Physical talent doesn't necessarily go hand-in-hand with sound morals. Over the decades, a number
of successful athletes have demonstrated a less-than-perfect grasp of ethics and sportsmanship.
With that in mind, check out this list of history's most corrupt athletes.
Lenny Dykstra was an unlikely superstar. When he came up with the New York Mets in the 80s,
nobody pegged him as a future franchise player. But then he bulked up, got traded to the Phillies,
and became the team's driving force on their way to the 1993 World Series. At the height
of his career, Dykstra was making more than $6 million per year.
After retirement, Dykstra sought to reinvent himself as a businessman. He invested in a
chain of car washes, which he sold for millions. Then he became something of a stock-picking
guru and was hired to be a columnist for TheStreet.com. That in turn inspired him to launch The Player's
Club, a magazine and brokerage company focused on helping professional athletes invest and
plan for retirement. Everything seemed to be going great.
But it was all a front for an increasingly corrupt life, fueled by a drug habit that
began during his playing days. The Player's Club was a chaotic mess. After getting the
debut magazine issue out the door, the company was drowning in debt. Dykstra started using
his employees' credit cards to cover his costs, and his descent continued from there. By 2020,
he'd been convicted of grand theft auto, financial fraud, and indecent exposure, to name just
a few of his crimes.
In 2000, Marion Jones was considered one of the greatest athletes in Olympic history.
She'd just scored three gold and two bronze medals at the Sydney Games. Although there
were rumors that she was using illegal performance-enhancing drugs, there was no evidence. She passed all
of her drug tests until testing positive for a banned substance in 2006. But even then,
a follow-up test cleared her.
Jones took a break from the track to have a baby, and when she returned, she didn't
perform up to her previous standards. In 2004, she was accused of using drugs by Victor Conte,
the head of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, which had supplied professional athletes with
various steroid products. Jones sued and issued fierce denials.
But then in 2007, the walls came tumbling down, as Jones admitted that she'd been doping
for years and had lied about her involvement in a money laundering scheme. She was sentenced
to six months in prison and was basically broke, despite once being a millionaire with
several lucrative endorsement deals.
"How did this happen? How in the world is my worst nightmare actually happening?"
Lance Armstrong was a champion cyclist in his teens and early 20s, but then he was diagnosed
with testicular cancer at the age of 25. After successfully battling the disease, he founded
the Livestrong Foundation and went on to become the most dominant cyclist in history, winning
seven consecutive Tour de Frances.
But today Armstrong is better known as the ringleader of a sophisticated cheating scheme.
In 2013 he finally admitted that he'd used a variety of performance-enhancing drugs during
his storied career. He was then stripped of all of his Tour de France victories and banned
from competition. His elaborate rule-breaking involved setting up doping labs in hotel rooms
and bribing doctors and officials in order to escape detection.
Armstrong also had to face a lawsuit brought against him by the United States Justice Department
for "unjust enrichment." He ultimately settled that suit for $6.65 million, a fraction of
the fortune he'd built by cheating and a small amount of the $32.3 million paid to him over
the years by the U.S. Postal Service, which had sponsored his Tour de France teams.
"Yes or no, did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?"
"Yes."
Pete Rose was undoubtedly one of the best players in baseball history. The all-time
leader in hits, he should've been remembered as a Hall of Fame-caliber athlete. Instead,
he's now largely known as the guy so corrupt that he actually placed bets on his own team.
It was an open secret that Rose had a gambling problem as early as the 1970s. But since he
restricted his bets to horse racing and other sports, it was considered a personal issue
and had no effect on his playing and managing career. But that all changed in 1989, when
he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds. He was accused of not just betting on baseball
but betting on the team that he was managing. As a result, he was banned for life from the
game and is thus ineligible for Hall of Fame induction.
Rose claimed that he never bet on baseball while he was playing, but a notebook kept
by one of his associates shows that he did in fact do so, including on his own team's
games. He's always maintained that he only bet on his team to win, thereby implying that
there would be no reason for him to throw a game. But that hasn't done much to change
his reputation as one of the most corrupt athletes of all time.
"Pete, you're not supposed to be in the hall."
"Even at home?"
Denny McLain was once a baseball superstar. The last major league pitcher to win 30 games
in a season, he won back-to-back Cy Young Awards in 1968 and 1969. But just a year later,
everything went wrong. In 1970, his involvement with a bookmaking scheme run by the Syrian
mob was revealed, and he was temporarily suspended from baseball, despite denying most of the
charges. Without his baseball income, McLain declared bankruptcy, and when he returned
to the game, he wasn't the same. He lost 22 games in 1971 and was out for good by 1972.
It's been a long, slow slide into total corruption since then. McLain hustled golf for a while,
then he began a loan shark business, and he even smuggled a wanted criminal out of the
country in his airplane for $160,000. In 1985, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for
racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, and attempting to sell 3 kilograms of cocaine. He was released
after 27 months, but in 1996, he was convicted of money laundering, conspiracy, theft, and
mail fraud in a pension fraud scheme. At this point, it's easier to ask what crimes Denny
McLain hasn't committed.
After a solid college football career, Rae Carruth was selected in the first round of
the 1997 NFL Draft, and he then signed a $3.7 million deal with a $1.3 million signing bonus.
He got injured the next year, but by 1999, he was back on the comeback trail. But trouble
was brewing. He was worried about the child support he owed to Cherica Adams, a woman
he'd gotten pregnant, so he decided to have her killed. He was already paying $5,500 per
month to the mother of his first child and chafed at the responsibility. His brilliant
plan to avoid paying out more was to hire a man named Van Brett Watkins to murder Adams
before she gave birth.
Not only did Carruth hire a killer, he also participated directly in the murder himself.
He and Adams went out to the movies, but he insisted on taking separate cars. While driving
home, he suddenly stopped in the road, forcing Adams to stop behind him. Watkins pulled up
alongside and shot her. She died, but her unborn son survived. Carruth attempted to
flee to California, but he was arrested, tried, and convicted. He was sentenced to a minimum
of 18 years and 11 months in prison. He was released in October 2018.
"Now starting his life over at the age of 44."
It's hard to avoid O.J. Simpson in any discussion of the most corrupt athletes of all time.
He was once upon a time a beloved celebrity whose incredible athletic talent led to business
opportunities and an acting career. But then it all began spiraling downward in 1994. That
was when his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her acquaintance Ron Goldman were brutally
killed. Simpson then led police on an infamous car chase, but he ultimately was acquitted
after a sensational trial.
Goldman's family was outraged, and they brought a civil wrongful death suit against Simpson.
In 1997, a jury found Simpson liable for the deaths of his wife and Goldman, ordering him
to pay the Goldman family $33.5 million. Simpson then slid further into corruption as he tried
to evade consequences. He attempted to publish an incredibly tasteless book describing how
he would have committed the murders if he'd actually done it, but the Goldmans were awarded
the rights to the book.
Simpson began working hard to hide his assets, and in 2007, he entered a new phase of criminality
when he hatched a scheme to steal back some memorabilia via armed robbery. He was ultimately
sentenced to 33 years in prison for the robbery. He served nine and was released on parole
in 2017.
Gambling addiction took everything away from Art Schlichter. A once-promising football
player who was the fourth overall pick by the Baltimore Colts in the 1982 NFL draft,
Schlichter couldn't resist the thrill of illegal gambling. He received a $350,000 signing bonus
from the Colts, along with a low-interest loan of $125,000 from the team's owner. By
the end of the year, he owed all of that and more to his bookies.
In 1983, Schlichter was suspended from the NFL due to his gambling. Worried that he would
be asked to throw games, he called the FBI and confessed to his gambling. That act of
contrition gave him another chance in the NFL, but by 1987, he was out of the sport
and arrested for illegal betting. He still almost managed to turn it around. He signed
with the Arena Football League and was named MVP in 1990. But he never really stopped gambling,
and has been in and out of jail for various crimes like writing bad checks, forgery, and
fraud ever since.
In 2011, Schlichter was arrested for a breathtakingly corrupt scheme in which he took money in exchange
for hard-to-get tickets, like the Super Bowl. But he simply kept the money and never had
any tickets to sell. This crime earned him an 11-year prison sentence.
South African cricketer Hansie Cronje never met a match he couldn't be paid to throw.
And it may have gotten him killed. Cronje was a hero to his country and captain of the
national cricket team in the 1990s. He was first approached by gamblers about throwing
a cricket match in 1995, at which time he refused. But just a year later, he accepted
$30,000 to persuade his teammates to throw a match. He didn't even actually convey the
offer to his teammates; instead, he kept all the money himself.
Cronje had apparently discovered that his true love was money. He had no fewer than
72 bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. He admitted to accepting at least $130,000 from
gamblers to throw matches between 1996 and 2000. However, it's widely suspected that
he accepted a lot more cash, threw many more matches, and convinced many more players to
cheat. Some even suspect that his death in a plane crash in 2002 wasn't an accident but
a targeted killing, to make sure that the secrets he knew about corruption in the sport
remained unspoken.
If you think corrupt athletes are a modern affliction, think again. As dramatized in
the film Eight Men Out, in 1919 eight members of the Chicago White Sox agreed to throw the
World Series in exchange for a total payout of about $100,000, roughly equivalent to $1.5
million today. First baseman C. Arnold "Chick" Gandil met with gambler and gangster Joseph
Sullivan, and then Gandil conveyed the scheme to seven of his teammates.
One of them, Buck Weaver, was largely innocent. Although involved in the very early stages,
he quickly pulled out, but he was accused and punished with the rest. "Shoeless" Joe
Jackson, one of the greatest hitters of his generation, always insisted that he played
his best, although he accepted about $5,000 from the gamblers.
The players weren't convicted of anything, in part because key evidence mysteriously
disappeared. But baseball had recently installed a commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who
was determined to preserve the sport's reputation. He banned all eight members of the White Sox
for life, and they were given the nickname "Black Sox."
"No player who throws a ball game…"
"... will ever play professional baseball again."
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