Plying his trade at the turn of the millennium, in what to the untrained eye looks the almost lawless world of the Australian Football League (AFL), Victoria-born full-forward, Brendan Fevola, is regarded by many as a genuine great of the sport. And that’s in spite of everything that has subsequently happened off the field.

 Born January 20, 1981, this son of an Italian lacrosse-playing father, won the Coleman Medal as the league’s leading goalkicker in 2006 and 2009 when playing for Melbourne club Carlton Blues (187 appearances). He latterly went on to play for the Brisbane Lions (17 games), as well as picking up three caps as an All-Australian selection.

Consensus has Charles L ‘Sonny’ Liston born in the May of 1932, as the twenty-fourth of 25 children sired by father, Tobe.

 He grew up tall-and-strong as part of a sharecropping family, picking cotton in the fields of Sand Slough, Arkansas. His ‘intimidating demeanour’ and size was said to be born of his father administering regular ‘whoopings’ as well as substituting him for the mule to pull a plough.  

 He ran away to join his mother in St Louis when aged 13. Where his inability to read and write further marked him out. The streets proved his outlet, seeing the young Liston arrested over a hundred times as a teen. Described as ‘not afraid to fight the cops’, his photograph served as a warning, and was a fixture in every squad car in the city.

Finding yourself described as a ‘Cuban-American fraudster’ isn’t the opening passage in a biography that any self-respecting athlete would want for themselves. But such is the case for Havana-born, Rosie Ruiz.

‘Bent referee’ is a pretty common phrase thrown around in sport; particularly football.

It’s essentially a lazy term of abuse hurled at a match official when fans feel they’re in some way being negatively discriminated against. But in the case of South America’s ‘man in the middle’ Byron Moreno; with some justification.

It’s June 17, 2013. On some waste ground in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, lies the body of Odin Lloyd. The semi-professional American football player shot multiple times, execution style.

As local police retrace Lloyd’s final movements, the investigation quickly leads detectives to the door of Aaron Hernandez, tight end for Tom Brady’s NFL Super Bowl-winning New England Patriots. All this happens in the context of Pro Bowl-er Hernandez signing a five-year $39.58m contract extension with the Patriots the previous October.

From Germany’s first proper tennis champion to prison in South London; a flame-haired hero flames out.

From youngest-ever winner of Wimbledon to doing eight months (of a two-year stretch) at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, few have trod the line between idol and idiot with the panache of Boris Becker.