All Victor's Children

Newmaniacs often talk of their hero as if he were about to step through the front door. "As cool as Victor is, he's not my role model," Thompson insists. "I'm not going to jump into different beds or pull off some dirty business deal. But if I had to, he'd be the one to show me how."

"Victor Newman can make your life so miserable, you're going to sit on your grave and wish you were buried," says Houston Oiler wide receiver Haywood Jeffires. "He has power, and with power you can be as ugly as you want because you know you'll look beautiful in the end."

The three-time Pro Bowler has followed Victor since his freshman year at North Carolina State. "Victor's got all the money," he explains. "He'll say, 'It costs $10 million? Call my accountant.' He'll say, 'Let's go to Europe for dinner.' The jet will be waiting and the Dom Pérignon will be on ice. Is that power or what?" Jeffires doesn't call his favorite soap The Young and the Restless anymore. "To me," he says, "it's just Victor."

Jeffires is such an avid Victorite that he rushes home from practice to catch the last 45 minutes during lunch break. Clutching three remote controls, a glass of milk and a stack of Oreos, he'll move from room to room, TV to TV. Jeffires gets so lost in Victor that his wife, Robin, makes him wear a receiver in his ear. "Haywood!" she'll shout into a mike. "Didn't you come home to be with me and the kids?"

"No, honey," he'll shout back. "I came home to look at Victor! I want to see who he's messing up today."

If Newman goes a few days without messing somebody up, Haywood goes haywire. "I've thrown my glass at the screen 15 times," he says. "Repairs have run me $6,000." Robin jokes that she used to worry that he would hurl his infant son, Haywood III, at the screen. "I need Victor to be controversial," Jeffires says. "The Lone Ranger and Tonto ain't no more. It's the '90s. Time for the bad boys."

They don't come much badder than Victor. "When he loses, he just finds another way to win," Jeffires says. "In my next life, I want to be Victor Newman."

"Victor Newman has all that knowledge and yet he doesn't know——about women," 59-year-old Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson says. "He loves everybody and divorces everybody. But he never gets rid of his ex-wives. He still wants to control them."

It's 11 a.m. and a telephone rings in Bellevue, Neb. And rings and rings.... "Call me at 11, chances are I'm not pickin' it up," says Gibson, now a St. Louis Cardinal coach. "That's my time for The Young and the Restless."

The man with the glare, the man with one of the meanest dispositions in baseball history, spends the off-season watching soaps. "The only way to get me mad now is to interrupt my watching," Gibson says.