Football star Thomas Gravesen has been described as ‘a grenade with the pin pulled out’ and his explosive career has now been documented in a sensational new biography.
He shocked team-mates, coaches and managers throughout his journey from boyhood club Vejle Boldklub to a glittering career that took him to Hamburg, Everton, Real Madrid and Celtic.
But at the age of 32, he suddenly retired and disappeared only to resurface several years later living in a luxurious gated community in Las Vegas, with Andre Agassi and Nicolas Cage as neighbours.
Football star Thomas Gravesen has been described as ‘a grenade with the pin pulled out’
Rumours swirl around that the midfielder made himself a £100million fortune in the US. There’s also reports he lost $54m in a high stakes game of poker.
Very little is actually known about the man dubbed Mad Dog, with some in Denmark even labelling him a unicorn due to the mystery that surrounds him.
But a new book pulls back the curtain and lets fans find out about the life and times of one of the most colourful players ever to exist. Here are some extracts from one of football’s most revealing stories.
Knocking one of Ronaldo’s teeth out
Thomas made the move to Real Madrid after becoming undoubtedly one of Europe’s leading midfielders at that point due to his performances for both Everton and Denmark.
Now it was an intriguing question of how good he could become with these facilities at his disposal and players of such high calibre to spur him on. Anyone who thought Thomas was going to Madrid just to pick up a big salary was in for a shock. Thomas was going there to play. He still only had one gear, the same one he had back in his days in the youth team at Vejle, and that was full steam ahead, no matter what obstacles appeared.
In training Thomas was his usual boisterous self, flying into tackles and putting maximum effort into every single second as if his life depended on it. But he also brought his sporadic poor judgement to Spain too and would think nothing of grabbing and putting any of the Galácticos in one of his bone-crushing bear hugs.
Of course, even they couldn’t get out of them, no matter how long they’d spent in the gym team-mate Borja Fernández added: ‘Thomas was a character, he made us laugh a lot. He was so much fun and genuine too’.
Gravesen joined Real Madrid after becoming undoubtedly one of Europe’s leading midfielders
Gravesen would think nothing of grabbing and putting any of the Galácticos in a tight bear hug
Gravesen (L) squares up to a young Fernando Torres during a Madrid derby in March 2006
He went a bit too far, though, when he decided to throw around the world’s top striker, Ronaldo, who was worshipped by millions and an icon to people everywhere. You can imagine the horror on the management team’s faces when they saw their main source of goals, who was worth his weight in gold, in the unforgiving hands of The Ogre as he’d been dubbed by the Spanish media.
THOMAS GRAVESEN’S CAREER
1995-1997 – Vejle Boldklub
1997-2000 – Hamburg
2000-2005 – Everton
2005-2006 – Real Madrid
2006-2008 – Celtic
1998-2006 – Denmark – 66 caps
Honours:
1x Scottish Premier League
1x Scottish Cup
Despite being 6ft tall and rippling with muscles, Ronaldo for all his might couldn’t get loose and ended up being tossed around like a rag doll. After some rough and tumble, the shenanigans ended with Ronaldo lying there minus a tooth. The incident, of course, made the papers.
While there was no malice or fallout, it showed that Thomas wasn’t going to tone down his antics. Even if he was playing for the biggest club in the world, he was still going to have a hell of a lot of fun doing it. Thomas’s Danish team-mate Morten Wieghorst said: ‘In Spain, they wouldn’t have experienced many players like him and that’s why at Real Madrid that stuff came out about his old tricks, so to speak. They weren’t used to that kind of character and to be fair, neither were we.’
Dating a Porn Star
Thomas’s downfall was caused by a cocktail of elements and influences that hit him hard. I don’t think he even saw them coming. While he’d been able to stay focused during his first six months in Madrid, once the season stopped and he had a chance to survey the scenery, it dawned on him just how much attention was on him.
The spotlight was burning brightly. Fans in Spain adored him and he was the biggest thing in Denmark. The likes of Beckham and Ronaldo were accustomed to intense scrutiny of their lives, on and off the pitch. They’d never known any different since becoming footballers. They were well used to having paparazzi following their car or leaping out in front of them as they left a shop. Thomas had been able to live a fairly normal life in Liverpool and Hamburg. He’d been well known but never one to trouble the non-sports media regularly. That was no longer the case. He wasn’t only big news in Denmark, he was fodder for every news outlet under the sun as being a Real Madrid star meant you were fair game.
Danish football journalist Johan Lyngholm-Bjerge explained: ‘Even now, after he’s retired, if something happens with Gravesen, it’s all over the newspapers in Denmark as people love to read it. He doesn’t feel he owes the media anything, as there have been clashes. He’s had relationships with women and you can imagine if a famous football player starts a new relationship, it’s all over the magazines and lots of the stories were probably not true He got tired of that.’
Enter Kira Eggers, who politely declined to be interviewed for this book. She had been described as a ‘porn star’ and there’s numerous X-rated videos featuring her online. She has also worked for Playboy TV and has done raunchy modelling shoots.
Gravesen’s downfall was prompted by the increased scrutiny that came with playing for Real
Gravesen once dated Porn Star Kira Eggers but is now believed to be with Kamila Persse (R)
It soon broke that her and Thomas had become a couple. As if the interest in him wasn’t already at fever pitch, getting together with a porn star sent Thomas’s profile rocketing into a different stratosphere. It was the sort of story that tabloid journalists salivate about in their sleep. Thomas was in his first public relationship since parting with teenage sweetheart Gitte Pedersen, and it couldn’t have been more different.
He’d gone from someone he’d known since his teenage days to someone who was used to attention in a completely different way. Unusually, someone within his personal circle actually broke ranks as Gitte gave an interview in which she expressed her surprise about his new partner. Gitte said: ‘Thomas and I had a very quiet life, and so I was very surprised to see him with Kira. I’m not so sure that Thomas takes the relationship as seriously as Kira. But I wish them both good luck I am not jealous. We had our time together and have both moved on.’
Not only that, she then revealed details about their relationship, which began after Thomas met a 15-year-old Gitte in Vejle. She revealed how Thomas was too shy to ask for her number, so enlisted a friend. Gitte added: ‘I simply could not believe that the hard football player was too shy to ask me. So I let him sweat a little before I gave it to him and we immediately clicked and did all the things that normal young people do when they date.’ Even a seemingly innocuous disclosure such as this would not have gone down well with Thomas, a notoriously private man who is very selective about who he speaks to.
Shooting fireworks at Wayne Rooney
Thomas wasn’t firing on all cylinders in season 2003/04. While he was still capable of producing moments of magic, they weren’t as frequent and it seemed something had blunted his blade. Part of the reason was that his midfield partner Lee Carsley didn’t play as much that season, meaning Thomas would have to be more disciplined, which of course he wasn’t. When he tried to be, it frustrated him. It placed a greater burden on the rest of the team and the gamble backfired.
Another reason was that Wayne Rooney was now a certain starter. He played the most league games of any outfield player in the squad that season. Naturally, the manager was going to utilise such a potent weapon. Rooney was older and no longer a rookie and his regular inclusion meant the way the team played had changed. The shape wasn’t the same and Thomas was no longer the fulcrum. That role had been handed to Rooney.
Thomas wasn’t firing on all cylinders in 03/04 and it seemed something had blunted his blade
Gravesen would have to be more disciplined in the absence of Lee Carsley but he wasn’t
Wayne Rooney was now a certain starter and was the fulcrum of the team instead of Gravesen
The switching of responsibility didn’t cause any friction between the two star men, although a casual observer might have assumed they were trying to kill each other if they’d walked in during their ‘shootout’ one afternoon. Moyes said: ‘It was the old gym, it’s about 60 yards long. Him [Thomas] and Wayne, they were shooting fireworks at each other. They had big rockets full of gunpowder, they were holding one end and shooting them at each other’.
The manager added: ‘Tommy was mental in a good way. He was a great player and we loved him He wouldn’t listen but it wasn’t in a bad way. I think it was a wee bit where he didn’t want to hear you and just done [sic] his own thing. He was crazy in his training. He was a good lad but mental.’
Working as a car salesman
After gaining a reputation as a promising young player, Thomas’s uniqueness began to seep out. Before, he’d just been a game-for-a-laugh youngster. But as he became an adult, it was clear he had a character that was different from all the other players.
In one of his early-career interviews, Thomas told how he took a job at a workshop that sold spare car parts because he needed something on which to focus his pulsating and consuming energy when he wasn’t playing.
He said: ‘I need to know that the alarm clock rings in the morning, otherwise I will never go to bed. Previously, I had a period of three to four months where I did not work. I only slept in the morning and could not sleep at night I switched completely night and day and could clearly notice that my game was getting worse and my condition worse.’
Gravesen, pictured playing for Hamburg in 1997, worked as a car salesman to give him routine
Gravesen challenges Zlatan Ibrahimovic during a Champions League clash in Turin in 2005
After explaining the issue to the club and his mentor Ole Fritsen, Thomas got some support and was able to revert to ‘just’ being one of European football’s best young players.
But it showed he had an almost abnormally obsessive personality that was to become more prevalent once he left the comfort of his homeland behind. It would be national news in any major country like England, Italy or Spain if a young star was combining their career with a regular job as a salesman in a spare parts shop.
Playing the odds in Las Vegas
After retiring the next time Thomas surfaced was four years later. He hadn’t been mentioned by anyone or appeared in any newspapers. He’d been a ghost. When Thomas was finally tracked down in 2013, he was living in a lavish gated community in Las Vegas. Tennis power couple Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, actor Nicolas Cage and superstar magician Penn Jillette were his neighbours
Mad Dog had settled down in Sin City’s suburb, Summerlin, which lies on the edge of the spectacular Spring Mountains. He was living in the luxurious Canyon Fairways, where houses sell for small fortunes and a price tag of $5.5m and upwards is not rare.
Thomas hadn’t lost his love of speed and was regularly seen burning up the Nevada freeways in his Mercedes SLR McLaren. It had a top speed of 208mph and cost around $500,000. His Mercedes was so exclusive that only 2,157 were made worldwide and each one could be individually crafted to the buyer’s specifications. It’s as bespoke as it gets in the car world and to be frank, it’s precisely the type of machine you might imagine Thomas jumping into to do his groceries.
Gravesen (C) speaks to the press prior to a training session with Denmark after joining Celtic
Celtic manager Gordon Strachan makes a point to Gravesen during a game at Old Trafford
Newspapers broke the story that Thomas had amassed a fortune of over £80m in Las Vegas
All of this leaked into the public arena due to revelations about Thomas’s wealth. According to numerous reports, in Nevada he hadn’t just lapped up the sun and amused himself. Out of nowhere, newspapers broke the story that Thomas had amassed a fortune of over £80m, with some even saying it had hit £100m. This is where Thomas’s story gets really interesting as there are lots of theories about how he made that money. But none are clear-cut.
One is the tale that first appeared on poker forum Two Plus Two. The story goes that some poker insiders were in a Vegas casino and became engrossed in an electric high-rollers game, featuring Thomas. A post made by a user going under the name TarantulaGargantu said: ‘I can confirm he has made £80m but it did not come easy. I was there in one of the sessions where he was playing some guy heads-up and lost £54m in one night. Can’t say who it was against, though’.
Heads-up means that it’s one on one, instead of the usual group of players around the table, all competing against each another. As it’s an American website, we can assume the staggering amount that Thomas is claimed to have lost is in US dollars.
The identity of his opponent being kept secret only makes the suggestion more credible. It would have been easier to throw out a bogus name of someone famous and allow it to filter through to the gossip magazines and tabloids.
TarantulaGargantu is no longer part of the forum, so cannot be tracked down for further information, and his or her identity could be someone very close to Thomas.
Mad Dog Gravesen: The Last of the Modern Footballing Mavericks by Chris Sweeney is on sale now from Pitch Publishing.
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