Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit

Pete Rose said she was “bigger than any one player” in baseball during the 70s and 80s. Morganna the Kissing Bandit became a legend in sports for running onto baseball fields and kissing players during games. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:34Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave. And this is Short Stuff. Kind of sports-related, but real pop culture, to tell you the truth.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, because if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, and you were a sports fan, in particular a baseball fan of Major League Baseball here in the United States, then no doubt at some point, you either saw on the news, or saw live during a game, a woman run out onto the baseball field and chatted up for a moment with a professional baseball player, and then kissed them on the cheek, and then run back to the stands waving, at least for a while, until she started getting arrested for doing this.

• 1:19Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  And that was Morganna the Kissing Bandit.

• 1:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Apparently, she was born Nancy Lee Rose in Louisville, Kentucky. She started lying about her age at a very young age, as we'll see, because she had a very difficult, really rough adolescence. But she became so famous for this during the 70s and 80s that at one point, Pete Rose said that he considered her bigger than any one baseball player in the whole game. Like, she was really, really famous for this. She was on Letterman, she was on Carson. And she was an exotic dancer by trade, by profession. And I saw Chuck, her act, I saw it described as part nudity, part comedy, which is kind of tough to pull off, if you ask me.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  But one of the things, in addition to running onto baseball fields that she was known for, that was very attention-getting, was her bust. She was extraordinarily buxom. Apparently, she had a 60-inch bust that required an eye cup. And so that- Combined with running onto the field at sporting events and kissing players, it really captured the attention of the American public.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, that's not the kind of thing we usually highlight when we're talking about women on the show, but you can't ignore that with Morganna the Kissing Bandit.

• 2:43Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Most notably because it comes up later in a potential defense in court, which if you're wondering how in the world is that, does that work, then you'll find out in Act Two.

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  And I think the fact that we mentioned it just goes to show how much you can't ignore it.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  I hope so. She was introduced to baseball by her grandfather, who raised her. You said she had a rough childhood, which very sadly she did. She was a runaway at age 13. She was unhoused for a while. Eventually, she became an exotic dancer as a teenager. And in 1969, at Crossley Field during a Cincinnati Reds game, when she was 17, she was with a couple of friends, sitting, you know, near the field level. And, you know, the baseball players were checking these girls out because it was 1969. And that's what you did when you were a baseball player. You'd get a little bored in outfield and look to the stands at teenage curls, I guess. And everyone was sort of, you know, the players were sort of paying them some attention, except for Pete Rose.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  And they were like, what gives with this guy? And her friend said, hey, I bet you, I'll give you five bucks if you run out on the field and, you know, confront him, which she did. Pete Rose played outfield at the time before his move to the infield.

• 3:58Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  She ran out there. Yeah.

• 4:00Josh Clark?

  I didn't know that.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Which part?

• 4:03Josh Clark?

  The outfield part.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he was an outfielder at first, but

• 4:07Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  He played everywhere but I think shortstop and catcher.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  Really?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  And pitcher, yeah. Anyway, Pete Rose had a brief chat with her. He was endorsing Ballpark Frank's hot dogs at the time. And she said, hey, I buy those hot dogs. Gave him a kiss on the cheek. He said, you're nuts, you're going to get in trouble. But she didn't at the time. She went back to her seat and security didn't come by. And she watched the rest of the game with her friends. And a sportswriter in Cincinnati, the next day dubbed her the kissing bandit.

• 4:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and a great example of her sense of humor, she said later that her career started with a bet from her friends, and Pete Rose's career ended with a bet. Because of course she got caught betting.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Hundreds of bets.

• 4:54Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:55Josh Clark?

  I say we take a break and we come back and talk a little more about Morganna and her prolific career.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 5:15Speaker 02

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• 5:29Josh Clark?

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• 5:47Speaker 02

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• 6:07Speaker 02

  All right, so Morganna is kissing athletes all over the place. She's getting more and more famous.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  She, I mentioned that, you know, she did this with most of the sports, but baseball was her number one love. But she would show up at a NASCAR race. She'd kiss an NBA player. She'd go to an NFL game. She went to NHL games. She, I don't know if she kissed a horse or a jockey, but she did this at a horse race once. Apparently, George Brett sort of got back at her in a playful way when he showed up at the club where she was dancing and jumped up on stage and kissed her.

• 6:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he got, he got it twice, I think, right?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 6:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think he might have been one of the only ones that she got twice, which is why he, he got her back. And like I said, she was prolific, right? I think between 1969 and 99, pretty sure this was Sports Illustrated who came up with this stat. She kissed over 50 athletes, not to mention managers, umpires and mascots, including the San Diego Chicken, who just keeps popping up again and again in Stuff You Should Know episodes lately.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Weirdly.

• 7:16Josh Clark?

  And I think this one was from our friends at Grunge. They said that her presence often doubled the number of fans in the stands. Like she was really well known and she would announce where she was going, what game she was going to attend and people would just show up because you wanted to see that kind of thing in addition to a game. So there was, from what I can tell, and correct me if I'm wrong, there was a love hate relationship with her because she would disrupt games.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:44Josh Clark?

  But at the same time, she would fill, you know, double the attendance at a stadium when she said that she was going to a game, you know?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was this weird cultural moment in time where someone got really famous for doing something just sort of unusual and something that a lot of people did. Like these days, when you see somebody run down on a field, especially since the stabbing of Monica Seles on the tennis court years ago.

• 8:13Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  This is all sort of scary stuff and you never know what someone's going to do. You know, when Hank Aaron hit his homerun, the guys ran down on the field and, you know, were patting him on the back. But that was sort of the first like, oh, boy, what's happening here? Like these white guys are rushing, you know, the black man who broke the white guy's record.

• 8:31Josh Clark?

  Oh, is that what changed things, that particular incident?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Well, that was what first started, I mean, Morganna came after this, so it clearly didn't change that much.

• 8:40Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I think Monica Seles is what really, really changed it because that was an actual act of violence. Everyone else had good intentions, but these days when somebody rushes the field, it's usually a protester and they usually get tackled in a pretty violent manner. And they won't show it on TV immediately. All cameras are directed to not show any of this stuff, so no one's incentivized to actually do this.

• 9:02Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  But not back then, man, everyone, like she was good for baseball, you know?

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  She, she did have a few encounters with security that ended up pretty rough. There was one, I think the 1970 All-Star game in Cincinnati. The Reds management put a bounty on her, a hundred bucks to whoever could catch her. Because she, I guess it announced that she was coming. And they, they did catch her and I guess they got her on the ground and started, the security started kicking her in the, the ribs.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  That's ridiculous.

• 9:33Josh Clark?

  Broke three of her ribs.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, I said, that's ridiculous because it's different these days and it is a genuine security risk because you never know what someone's going to do because the world is crazy now.

• 9:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  But back then, like everyone knew who Morganna was. Everyone knew she was going to run out there. It would take less than a minute. She would kiss the player on the cheek, not even on the lips, because she didn't like the chewing tobacco in baseball. And there's absolutely no reason to throw this woman on the ground and kick her for sort of a minor disruption. This is a different time. So if people are like, oh, I don't know, man, you, you can't do something like that. Like it's just different these days. Everyone knew her and knew she meant no ill will.

• 10:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. But despite that, I mean, she, not just three broken ribs, she also suffered a broken kneecap once. She suffered a broken tailbone, all at the hands of security. But she just apparently shrugged it all off because I read an interview with her from not too long ago, where she chalked it up to rent a cops getting carried, getting a little carried away. So I think she just kind of took this as like, you know, it kind of goes along with it. It's going to happen from time to time. And she did get arrested quite a bit, but you know, usually without incident. There was one, one incident in particular, when she rushed the field at Astros game to kiss Nolan Ryan on the mound. Well, he was on the pitcher's mound. She was kissing him on the cheek.

• 11:00Josh Clark?

  And she was arrested and she had to hire an attorney because she was called to defend herself in court, even though she didn't actually have to go through with it. It got far enough that she hired this one particular attorney.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, this guy, his name was Richard Haynes. They call him the racehorse. And he was, you know, one of those sort of showboating, would take wealthy clients accused of everything from murder to, you know, embezzling and stuff like that. And apparently one time in court, he zapped himself with a cattle prod to prove that it wasn't the lethal weapon. So he was that kind of guy.

• 11:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  And this is where we mentioned that he used her bust size as part of the defense, because he was going to use the gravity defense, he called it, wherein he would argue that she would just lean over the railings as a sports fan, and that her, the weight of her bust would drag her over the rail onto the field. And I guess the court was like, oh, boy. Let's just drop the charges so we don't have to go through that.

• 12:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think the Houston Sports Association got involved. They're like, this is not a good look for Houston, guys. Let's just drop this. So they did. And that was the one time where she had to go to court, was called to court. But that just became part of her legend, too. The gravity defense. It's like you can't read an article about Morganna, the kissing bandit, and the gravity defense not get mentioned. It's just part of her legend.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 12:31Josh Clark?

  And one of the other things I saw about her that I wanted to mention, Chuck, was she was apparently like very crafty. I saw it put that there was one time in particular, I think in 1986, she said publicly that she was going to kiss Don Mattingly of the Yankees. She was going to go to New York for a game. And so everybody was on high alert in New York. And while they were doing that, she flew to, I guess, Seattle to kiss the Mariners catcher, Steve Yeager. So she would use a little deflection and sleight of hand. She wasn't above that, which also, I mean, this lady was pretty cool.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  That's right. Scottie Pippen of the Bulls was the last player to get that kiss. And that was in the early 90s. And then she was in the movie Kingpin and as a cameo in 96. Retired officially in 2000, even though Scottie Pippen was years before that. But I don't think we mentioned, she made millions of bucks off this persona.

• 13:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  But eventually, you know, like all entertainers, even kind of oddball pseudo entertainers, has to leave eventually and really went underground. And it's hard to find a lot of recent information about her, even though we think she is still alive, probably in her late 70s. But who knows? Because she's never been very truthful about her age.

• 13:54Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 13:56Josh Clark?

  Great. Well, here's to Morganna, the kissing bandit, one of the more interesting 20th century figures ever. Short Stuff Friends is out.