing all of Gascoigne's 'accomplishments,' one might wonder how mentally normal he was. But that is another conversation.
Literally an hour after the end of a game for the England national team, Paul was spotted in the company of his friends Danny Baker and Chris Evans in a pub. Dressed completely in his national team kit! And Gazza was in such a hurry (or pretended to be in a hurry) that he didn't even have time to change his footwear and was drinking in the pub right in his... boots.
Once, during a visit to London, the footballer jumped out of a car, took a jackhammer from a road worker working nearby, and showered passersby with gravel, to their wild delight.
When Paul was playing for Newcastle, he ordered a course of tanning sessions for his teammate Tony Cunningham. As you may have guessed, Tony, of course, was black. And another friend of his – Jimmy Gardner – Gazza once introduced to a girl who turned out to be a transvestite. And Paul also treated Jimmy to a sweet bun, from which he had removed the filling and put there... cat excrement.
In the England national team, he once disrupted a training session because he arrived in socks with mops sticking out of them. This was the footballer's response to coach Bobby Robson, who the day before had called him 'as dumb as a mop' (the English version of our expression 'dumb as a cork').
After one of the matches against Wimbledon, in which Gazza treated Vinnie Jones, a midfielder as frantic as himself, rather unkindly, Gascoigne sent a rose to the opponents' dressing room. In response, he received a toilet brush.
At the 1990 World Cup, in a match against Belgium, Paul mocked Enzo Scifo when he was injured and lay on the grass holding his leg. Gazza hopped around him on one leg with his tongue out. And at a meeting with the president of the Danish football federation, Gascoigne said he could speak Danish. When asked to demonstrate his skill, Gazza began copying the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show very closely to the original.
In 1988, Gazza signed a contract with London's Tottenham Hotspur and decided to celebrate the occasion with friends. They booked a room in the luxurious Hadley Woods hotel, which the club paid for, and trashed the place completely. When Paul later met the club president, he began his conversation with the words: "Thank you for the three happiest days of our lives!"
And during his first evening in Rome after signing with Lazio, Paul ran away from the guide, put his shoes by an open window, and hid in a table. The guide thought Gazza had committed suicide.
Another incident from team life in the dressing room. One fine day, Gazza stole and cut into small pieces an Armani jacket that his national team partner Dennis Wise had bought for himself. As the joker later explained, he did it "just for laughs".
Overall, Gazza is a very colorful character. As the famous German footballer Mario Basler said, "The world has not yet known a player who would drink after every match and still stay on his feet." Unfortunately, his playing career ended prematurely. Last winter, by the way, he was wanted to be invited to FC Moscow to attract spectators to the stands, since Gascoigne was himself not only in the dressing room but also on the field. Alas (or maybe fortunately), the transfer did not happen.
A great many funny stories are connected with trips of our athletes abroad. Amusing situations occurred for two main reasons: ignorance of foreign languages and the backwardness of the USSR, and later of the former Soviet republics, in terms of technical progress. To this day there is a legend about how one midfielder of the Soviet national team, during his first trip abroad, did not know how to turn on a water tap and had to amuse his teammates, who advised him to give his surname, year of birth, and club.
Former defender of Dynamo Kyiv and the Ukraine national team Alexander Golovko laughed as he recalled his adventures in China, where he lived in the coastal city of Qingdao: "Why did I rarely go swimming? It's just as if a monkey had come to our beach! Can you imagine my appearance on a beach where there are only Chinese people around? When you walk among them in clothes, the attention is not so close. They are already used to Europeans. But if you go swimming, increased attention is guaranteed. They took photos with me, pointed fingers at me, and watched what I was doing. I felt like I was in a zoo. It's very hard to overcome yourself and not lose your temper. They find it interesting, you don't. True, over time I became a familiar sight, and the Chinese stopped pointing fingers."
Another curious story was told by the same Golovko: "The Chinese language is too difficult for me. Truly Chinese writing! You pronounce a sound incorrectly - and that's it, the meaning of the word is completely different. It happened that teammates I tried to call did not respond. It turned out I was somehow pronouncing the vowels incorrectly. But the most memorable event happened when I got into a taxi. I thought I had learned all the names I needed, and I asked the driver to take me from the stadium to the hotel where the club had booked a room for me. So I said the name of the hotel. The driver turned and stared at me with an astonished look. I repeated it, and his eyes began to widen. When I repeated it several times and the reaction became even stronger, I had to say that he should just drive, and I would give him directions - right, left, or straight. We arrived. He turns around and says, 'Why didn't you just say you needed to go here?' And he pronounces that very name I had repeated to him several times at the beginning! I almost fell over! I didn't understand anything and turned to the interpreter the club had assigned to me. He started laughing. He said that again I hadn't fully drawn out the vowel, and as a result it turned out I was asking the driver to take me not to the hotel, but to the brewery. And he, seeing that I was an athlete, just blinked his eyes in bewilderment..."
The now very popular Ukrainian footballer Andriy Voronin has lived in Germany for almost ten years, where he went from a promising junior to one of the best scorers in the Bundesliga. He started in Mönchengladbach, where he became friends with current Bayern Munich midfielder Sebastian Deisler. Why Deisler turned specifically to Voronin with a request to cut his hair is unknown. The Odessite set about the task with great care, and in the end Sebastian saw in the mirror his own completely bald head. No one will remember how long the German chased the Ukrainian, but in the end Voronin decided to compensate his friend for the moral damage and shaved his own head bald.
Another native of Odessa, Dmitry Piterman, who for some time owned the elite division club Racing, reacted in an original way to the demand to provide the Spanish professional league with a coaching license. When he was forbidden to be on the team's coaching bench (and Piterman persistently tried to manage not only the club but also the team), the ex-Odessite got himself accredited as a photographer, put on the appropriate shirt, and sat down next to the bench with a camera in his hands.
One can also recall the story of how the USSR national basketball team flew to the World Championship on the same plane as the Israeli team. In the front rows were the Israelis, further back were our team, and in the tail of the plane at an observation point sat head coach Kondrashin, who guards his team like Karatsupa. The team was accompanied by a doctor and two female journalists. While boarding, the doctor says: "Girls, come sit with me, I have everything," and discreetly shows a 0.75-liter bottle. Immediately after takeoff (there is such a tradition), you need to have a first drink, but there are no glasses or shot glasses. What to do? They came up with the idea of drinking from paper airsickness bags. The first drink went well, they decided to repeat. The basketball players sitting in the same row across the aisle see everything and are fiercely envious: they are not allowed, because Kondrashin would immediately kick them out of the team for such things. They can't drink, but they can joke. Then one of them nudges the Israelis sitting in front and says: "Look at the Russians: absolutely everyone is drinking, even their own vomit." The Israelis turn around, and our team at that moment is just having their second drink... The entire Israeli team is immediately turned inside out. And at the actual World Championship, our team threw the ball into Israel's basket quite well.