The mention of soccer makes me think of rugby, which is a related sport but a lot rougher. I might as well tell my rugby story here, some of you might find it amusing.
A few years back, I was managing a small hotel in downtown San Francisco. A quiet little place with only 120 rooms, and most of the guests were either traveling businesspeople or middle-aged tourists.
Somehow, though, we got a booking for a block of rooms for a rugby team from Argentina, and they turned out to be the crudest bunch of complete jerk-offs that I've ever seen in my life! They were from some rural part of Argentina, and they were sort of the South American equivalent of the most backward Appalachian hillbillies, that's the best way I can describe them.
So, for a week it was utterly insane, total bedlam in that place, because these characters were
genuinely uncivilized. They were harrassing the younger female guests, making obscene gestures at them and so on, and one day I saw one of them taking a leak into a potted plant in the hallway as I was getting out of the elevator.
I wanted to kick them all out, but upper management wouldn't let me. "You can't throw them out unless they commit an actual crime." Believe it or not, that was the answer I got from my cementhead boss. Of course, he was thinking only in terms of revenue, but the hotel ended up with a net loss by
not 86'ing them (the punch line comes at the end).
We had some international flags on the outside of the building, two floors off the ground, just for decoration. One day I was walking up to the place and I noticed that about half the flags were missing... these guys had been stealing them, which you couldn't do without leaning out a window so far that you'd have to have someone hold you by the ankles so you wouldn't fall out!
But here's the capper: I'm working late at night and one of these dimwits walks into the lobby with a live chicken under his arm. At this point, I've
had it, so I step out from behind the front desk and tell him, "Hey! This is a hotel! You can't bring livestock in here!" Of course, he didn't understand a word I was saying, because only two of these dozen or so morons spoke even a little English, and I speak basically no Spanish. He got the message, though, from my tone of voice, and he turned around and left.
I found out that he'd sneaked the chicken back in after
I left, though; a Spanish-speaking janitor told me. So I asked him, "What the hell were they doing with a live chicken in their room?"
He said, "They told me that they sacrifice a chicken before every game, for good luck."
That's absolutely true, every bit of it... oh, and they did $3,000 worth of damage to the rooms.
"Truth is stranger than fiction, Judgie-Wudgie!"
Amen to that, and I'm not
ever going to any rugby games,
that's for sure!
![[yikes]](https://threestooges.net/forums/Smileys/default/yikes.gif "Yikes")
