Teammates Who Were Actually Enemies In Real Life

Sports is a high-octane profession. When your only job is to win, emotions and adrenaline run high. This can bring teammates together, since they need each other to succeed and are the only people in the world who can understand the pressure. They live in each other's pockets during the season, traveling together, seeing each other at endless practices, and of course playing together. This can result in friendships that last a lifetime.

But sometimes the opposite can happen. If two people don't gel, all that stress can result in some seriously epic feuds. Being around your enemy all the time becomes fuel on a fire. They have to work with someone they hate because it's their job, even when they can't stand the sight of their stupid face. Soon you have people refusing to speak, openly insulting each other, and sometimes even coming to blows. Here are some of the biggest enemies in sports history.

The animosity between San Francisco Giants teammates Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent was the worst-kept secret in baseball. Even more than a decade later, Kent told the San Francisco Chronicle, "We weren't friends off the field. I've never really spent any effort trying to evaluate our relationship or care about it. It is what it was. It didn't matter to me." He continued, "Why do we have to be friends? ... We relied on each other on the field to win. That's all that matters: win." And sure, winning is the main thing when it comes to sports, but it's probably nice to not actively hate someone you have to do that winning with.

It's not unheard of to have fights during a baseball game. Of course, they're usually between people on opposite teams. That wasn't the case in 2002. While playing the Padres, Kent started yelling at another teammate, David Bell, about a play he wasn't happy with. Bonds stood up for Bell. This resulted in Bonds and Kent screaming profanities at each other, and according to NBC Sports, this escalated to shoving. Then Bonds grabbed Kent around the throat and threw him against the wall. The team's manager had to pull them apart, while Kent shouted that he was off the team. ESPN dubbed it the "Slugout in the Dugout," and it showed the world just how they felt about each other.

You might think teenage girls are the best grudge-holders on the planet. But you would be wrong. Grown men are just as capable of prolonged hatred over the tiniest little thing.

Take the England and Manchester United soccer players Teddy Sheringham and Andy Cole. Despite having to interact approximately a million times over the years, they didn't speak to each other. Ever. Even long after they stopped playing, the hate was still there. Take for example the opening line of an Independent column by Cole in 2010: "I would rather sit down and have a [cup of tea] with Neil Ruddock, who broke my leg in two places in 1996, than with Teddy Sheringham, who I've pretty much detested for the past 15 years." He goes on to explain, "We played together for years. We scored a lot of goals. I never spoke a single word to him."

But don't assume he didn't have a great reason for this intense dislike. Obviously Sheringham must have done something unforgivable. And Cole does explain what happened. It was 1995 and his first ever game for England. He was standing on the sidelines waiting to go on as a substitute, thinking about how much it meant to him and his family. He knew thousands were watching. As Sheringham came off, he completely ignored Cole, not shaking his hand as is customary. That was it. From then on they hated each other.

When you're a rich and famous sportsman, you can get almost any woman you want. But it's still a pretty basic rule that you don't hook up with the mother of your teammate's child. English footballer John Terry forgot this rule.

Terry and Wayne Bridge played together for the England national team and at Chelsea. They didn't seem to have problems until Bridge ended his three-year relationship with Vanessa Perroncel. Then, The Telegraph says, Terry moved in. Never mind that he had his own wife and children at home. Or the fact that he had been caught stepping out numerous times in the past and had sworn "I'm not going to cheat on her ever again." Terry went to court to stop reports of his affair from hitting the papers, but he failed. Things got even worse when it emerged he might have gotten Perroncel pregnant and paid for an abortion.

Everyone was angry. According to Sport Bible, fans at Chelsea games came up with creative chants about Terry being a dog, like "same old Terry, always cheating" and "Chelsea, wherever you may be, don't leave your wife with John Terry." But Bridge really couldn't forgive him. Per The Guardian, he chose to skip the World Cup rather than have to play with Terry again. Another Guardian article recounts how when they first met in a game after the scandal, Bridge refused to shake Terry's hand. No one blamed him, and the moment went viral.

Bill Romanowski was an angry football player. This might be because he used steroids, which he admitted in 2005, according to Sporting News. He had a long rap sheet, including throwing a microwave at a teammate. But the worst is what he did to Marcus Williams.

The Raiders were having an "unusual full-tilt" practice. It was Williams' job to block Romanowski on a running play. What happened next would end up in court. SF Gate reported the testimony of Ryan Prince, another player who witnessed it. After the play ended the two began "mixing it up." They each grabbed each other's facemasks, and Williams' came flying off. Then the furious Romanowski punched him in the face. Or rather, he "crushed" it. Prince said, "It sounded gross — a really unnatural sound, and [Williams] dropped — he was out. [Romanowski] is over the top of him, screaming, 'Don't you ever f***ing hold me! Don't you ever f***ing touch me!'"

Williams didn't move for "a good period of time." And no wonder, because he was messed up. His lawyer claimed his eye socket was completely shattered, and even when it healed he had double vision and brain damage, as well as flashbacks to the incident, depression, and memory loss. Romanowski's attorney said it was just a case of "mutual combat" that got out of hand, and that you had to expect this kind of thing in football. The jury didn't buy it and awarded Williams $340,000.

Despite working well together on the court, Dallas Mavericks players Jason Kidd and Jim Jackson just didn't like each other. According to CBS News, Kidd thought Jackson was a selfish player. The Orlando Sentinel reported that it came to a head during one game where, even though they were winning, Jackson attacked another teammate for not passing to him enough. This made Kidd angry. But rumor had it that there was a different reason they became enemies, a more female reason.

This was back in the mid-'90s, when the singer Toni Braxton was huge. She was dating Kidd, and she supposedly dropped by the team's hotel one night to pick him up for a date, but somehow ended up leaving with Jackson instead. While both teammates deny this, Braxton confused things, telling a reporter who asked about it that she would "never kiss and tell."

Whatever happened, it finally became too much for Kidd. He told the owners that either he or Jackson had to go, and if they weren't willing to trade one of them to another team, he would sit out until they did. He said they tried to patch things up, but their relationship was "beyond repair" and he didn't think Jackson was really committed to winning a championship. Despite their coach saying he thought the guys would be able to "put their differences aside and move forward," Kidd got his wish and was traded to the Phoenix Suns in 1996.

The bad blood between Philadelphia Eagles players Terrell Owens and Donovan McNabb was plain to see for fans and pundits during 2004 and 2005. And decades later, the two are still talking smack about each other. Owens claims there is good reason for him to disrespect his former teammate: McNabb's bad choices blew the Super Bowl for the team. Owens made the accusations on the Club Shay Shay podcast in 2021 (via CBS Sports). "There were teammates that said he threw up in the huddle," Owens said. "I've talked to teammates since then, and know for a fact, that he was out before Super Bowl XXXIX, drinking before the biggest game, pretty much of all our lives."

Owens even said that, given the chance, he'd be willing to compete in a boxing match against McNabb. "I'll be controlled. It'll be controlled anger. I'd be like a Navy Seal. I'd be a Navy Seal because you know they're cool, calm under all conditions. But there would be a fire burning inside of me ... I'd knock the Chunky Soup from him."

And as of 2022, it seems Owens still hasn't forgiven and forgotten. When McNabb's former teammate DeSean Jackson complained about him on a podcast (via Sports Illustrated), it lit up Twitter. One tweet opined that "McNabb was always jealous of other players getting the spotlight, that's what started the whole thing with @terrellowens..." The former player responded to the tag, saying it was "Facts!!!"

It takes a brave player to come for Michael Jordan. Despite his well-documented issues as a person, Jordan is still considered the GOAT of basketball by many. But when Kwame Brown played with Jordan, he found out why you should never meet your idols.

Brown played for the Washington Wizards after being a #1 draft pick in 2001, but his career didn't measure up to the hype, and teammate Jordan seemed to have a problem with that. According to Michael Leahy's book "When Nothing Else Matters" (via ESPN), Jordan would scream at and utterly mortify Brown during practice. At the time, the situation was difficult and painful for the young player. "I knew what they were trying to do. You're trying to prove to the world that this young kid can't handle pressure. So you're creating situations for me to overreact to so you can succeed," he said.

Brown seems to have reflected on the situation deeply in the years since. In an interview in 2021 (via Essentially Sports), he said, "What happened to me was about money ... Look at this guy that Michael Jordan drafted and he was wrong about him ... Look at the way this kid is playing, he can't even catch. They didn't say one good thing about me in 20 years." But according to Sportscasting, there is one part of the beef that Brown says has been exaggerated. "Michael has never brought me to tears," he said. "Did he upset me a lot? Yeah."

Many sports stars air their dirty laundry in autobiographies eventually, but usually, this tends to happen after they have stopped playing. But not always. In his book "Omar! My Life On and Off the Field," Omar Vizquel laid the blame for the Cleveland Indians' loss of the 1997 World Series at the feet of his then-teammate Jose Mesa, per ESPN.

Nine months later, now on different teams, the two faced each other, with Mesa on the mound, and he had a score to settle. "He hit me [with a pitch] three times," Vizquel said, according to Cleveland.com. "He said he was going to hit me every time he faced me and he did that." Mesa was unrepentant about his unsportsmanlike revenge, saying, "If I face him 10 more times, I'll hit him 10 times. I want to kill him."

Vizquel shrugged off the threat. "I don't know if that's really what he meant when he said that," he said. "Sometimes we would say in Spanish, 'I'm gonna kill you.' But in the translation, that's not really what we meant." (Narrator: It was what Mesa meant.)

And an apology was out of the question, since Vizquel said of Mesa, "I don't think he's the type of man who would take an apology." While they may not have liked each other, Vizquel obviously understood Mesa, as the latter's response was, "If he comes to apologize, I will punch him right in the face. And then I'll kill him."