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So Vinnie Jones copped a glass in the face in a bar fight in the US and could go behind bars for up to a year. It's been a long time coming and big, bad Vinnie finally learned the lesson: No matter how tough and how nasty you are, there's always someone bigger, tougher, nastier and faster to push a glass in your face.
For those of you who don't know who Vinnie Jones is, he's the intimidating geezer who starred in movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, specialising in playing characters of violent menace who occasionally inflicted that violence. That came after long years in England's football Premiership, where he specialised in being a player of violent menace who occasionally inflicted that violence.
In 12 years, he was sent off 12 times. He broke the leg of Tottenham Hotspur defender Gary Stevens - ending his career - with a vicious lunge and he famously gave Paul Gascoigne's testicles a workout that can only be described as "changing lightbulbs" in style.
He also once threatened Liverpool great Kenny Dalglish that he would rip off his ear "and spit in the hole" and he was fined 20,000 for putting out a video nasty of football hard men (including himself, of course), which featured advice for people who wanted to be just like him.
But it wasn't just his on-field violence that marked Vinnie Jones out. He was, if it was possible, an even nastier customer off the field where it seemed his tough-guy image intruded ever more insistently into reality. Talk about believing your own press releases.
The worst example - and there are many to choose from - was when he bit the nose (yes, you read that right) of reporter Ted Oliver, then of the Daily Mirror, in 1995. I knew Ted Oliver a little - an award-winning reporter and a legendary man of drink, who died last year after a battle with cancer.
Oliver hadn't met Jones before and hadn't written anything uncomplimentary about him but, when he got up from his chair to be introduced to Jones, the "hard man" leaned over and bit Oliver's nose - hard - and then reportedly started shaking his head from side to side like a dog. "I always do that to people," Jones is reported to have said as way of an explanation.
The heavily bleeding Oliver was asked by a bystander if he needed an ambulance. "No, get me a photographer," Oliver is said to have replied and the Mirror ran the whole gory mess on their front page.
Jones is said to have begged him not to write anything but Oliver recounted how Jones had earlier thrown toast at England skipper Gary Lineker and called him "Big Ears"; had poured orange juice over another reporter; had been turned away from a taxi because he was drunk; and then rowed over his 300 hotel bill.
Not that it stopped Vinnie being a tough guy. In 2003, Jones was convicted of air rage charges after he engaged with a woman at the first-class bar, she chose to return to her seat rather than carry things on, he pursued her and pushed a plate of food in her lap then slapped a fellow passenger about the head 10 times after he remonstrated with Jones. He then told the cabin crew he could have them all killed.
So he's a right charmer, then. In 1998, he was convicted of assaulting a neighbour in a late-night attack and the list goes on and on.
Until he ran into a character in Wiley's Bar, in Sioux Falls, North Dakota. Not your normal A-lister's club. But then Vinnie was there to go hunting (he enjoys killing wild animals, apparently) and he was allegedly taunted about his X-Men movie. That was when the fight and glassing happened which left Jones with 48 stitches and, ironically (are you listening, Ted?), a badly cut nose.
Jones is up on assault charges while the man who allegedly attacked him is facing more serious aggravated assault charges. Of course, he is telling a different story - how Jones was affronted when they innocently remarked about him being the bloke from X-Men and how he had tried to horn into a game of pool. Closed-circuit TV footage shows a bloody Jones being led to the toilets when he attacked a 165kg friend of the man who allegedly glassed him. The man struggled with Jones before throwing him to the floor like a doll. So it was a bad night for Vinnie, all round.
Not before time. If you examine the life and times of Vinnie Jones, it is as pockmarked by violence as his face. He was an ordinary footballer, made remarkable only by his penchant for violence.
Football was where he made his name but Vinnie Jones had very little to do with sport; not in the normal sense of sport as rivalry, fair play and respect for opponents.
His reward for this? A life in Hollywood's fast lane where his glittering, unforgettable message to kids is that being a nasty bastard can bring you many benefits.
Now he has received a reward of a different nature and is sending another message to kids - violence has a way of returning to those who deliver it. Lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
