Dr. Lemma@DoctorLemma
She was arrested nineteen times. She cracked a kneecap, broke her tailbone, and fractured three ribs. And she never once regretted any of it.
Morganna Roberts grew up in Kentucky, USA, abandoned by her mother as a baby, raised by her grandmother, sent to a boarding school, and ran away at thirteen with nowhere to go. She survived on the streets of Baltimore before finding work in nightclubs. By her late teens she was performing across the country.
Then in August 1969, at a baseball game in Cincinnati, a friend dared her for five dollars to run onto the field and kiss a player.
She kissed Pete Rose, one of baseball's biggest stars, on the cheek. He called her a name she couldn't repeat. The next night he found her at her show and apologised with flowers.
A sportswriter in Cincinnati the following morning wrote the headline: "Bandit steals kiss from Pete Rose."
That was the day Morganna the Kissing Bandit was born.
She spent the next thirty years doing it again and again. Baseball fields. Basketball courts. Hockey rinks. She kissed Nolan Ryan, a pitcher so dominant he held the world record for strikeouts. She kissed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the all-time leading scorer in NBA basketball history. She kissed George Brett, a baseball legend, twice. He showed up at her show three weeks later and kissed her back.
When she was once charged in court, her lawyer argued she hadn't intended to run onto the field at all. He told the judge that with her particular figure, she had simply leaned over the rail to watch the game, and gravity had done the rest.
The judge laughed and dismissed the case.
Her fame earned her millions. Her own baseball card. A display at the sport's Hall of Fame. A share in a minor league team. Her own brand of peanuts.
She retired in 2000 and has lived quietly in Ohio ever since.
