The Greatest Living Antiheroes in Sports

From Iverson and Kyrgios to Vick and Zidane, we present the greatest male renegades, rebels, and mavericks in global sports.
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John McEnroe: Bettman/Getty Images; Trae Young: Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS/Alamy Live News.

When you're young, you're told to be like the star on the Wheaties box, the MVP, the all-American hero. But sometime later, in your early teenage years, maybe, a different, darker shade of athletic superstar takes hold in your mind. The punks and the bad boys, the uncoachable hotheads, the men who mirror your own angst and inner rebellion. You're 16 years old and totally transfixed by ski god Bode Miller, missing the podium but making the party. The sphinx-like Zinedine Zidane, inexplicably headbutting an Italian defender in the last gesture of his career. The mulleted John Daly, teeing off with a Marlboro in his mouth. As long as there have been sports, there have been athletes with the swagger to defy convention. Those who played only by rules they wrote for themselves. And in so doing, they've updated more than merely the game—they've changed the culture. To management and commissioners and coaches and agents, they are often nightmares. But to the fans, they are something like gods—even when they play like devils. They remain the people's champs. And the most human heroes of all.

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Zinedine Zidane

If you saw it live you can still picture it all these years later: the sudden lowering of the shoulder and forward thrust, the terse exchange with the referee after the red card, the ignominious walk off the pitch past the trophy-in-waiting. Zinedine Zidane's shocking headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the waning minutes of the 2006 World Cup final—Italy prevailed over Zidane's French squad on penalty kicks—marked the end of a career defined as much by the sublime as the despicable. Eight years earlier, Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, had tasted World Cup glory, leading a multiracial French team to victory over Brazil. “With one World Cup he unified a fractured nation,” Men in Blazers' cohost Roger Bennett told GQ. “His two headers in the 1998 final shattered the myth of Brazilian invincibility and utterly silenced the French right wing. And then he used another World Cup to tear all that largesse right down.” We're left trying to square the moments of astonishing artistry with those of deplorable rage. The man capable of producing an exquisite left-footed volley to win the 2002 Champions League also racked up 14 career red cards, including one for another headbutt, in 2000, of Hamburg player Jochen Kientz—a haunting foreshadowing of his final moments on the pitch.—Eric Wills

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Trae Young

Philadelphia. Hawks vs. Sixers. Game 1 of the second round of the 2021 NBA playoffs. Atlanta's Trae Young had shut down Madison Square Garden days before, and now, as Hawks fans cheered his every bucket like the Rapture was imminent, the message was clear: Trae was the league's most delightful new villain, and this was his coming-out party. He plays like he was born to be bad: the disheveled hair, the “fuck you” threes from the logo, even the twerk of his limbs, the thrill of contorting his body to draw the nastiest fouls on his opponents. Philadelphia is supposed to be the city of underdogs, and here's Knuckles the Echidna nutmegging grown men with crossovers, daring someone to check him into the cheap seats. There's something beautiful about watching a lawbreaker get away with his crimes. And in the NBA, there is no bolder antihero right now than Trae Young. If this is the future of the game, bring it on.—Tyler R. Tynes

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Darryl Strawberry

“When I reflect, I'm like, man, you were pretty crazy back then,” says Darryl Strawberry, almost 60 and decades removed from his years as a hard-partying, hard-playing outfielder. He was crazy—crazy good. The first pick in the 1980 MLB draft, Strawberry used his wiry six-foot-six frame to blast 335 career homers, becoming an eight-time all-star and four-time World Series champion, winning with both the Mets and the Yankees. Though he says the New York fans brought out the best in him—“I loved the fact that fans would boo you when you sucked,” he says—the New York lifestyle didn't always. He was suspended three times for substance abuse, and admitted to entertaining ladies in the clubhouse between innings. “Everything is different on the East Coast because everything on the East Coast stays open 24/7,” says Strawberry. “I went to the club at night and didn't come out until eight in the morning, and I got a ball game that afternoon.” Back then, Strawberry says he was “broken, lost, and living a life completely all wrong” off the field. Now he's almost 20 years sober, a pastor, and has started a ministry and a foundation to help children with autism. So what advice would he give his 18-year-old self? “Listen to your mother.”—Clay Skipper

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Kyle Troup

Kyle Troup didn't set out to buck convention. The Afro'd son of bowling legend Guppy Troup, he picked up the sport when he was just three years old. So he did what all kids that age do: He grabbed the ball with two hands and let it rip down the lane. And then he did it again. And again. For the rest of his life. “I had to bowl two-handed because I didn't have enough strength to bowl one-handed,” says Troup, who would sometimes catch flak from traditionalists who thought his style was goofy, perhaps even unmanly. “But luckily for me, as I got older, my father never tried to change my style.” He stuck with it: Bowling with two hands gave him more control, more power, more rotations-per-minute. And now, he's not only one of the highest earners in the bowling world, he's also part of a new vanguard changing the sport. “Twenty, 25 years ago, nobody really knew about two-handed bowling,” he says proudly. “Fast-forward to today, 60 percent of all youth bowlers are probably bowling two-handed.” As for his wild fits—bright blue pants, shirts with flames—that's all thanks to Dad, too. “Guppy wore wild pants, very wild designs back in the '80s. It's a Troup tradition.”—Chris Gayomali

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Allen Iverson

Allen Iverson's breakthrough moment came at the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland. He wore cornrows. “That was huge,” says journalist Chris Broussard, who covered that game. “In the Black community, that was just a natural hairstyle. But the thought had always been, when you step into white America, you had to play the game, tone it down. Now it was like, ‘Wow, this dude is really being Black in mainstream America.’ Allen's message was, ‘Be yourself.’ He was merging hip-hop and basketball. That was a first.” Iverson, known for his ankle-breaking crossover dribble, had crossed the cultures of the game he lived for and the music he lived by. He was also simply being Allen Iverson, a product of Newport News, Virginia—Newport “Bad” News, as it was called by residents of its projects. His whole career, Iverson did it his way: lived his way, dressed his way, played his way. He owned every dribble of his life with an honesty his haters could never deny. His famous rant about missing practice is much quoted. A final salvo to reporters near the end of that press conference is less remembered: “I bleed like y'all.” Did he ever. Such heart this man has.—Skip Bayless

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Kieron Pollard

The latest in Trinidad and Tobago's storied line of cricketers, Kieron Pollard is renowned for his volcanic power. Built like a heavyweight boxer, he holds the bat like a broom in his mammoth grip. Last March, he became one of three batsmen to hit six sixes in an international over when he smashed the hapless Sri Lankan spinner Akila Dananjaya to all parts of Antigua's Coolidge Cricket Ground. At 34, Pollard is celebrated as a hero, yet he was long cast as a villain—a mercenary who prioritized club over country, focusing on the lucrative T20 format of the game. Raised by a single mother in a tough town outside Port of Spain, Pollard made the hard choices in his career he needed to in order to survive. The rise of T20 cricket over the past decade coincided with his emergence, and he plied his trade in leagues across the world, becoming a lavishly compensated star. “The criticism against him wasn't fair at all,” says Trinidad and Tobago's national cricket coach, David Furlonge. “Cricket is no longer just a sport—it's a livelihood. It's also how Kieron has looked after his family.”—Che Kurrien

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Bode Miller

Just how bad was Bode Miller's bad-boy image? Bad enough that his own uncle called him the “greatest underachieving ski racer in history.” Bad enough that his most famous Olympic moment didn't come on the slopes but when he told a reporter, after missing the podium in '06, that at least he “got to party and socialize at an Olympic level.” As Miller, now 44, reflects, “There were certainly moments where I was defiant for the sake of being defiant—but we're talking less than 1 percent of the time.” What looked like defiance, he says, was authenticity. The American public wanted as many medals as possible—a priority that Miller didn't share. “If I blew out my knee racing, I didn't want to look back and be like, dang, I should've done something different. I wanted people to see me enjoying my life and having a party and charging.” Charging meant attacking every downhill, even if it cost him the race. “I raced 450 World Cups,” he says. “I crashed in 200-plus of them.” But he still won six Olympic medals. “Am I proud of what I did, and how I did it?” he asks. “The answer is a resounding yes.”—Clay Skipper

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Nick Kyrgios

“I haven't had a coach for about five years now,” says Nick Kyrgios, the 26-year-old Aussie tennis star whose untamed playing style has made him one of the most controversial players in the gentleman's sport. Kyrgios has a booming serve and a fearsome forehand, weapons that have helped him take down the Big Three on multiple occasions. And he's done so while putting on a show nearly every time he steps on the court, hitting cheeky underhand serves, physics-defying tweeners, and overhead jump smashes that rival Vince Carter's dunks in flamboyance. (He says he's always wanted to bridge the gap between the “exciting” NBA and “boring” tennis.) Coaches tried to straighten him out for years (and mitigate his occasional on-court meltdowns), but Kyrgios only knows one way to play: like himself. “I'm just on my own wavelength, man. I don't really give a fuck about what the media says or anything like that. I'm just trying to be better every day.… I just always wanted to be myself out there.”—Samuel Hine

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Cam Newton

He's the NFL's most defiant provocateur in the pocket, the modern Black quarterback who set football on fire. A man like that is bound to come with a slew of haters, but Newton smiles through it all. “Being around Cam, there's an immediate gravity and energy you haven't felt before,” says Marshall Newhouse, an offensive tackle who used to block for Newton on the Carolina Panthers. “If you're around football long enough, you grow up expecting this corporate, CEO type at quarterback. That's what most owners want, someone buttoned-up and mostly white. But Cam? Cam just broke the mold.”—Tyler R. Tynes

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Luis Suárez

It wasn't just the biting, as shocking as it was to see Uruguayan soccer star Luis Suárez attack the shoulder of the Italian Giorgio Chiellini like a plate of ribs during the 2014 World Cup—the third such time he had chomped down on the opposition. It was also the dramatic diving. And the devilish hand ball in the 2010 World Cup that denied Ghana a sure goal and led to Uruguay's quarterfinal victory. And the racially charged row with Manchester United's Patrice Evra that earned him an eight-game ban. Off the pitch, he was shy, sweet even; on the pitch, he transformed into something else entirely, something even his wife didn't recognize. “He was as close as world football has had for a long time to a WWF-level wrestling heel,” Roger Bennett told GQ. “But a wrestling heel capable of sublime moments of otherworldly football domination.” Suárez won the European Golden Shoe twice, interrupting Ronaldo and Messi's stranglehold on the award, but you could never be sure what you would get—a wonder goal or something more sinister. “There is a sense in South American football that the ends justify the means,” said Bennett. “It was the mental side of his game, the garra charrúa, the warrior spirit, that would take him to some pretty dark places.”—Eric Wills

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Kimi Räikkönen

“Iceman is his nickname, because he comes from Finland, a cold place, but he also seemed a fairly cold person. This is the kid who turned up giving monosyllabic answers as part of his disdain for the press, who was fast asleep half an hour before his first qualifying session. He joked about taking a shit when Michael Schumacher was being given a lifetime achievement award, but it underplays how seriously he took it. He had a singular focus, which was to drive cars as fast as humanly possible. The other bullshit? He never had any time for it. Formula 1 hasn't seen anyone like him since James Hunt. All Ferrari drivers usually have to learn Italian so they can speak to the Italian press. Kimi never bothered so he could never be forced into talking to them. He went and drove rally for a bit and famously would have the car in a ditch or in a tree within the first 150 meters. He was all or nothing.”—Will Buxton

BRIAN FINKE, GQ, 2003
Michael Vick

He was the first Black quarterback to be drafted at number one in NFL history; he was also the first number one quarterback draft pick to go to federal prison, for dogfighting charges, at the height of his career. So go the contradictions of Michael Vick, a one-of-one in sports history: still the most electric athlete to ever play the position but fated to be remembered by some for other reasons entirely. Vick played with swagger and style and grace; he drove opponents to insanity and beyond. There was no defense for him, except what he would do to himself—and even then, after 14 months in prison, he was still able to return to the game, reformed, humbled but unbowed, and once again make grown men look silly. LeSean McCoy, a teammate of Vick's in Philadelphia, remembers his arrival in the city. “There would be so many protesters outside the stadium,” McCoy says. “But once he started playing? It's funny how the world works—they forgot about all of that.”—Zach Baron

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Charles Barkley

He brawled with Shaq on the court; off the court he pushed a man half his size through a bar window. Charles Barkley always seemed intent on proving that his infamous not-a-role-model Nike campaign wasn't just a slogan. But in retirement the former MVP has managed to up the ante with his unrepentant provocations. On his gambling: “I want to be dead broke when I keel over. I don't want to leave all that money for my freeloading family.” On the Golden State Warriors: “I'm never going to like that little girly basketball where you have to outscore people.” As Kenny Smith, his Inside the NBA cohost, told GQ: “He has, as Shaq would call it, a G5 classification. He can say things that other people can't say. I know where he stands, even when he's not standing with me.”—Eric Wills

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John Daly

“That guy was Happy Gilmore” is how No Laying Up podcast host Chris Solomon describes the blond bomber John Daly. Raised in rural Arkansas, Daly was a hell-raiser from the moment he entered the golf world's consciousness. “He came in with a mullet and a mustache,” Solomon notes, as the final alternate for the 1991 PGA Championship field. He drove overnight to get there on time, and then won the thing with a howitzer of a swing that revolutionized the sport. “People think Bryson [DeChambeau] blows the field away—he blew the field away more then than Bryson currently does, which is jarring to think,” Solomon says. And Daly did it with his own unique brand of panache: “Hitting balls shirtless or off of beer cans” in practice or rocketing drives inches over the heads of fans in the grandstand. He's still finding ways to upset the golf establishment: Each year, come Masters time, Daly stations his R.V. in the parking lot of a Hooters just down the road from the world's most esteemed country club, where he autographs just about anything put in front of him. In 2019, Augusta National bought the land that Hooters sits on. But Daly isn't going anywhere just yet.—Sam Schube

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Gabriel Medina

Surfers are a chill bunch, the kind of folks genetically predisposed to lounge in the sun with guitars and fruity strains of indica. But occasionally an apex predator emerges from the haze—a guy like three-time world title winner Gabriel Medina, who is beloved in his native Brazil and despised just about everywhere else. On land he's a smiley 28-year-old who likes video games. But in the water he's a ruthless competitor. Take the 2017 Pipe Masters. His opponent, Kelly Slater, was standing in the barrel of an enormous backdoor wave on which he could have scored a perfect 10. So Medina did something highly tactical—or highly unsportsmanlike. He burned Slater—his idol—by dropping in front of him. The two almost collided, nixing Slater's chances of scoring enough points to prevail. Medina won the heat, but fans online were incensed, calling him a disgrace. “I could be going against my best friends. I'm there to win,” Medina once said. “It's in my blood.”—Chris Gayomali

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Pete Rose

“What do I have—26 or 27 major leagues records? The best record I have is playing in 1,972 winning games. Someone's gonna win and someone's gonna lose. My philosophy is: Let the other guys lose. A lot of guys played hard, don't get me wrong. But I played different than most guys. Not three days a week, not five days a week—I played different every freaking day. And when I managed the Reds, my goal every night was to win the damn game. See, I picked the wrong vice. If I'd done drugs, they'd have given me a second chance. But I gambled. I was wrong, no question. I made a mistake. But everybody makes mistakes. The penalty don't fit the crime. I've been suspended over 31 years. I've heard of guys that killed somebody and they're out of jail after 20 years. I'm still in jail. Thirty-one years. 'Cause I made a bet. I bet on baseball. That's not my legacy. My legacy is I won more games than anybody, got more hits than anybody, scored more runs than anybody. I was at a banquet the other night and a guy asked me, ‘What do you think you'd hit if you were playing today?’ I said, ‘Probably .228 to .235.’ And he said, ‘Wow, the pitchers are that good?’ I said, ‘No, I'm 80 fucking years old.’ ”—Pete Rose, as told to Clay Skipper

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Asashōryū Akinori

It took only four years for Asashōryū Akinori—a young Mongolian man with the agility and fighting spirit of a prey-hungry wolf—to rise to the top of the deeply traditional Japanese world of sumo wrestling. Known for his impassioned outbursts, his gutsy poses in the ring, and his struggles outside of it, Asashōryū was a far cry from the image of the yokozuna, or sumo master, as a man of restraint and discipline. Yet his dynamic fighting style and carefree smile drew in countless people—even the elders who relentlessly criticized his impropriety came to regard him as a natural-born charmer. Twelve years have passed since his sudden retirement, and the sport still misses the sense of possibility and surprise he brought to it. “I've been told to be dignified, to be refined,” he once said. “But once I stepped into the ring, I felt like I had to be an ogre.”—Keigo Amemiya

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Jack Lambert

The mere sight of Jack Lambert—as unsettling as any Bond villain with his toothless maw, thinning hair, and spit-flying intensity—once made a Broncos rookie named John Elway wonder whether his own true calling was to be an accountant. Terrorizer of quarterbacks everywhere, Lambert embraced his odious image: During a Monday night game in 1974, the Steelers lineman and Ohio native announced that he hailed from the fictional town of Buzzard's Breath, Wyoming. After flattening Brian Sipe along the sideline a few years later (the first of two fine-inducing hits on the Cleveland quarterback), Lambert told Howard Cosell that if they wanted better protection, quarterbacks should wear dresses. In retirement he guarded his privacy with the same intensity that animated his Hall of Fame career: “Jack would rather wrestle a rattlesnake than talk to a reporter,” one neighbor told a journalist who came knocking. GQ left a voicemail asking Lambert if he had any comment about his inclusion on this list. Naturally, he did not return the call.—Eric Wills

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John McEnroe

You cannot be serious! It's the title of John McEnroe's autobiography, the punchline in his commercials now, and occasionally, when prompted, he'll say it from the broadcast booth. McEnroe originally yelled it during a Wimbledon match, in 1981, during a tournament that he'd go on to win, beating Björn Borg after losing to the Swede the year prior in one of the greatest matches ever played. That was, and is, McEnroe: an enfant terrible (the All England Club, the organization that runs Wimbledon, declined to offer him membership, as is customarily extended to champions). But McEnroe was also among the most dogged athletes ever to walk the face of this earth. If you beat him, he was coming back. And he was coming back for blood. He was the quintessential antihero: Audiences loved to boo him; his greatness was inseparable from the angry, abusive intensity that produced it. Tennis is a lonely, solitary, brutally difficult sport, played over hours in difficult conditions; there is no one to ask for help, no one to pick you up when you cannot pick up yourself. The best players are separated from each other less by ability than by will. Can you find the intensity inside yourself? Can you maintain it? McEnroe always could—and, maybe more than any other athlete, he let you see it. We loved him and hated him because he made the ugliness and the fire that fueled his talent visible, tangible, unavoidable. To watch him was to learn just how hard, and how transcendent, it is to win.—Zach Baron

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Sonny Bill Williams

At the finals of the 2015 Rugby World Cup, in London, New Zealand's strapping center Sonny Bill Williams made an audacious move. Receiving the ball at the halfway mark, Williams burst forward, drawing five burly Aussies into his orbit. He waited for his opponents to close right in, and with a delicate flick of his giant wrists, offloaded the ball into the hands of his dreadlocked teammate Ma'a Nonu, who charged into clear air to score a decisive try. It was a flashy play, and the teeming fans at Twickenham stadium thundered in exaltation. It was also the most sublime execution of “the offload”—a signature Sonny Bill Williams move—which until that moment, the rugby orthodoxy had disparaged as showboating and risky, akin to an Allen Iverson behind-the-back pass. Today, the offload is recognized as a vital component of the modern game, and Williams stands vindicated. “If I hadn't backed myself and pushed the boundaries, would I have achieved what I did?” asks the All Blacks legend. “When no one expects it, big plays in big matches change the course of the game.”—Che Kurrien

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The Bad Boys Detroit Pistons

When I think of Detroit, I think of an ass whippin', at least when it comes to basketball. Michael Jordan might, too. And Motor City's blue-collar edge is still best personified by the Pistons of the late '80s and early '90s, still the league's ultimate Bad Boys. Their lineup was a murderers' row of hard men—Dennis Rodman, Bill Laimbeer, Isiah Thomas. But they were also winners in a town that had often lost. “For a city of hardworking people that got hit real hard, we brought light to the city,” says John Salley, a power forward who won back-to-back NBA championships with the Pistons in 1989 and 1990. Yet Salley says he and his cohorts were also proud of being pariahs outside of Motown. “When they show you a cowboy movie,” he says, “the bad guy is always the best-dressed and the one you remember.”—Tyler R. Tynes

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Brad Marchand

Slashing. Trash-talking. Tripping. If it gets under an opponent's skin, the Boston Bruins winger has probably done it, earning him a reputation for being the game's foremost psycho. At a 2012 White House visit, even President Obama, diplomatic as he is, referred to Brad Marchand as the “Little Ball of Hate.” (“I thought that was awesome,” says Marchand, now in his 12th season with the Bruins.) In 2020, his fellow players concurred, voting him the dirtiest player in the league. Sometimes it's sneaky wallops to the back of opponents' legs; sometimes it's licking their faces, which he's done on at least three separate occasions. “The guy had his face in my face, so I just figured that would piss him off,” Marchand offers by way of explanation. (Spoiler: It did!) He claims his pesky brand of antagonism is mostly behind him, partly because it's hard to get away with, thanks to all the cameras, and partly because he doesn't need it anymore. “It's stuff I had to do early on to get established and try to earn a spot on the team and make a name for myself, whereas now I am established and I've had a successful career,” he says on a day he's serving a three-game suspension, the seventh of his career, for intentionally swiping a player's legs out from underneath him.—Clay Skipper

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2022 issue with the title "Antiheroes."

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