March 12, 2025 • 13 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for day.
And this is short stuff kind of sports related, but
real pop culture to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah, because if you grew up in the seventies and
eighties 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 in
the news or saw live during a game a woman
run out onto the baseball field and chatted up for
(00:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
For doing this. And that was MORGANA the Kissing Bandit.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
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 seventies and eighties that at one point Pete Rose
(01:13):
said that he considered her bigger than any one baseball
player in the whole game, like she was really really
famous for. She was on Letterman, she was on Carson,
and she was an exotic dancer by trade, by profession.
And I saw Chuck that her act. I saw it
described as part nudity, part comedy, which is kind of
(01:36):
tough to pull off, if you ask me. 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 sixty inch bust that required an I cup And
(01:56):
so that combined with running onto the field that sporting
events and kissing players, it really captured the attention of
the American public.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, and you know, that's not the kind of thing
we've usually highlighted when we're talking about women on the show.
But you can't ignore that with morgana the Kissing bandit
most notably because it comes up later in a potential
defense in court, which if you're wondering how in the
world does that work, then you'll find out an act too.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
And I think the fact that we mentioned it just
goes to show how much you can't ignore it.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I hope.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
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 thirteen.
She was on house for a while. Eventually she became
an exotic dancer as a teenager. In nineteen sixty nine,
at Crossley Field during a Cincinnata Reds game when she
(02:52):
was seventeen, she was with a couple of friends sitting
near the field level and you know, the baseball players
were checking these girls out because it was nineteen sixty nine,
and that's what you did when you were a baseball player.
You get a little bored and 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, and they were like,
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
She ran out there.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah I didn't know that which part, the outfield part?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
He was an outfielder at first, but okay, he played everywhere,
but I think shortstop and catcher 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
(03:56):
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 sports writer in Cincinnati the next day dubbed
her the kissing Bandit yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
A great example of her sense of humor. She said
later that her career started with the bet from her friends,
and Pete Rose's career ended with the bet because got caught.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Hundreds of bets.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Right, Yeah, I say we take a break and we'll
come back and talk a little more about MORGANA and
her prolific career.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
As watched, why s K.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Tough?
Speaker 2 (04:38):
You should know, all right, So MORGANA is kissing athletes
all over the place.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
She's getting more and more fair.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
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'd 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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Apparently George Brett.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, he got it twice, I think, right, I don't know. Yeah,
I think he might have been one of the only
ones that she got twice, which is why he got
her back. And like I said, she was prolific, right,
I think between nineteen sixty nine and ninety nine. Pretty
sure this was Sports Illustrated who came up with this
stat She kissed the over fifty athletes, not to mention managers, umpires,
(05:54):
and mascots, including the San Diego chicken who just keeps
popping up again and again and stuff you should know
episodes lately weirdly, 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
(06:16):
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, correct me if
I'm wrong, there was a love hate relationship with her
because she would disrupt games. Yeah, but at the same
time she would fill, you know, double the attendance at
a stadium when she said that she was going to
(06:39):
a game.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
You know. 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 Selis on
(06:59):
the two to score years ago, Oh yeah, this is
all sort of scary stuff and you never know what
someone's gonna do. You know, when Hank Aaron hit his
home run, the guys ran down on the field and
you know, we're 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.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Oh is that what changed things? That particular incident.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Well, that was what first started. I mean, Morgana came
after this, so it clearly didn't change that much. Oh okay,
I think Monica Selis is what really really changed it,
because that was an actual act of violence.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Everyone else had good intentions.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
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 are directed to not show any of
this stuff, so no one's incentivized to actually do this.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
But not back then, man, everyone like.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
She was good for baseball, you know she She did
have a few encounters with security that ended up pretty
There was one, I think the nineteen seventy All Star
Game in Cincinnati. The Reds management put a bounty on
her one hundred bucks to whoever could catch her because
she I guess it announced that she was coming and
(08:14):
they did catch her, and I guess they got her
on the ground and started the security started kicking her
in the ribs.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
That's ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Broke three of her ribs.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
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 gonna do because the
world is crazy now. But back then, like everyone knew
who MORGANA was. Everyone knew she was gonna run out there.
It would take less than a minute. She would kiss
the player on the cheek, not even on the lips,
(08:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
This is a different time.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
So if people are like, oh, I don't know, man,
you can't do something like that, Like, it's just different
these days. Everyone knew her and knew she meant no
ill will.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
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 renne cops getting carried
getting a little carried away. So I think she just
(09:25):
kind of took this as like, you know, it kind
of goes along with it. It's gonna 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 an
Astro's game to kiss Nolan Ryan on the mound. He
was on the pitcher's mount and she was kissing him
(09:46):
on the cheek, 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 party killer attorney.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
This guy, his name was Richard Haynes. They call him
the racehorse, and he was, you know, one of those
sort of show bodie 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
the cattle prode to prove that it wasn't the lethal weapon.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
So he was that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, 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
(10:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah. I think the Houston Sports Association got involved there,
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 morgana the kissing bandit and the
gravity defense not get mentioned. It's just part of her legend.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
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 nineteen eighty six,
she said publicly that she was going to kiss Don
Mattingly of the Yankees. She's 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,
(11:41):
she flew to I guess Seattle to kiss the Mari
nurse 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.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Scottie Pippen of the Bulls was the last player to
get that kiss, and that was in the early nineties,
and then she was in the movie Kingpin and I
was in a cameo in ninety six. Retired officially in
two thousand, even though Scottie Pippen was years before that.
But I don't think we mentioned she made millions of
bucks off this PERSONA. Yeah, but eventually, you know, like
(12:20):
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 seventies,
but who knows, because she's never been very truthful about
her age.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
You got anything else, I got nothing else? Great, Well,
here's to MORGANA the Kissing Bandit one of the more
interesting twentieth century figures. Ever Short Stuff Friends Did it Out?
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more pot casts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for day.
And this is short stuff kind of sports related, but
real pop culture to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah, because if you grew up in the seventies and
eighties 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 in
the news or saw live during a game a woman
run out onto the baseball field and chatted up for
(00:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
For doing this. And that was MORGANA the Kissing Bandit.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
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 seventies and eighties that at one point Pete Rose
(01:13):
said that he considered her bigger than any one baseball
player in the whole game, like she was really really
famous for. She was on Letterman, she was on Carson,
and she was an exotic dancer by trade, by profession.
And I saw Chuck that her act. I saw it
described as part nudity, part comedy, which is kind of
(01:36):
tough to pull off, if you ask me. 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 sixty inch bust that required an I cup And
(01:56):
so that combined with running onto the field that sporting
events and kissing players, it really captured the attention of
the American public.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, and you know, that's not the kind of thing
we've usually highlighted when we're talking about women on the show.
But you can't ignore that with morgana the Kissing bandit
most notably because it comes up later in a potential
defense in court, which if you're wondering how in the
world does that work, then you'll find out an act too.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
And I think the fact that we mentioned it just
goes to show how much you can't ignore it.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I hope.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
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 thirteen.
She was on house for a while. Eventually she became
an exotic dancer as a teenager. In nineteen sixty nine,
at Crossley Field during a Cincinnata Reds game when she
(02:52):
was seventeen, she was with a couple of friends sitting
near the field level and you know, the baseball players
were checking these girls out because it was nineteen sixty nine,
and that's what you did when you were a baseball player.
You get a little bored and 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, and they were like,
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
She ran out there.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah I didn't know that which part, the outfield part?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
He was an outfielder at first, but okay, he played everywhere,
but I think shortstop and catcher 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
(03:56):
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 sports writer in Cincinnati the next day dubbed
her the kissing Bandit yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
A great example of her sense of humor. She said
later that her career started with the bet from her friends,
and Pete Rose's career ended with the bet because got caught.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Hundreds of bets.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Right, Yeah, I say we take a break and we'll
come back and talk a little more about MORGANA and
her prolific career.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
As watched, why s K.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Tough?
Speaker 2 (04:38):
You should know, all right, So MORGANA is kissing athletes
all over the place.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
She's getting more and more fair.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
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'd 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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Apparently George Brett.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, he got it twice, I think, right, I don't know. Yeah,
I think he might have been one of the only
ones that she got twice, which is why he got
her back. And like I said, she was prolific, right,
I think between nineteen sixty nine and ninety nine. Pretty
sure this was Sports Illustrated who came up with this
stat She kissed the over fifty athletes, not to mention managers, umpires,
(05:54):
and mascots, including the San Diego chicken who just keeps
popping up again and again and stuff you should know
episodes lately weirdly, 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
(06:16):
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, correct me if
I'm wrong, there was a love hate relationship with her
because she would disrupt games. Yeah, but at the same
time she would fill, you know, double the attendance at
a stadium when she said that she was going to
(06:39):
a game.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
You know. 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 Selis on
(06:59):
the two to score years ago, Oh yeah, this is
all sort of scary stuff and you never know what
someone's gonna do. You know, when Hank Aaron hit his
home run, the guys ran down on the field and
you know, we're 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.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Oh is that what changed things? That particular incident.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Well, that was what first started. I mean, Morgana came
after this, so it clearly didn't change that much. Oh okay,
I think Monica Selis is what really really changed it,
because that was an actual act of violence.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Everyone else had good intentions.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
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 are directed to not show any of
this stuff, so no one's incentivized to actually do this.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
But not back then, man, everyone like.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
She was good for baseball, you know she She did
have a few encounters with security that ended up pretty
There was one, I think the nineteen seventy All Star
Game in Cincinnati. The Reds management put a bounty on
her one hundred bucks to whoever could catch her because
she I guess it announced that she was coming and
(08:14):
they did catch her, and I guess they got her
on the ground and started the security started kicking her
in the ribs.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
That's ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Broke three of her ribs.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
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 gonna do because the
world is crazy now. But back then, like everyone knew
who MORGANA was. Everyone knew she was gonna run out there.
It would take less than a minute. She would kiss
the player on the cheek, not even on the lips,
(08:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
This is a different time.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
So if people are like, oh, I don't know, man,
you can't do something like that, Like, it's just different
these days. Everyone knew her and knew she meant no
ill will.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
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 renne cops getting carried
getting a little carried away. So I think she just
(09:25):
kind of took this as like, you know, it kind
of goes along with it. It's gonna 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 an
Astro's game to kiss Nolan Ryan on the mound. He
was on the pitcher's mount and she was kissing him
(09:46):
on the cheek, 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 party killer attorney.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
This guy, his name was Richard Haynes. They call him
the racehorse, and he was, you know, one of those
sort of show bodie 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
the cattle prode to prove that it wasn't the lethal weapon.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
So he was that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, 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
(10:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah. I think the Houston Sports Association got involved there,
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 morgana the kissing bandit and the
gravity defense not get mentioned. It's just part of her legend.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
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 nineteen eighty six,
she said publicly that she was going to kiss Don
Mattingly of the Yankees. She's 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,
(11:41):
she flew to I guess Seattle to kiss the Mari
nurse 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.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Scottie Pippen of the Bulls was the last player to
get that kiss, and that was in the early nineties,
and then she was in the movie Kingpin and I
was in a cameo in ninety six. Retired officially in
two thousand, even though Scottie Pippen was years before that.
But I don't think we mentioned she made millions of
bucks off this PERSONA. Yeah, but eventually, you know, like
(12:20):
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 seventies,
but who knows, because she's never been very truthful about
her age.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
You got anything else, I got nothing else? Great, Well,
here's to MORGANA the Kissing Bandit one of the more
interesting twentieth century figures. Ever Short Stuff Friends Did it Out?
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more pot casts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.