Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know

Episode: Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Release Date: March 12, 2025
Hosts: Josh and Chuck (with Jerry substituting for Dave)

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Introduction to Morganna the Kissing Bandit

In this engaging episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Josh and Chuck delve into the fascinating life of Morganna, famously known as "Morganna the Kissing Bandit." Morganna became a cultural icon in the 1970s and 1980s through her unconventional antics at Major League Baseball (MLB) games and other sporting events across the United States.

Josh introduces Morganna's notoriety:

"[...] 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." (01:22)

Early Life and Background

Morganna was born Nancy Lee Rose in Louisville, Kentucky. Her early years were tumultuous, marked by deception about her age and a challenging adolescence. Chuck provides context on her upbringing:

"She was a runaway at age 13. She was unhoused for a while. Eventually, she became an exotic dancer as a teenager." (03:00)

Her grandfather played a pivotal role in introducing her to the world of baseball, fostering her deep connection to the sport despite her rocky childhood.

Rise to Fame: The Kissing Antics

Morganna's fame skyrocketed from a simple bet with friends. At the age of 17, during a Cincinnati Reds game in 1969, she ran onto the field and kissed Pete Rose on the cheek. This bold move earned her the moniker "The Kissing Bandit."

Chuck recounts the origin of her nickname:

"A sports writer in Cincinnati the next day dubbed her the Kissing Bandit." (04:40)

Her performances weren't limited to baseball; Morganna made appearances at NASCAR races, NBA, NFL, and NHL games, even extending her antics to horse racing events. Her unmistakable presence, combined with her 60-inch bust, made her a media darling, leading to appearances on shows like Letterman and Carson.

Impact on Sports and Popular Culture

Morganna's appearances had a dual effect on sporting events. While she often disrupted games, her presence simultaneously boosted attendance numbers.

Josh explains:

"Her presence often doubled the number of fans in the stands. People would show up because they wanted to see that kind of thing in addition to a game." (06:00)

This phenomenon highlighted a unique cultural moment where Morganna became synonymous with the sports events she attended, blending entertainment with athletics in a way previously unseen.

Encounters with Security and Legal Troubles

Morganna's antics inevitably led to numerous run-ins with security. One notable incident occurred during the 1970 All-Star Game in Cincinnati, where Reds management placed a bounty on her, leading to her being violently subdued and suffering injuries such as broken ribs.

Chuck expresses disbelief at the response:

"She was just a minor disruption... This is a different time." (08:51)

Despite these altercations, Morganna maintained a resilient attitude, often shrugging off her injuries and continuing her mission with humor and determination.

The Gravity Defense and Legal Challenges

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Morganna's story is her legal defense during an arrest after attempting to kiss Nolan Ryan at an Astros game. Morganna hired attorney Richard Haynes, known as "the Racehorse," who devised the unconventional "gravity defense."

Josh describes the defense strategy:

"He was gonna 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 the weight of her bust would drag her over the rail onto the field." (11:24)

This unconventional approach, leveraging her physical attributes humorously, persuaded the court to drop the charges, further cementing her legendary status.

Ingenious Tactics and Later Years

Morganna was known for her clever maneuvers to avoid capture. In 1986, she announced her intention to kiss Yankees player Dom Mattingly but cleverly diverted her efforts to steal a kiss from Mariners catcher Steve Yeager instead.

Chuck highlights her cunning:

"She would use a little deflection and sleight of hand. She wasn't above that, which also, I mean, this lady was pretty cool." (12:25)

Her career spanned over three decades, with her final on-field kiss delivered to NBA star Scottie Pippen in the early '90s. Morganna even made a cameo appearance in the 1996 film Kingpin, showcasing her continued influence in popular culture.

Legacy and Conclusion

Morganna officially retired in 2000, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most intriguing and beloved figures in sports history. Despite retiring, she remains an enigmatic figure, with little known about her life post-retirement. Her story is a testament to the enduring impact one person can have on sports culture, blending humor, rebellion, and entertainment in a unique way.

Josh offers a heartfelt conclusion:

"Here's to Morganna, the Kissing Bandit, one of the more interesting 20th century figures ever." (13:11)

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Josh (01:22): "Pete Rose said that he considered her bigger than any one baseball player in the whole game."
• Chuck (04:40): "She was a runaway at age 13. She was unhoused for a while."
• Josh (06:00): "Her presence often doubled the number of fans in the stands."
• Chuck (08:51): "She was just a minor disruption... This is a different time."
• Josh (11:24): "He was gonna use the gravity defense... the weight of her bust would drag her over the rail onto the field."
• Chuck (12:25): "She wasn't above that, which also, I mean, this lady was pretty cool."
• Josh (13:11): "Here's to Morganna, the Kissing Bandit, one of the more interesting 20th century figures ever."

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Conclusion

This episode of Stuff You Should Know offers a comprehensive look into the life and legacy of Morganna the Kissing Bandit. Through engaging storytelling and insightful discussions, Josh and Chuck shed light on how Morganna became a beloved and controversial figure in American sports culture, leaving listeners with a deeper understanding of her unique place in history.

Transcript

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[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

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. And that was Morgana the Kissing Bandit.

[Josh]

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, 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. 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.

[Chuck]

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 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 in Act 2.

[Josh]

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

[Chuck]

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 near the field level, and 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 get a little bored in outfield and look to the stands at teenage girls, I guess. And everyone was sort of. The players were sort of paying them some attention, except for Pete Rose. 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. She ran out there. Yeah.

[Josh]

I didn't know that. Which part? The outfield part?

[Chuck]

Yeah. Yeah. He was an outfielder at first, but 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 gonna 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 sports writer in Cincinnati the next day. Dubbed her the Kissing Bandit.

[Josh]

Yeah. And 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 a bet.

[Chuck]

Because she got caught betting hundreds of bets.

[Josh]

Right.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

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

[Chuck]

Let's do it. S, Y, S, K. S, K. Right.

[Josh]

Stuff you should know.

[Chuck]

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

[Josh]

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

[Chuck]

I don't know.

[Josh]

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 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 youf 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 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, but at the same time she would fill double the attendance in a stadium when she said that she was going to a game.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

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

[Chuck]

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

[Josh]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Right.

[Chuck]

But not back then, man. Everyone, like, she was good for baseball.

[Josh]

You know, 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, 100 bucks to whoever could catch her because she. I guess it announced that she was coming, and they did catch her, and I guess they got her on the ground and security started kicking her in the. The ribs.

[Chuck]

That's ridiculous.

[Josh]

Broke three of her ribs.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And, you know, I said that's ridiculous because it's different these days, and it is a genuine security risk. Cause 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, 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's disruption. This is a different time. 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.

[Josh]

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 run 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 the Astros game to kiss Nolan Ryan on the mound. Well, he was on the pitcher's mountain. She was kissing him 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 particular attorney.

[Chuck]

Yeah, this guy. His name was Richard Haynes. They call him the Racehorse and he was one of those sort of showboaty. Would take wealthy clients accused of everything from murder to embezzling and stuff like that. And apparently one time in court, he zapped himself with a cattle prod to prove that it wasn't a lethal weapon. So he was that kind of guy. And this is where we mentioned that he used her bust size as part of the defense, because he was gonna 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 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.

[Josh]

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 Morgana the Kissing Bandit in the gravity defense not get mentioned. It's just part of her legend.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh]

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 Dom 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.

[Chuck]

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 in 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. But eventually, 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.

[Josh]

You got anything else I got nothing else. Great. Well, here's to Morgana, the Kissing Bandit, one of the more interesting 20th century figures ever. Short Sleep Stuff Friends is out.

[Chuck]

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