World's Top Shoe Misusers

Footwear-throwing journalist al-Zaidi ranks no. 5
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 16, 2009 10:26 AM CDT
World's Top Shoe Misusers
Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev, at the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Russia, 1963.   (Getty Images)

Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw a shoe at George W. Bush, was released from jail yesterday, leading the Christian Science Monitor to reflect on other top “footwear misusers” through the years:

  1. Richard Reid: The would-be shoe bomber brought homemade explosives onto a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001, but they didn’t work. He did succeed, however, in annoying travelers, who now have to remove their shoes to go through airport security.

  1. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: When angered at a UN meeting by a call for freedom for Soviet-held Eastern Europe, Stalin’s successor repeatedly slammed his shoe on the table in fury.
  2. Maxwell Smart: Okay, he’s not real, but he had a mobile phone long before anyone else. The Get Smart star’s shoe-phone was always causing him technical problems.
  3. Shoeless Joe Jackson: The baseball player got his nickname when blisters drove him to race around the bases without footwear, prompting a fan to yell, “you shoeless son of a gun, you!”
(More Muntadhar al-Zeidi stories.)

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