In 1996, something so unbelievably disgusting, so morally reprehensible, and just fucking shit, was created. The Super 12. It had the makings of a great competition, combining teams from New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It could have been great, but they made one simple mistake. They included a team from Hamilton.
Hamilton.
I feel the repetition there still really doesn’t capture just how little sense this made at the time, or even today. The Chiefs, as they were (I’m assuming ironically) named, failed to make the playoffs for the first seven seasons they were involved in the competition. In 2004 they threatened to make everyone play in Hamilton all season if they didn’t make the playoffs, and they scraped into fourth place. They predictably lost to the Brumbies in the semi-final.
In 2006, the competition expanded into the Super 14, with the addition of another South African and Australian club. It won’t surprise anybody that the Chiefs kicked up a fuss about this: “we’re already too shit to make the playoffs, how the fuck are we meant to get anywhere near them now?”
And of course they didn’t. It took them another five years. Chlamydia was at an all-time high in Hamilton when they beat the Hurricanes (who probably just wanted to get the fuck out of Hamilton) to make the final in 2009. They subsequently lost the final by the biggest margin in Super Rugby history, 61-17 to the Pretoria Bulls.
Another two seasons passed without the Hamilton battlers experiencing any playoff footy, before some evident misfit at the University of Waikato found a cure for chlamydia, and the Chiefs blew all of the money on bringing in the likes of Sonny Bill, Aaron Cruden, Brodie “Lurch” Retallick, and Big Benny Tameifuna. Unfortunately the cure turned out to be a false dawn, and they went into receivership, only to return to the competition in 2014.
Even if all of this isn’t enough to make you point and laugh, and generally just despise the Chiefs, I have more for you.
In August 2016, the Chiefs hired a stripper, Scarlette, for their unofficial end of season party at the Okoroire Hot Springs near Matamata. Scarlette subsequently levelled sexual abuse allegations against the Chiefs, which was the moment when the Chiefs stopped being terrible rugby players, and just became terrible people.
An investigation was launched after Scarlette alleged she had been inappropriately touched and licked, had alcohol and gravel thrown on her and was intimidated during the function.
There are good and bad ways to deal with a situation like this, and Chiefs CEO Andrew Flexman decided to go with the worst possible option. "You have got to remember this is one person's accusation and her standing in the community and culpability is not beyond reproach,” he said.
In another blow that dragged us all back a few centuries, Margaret Comer from Gallagher Group, a major Chiefs sponsor, offered this gem: "if a woman takes her clothes off and walks around in a group of men, what are we supposed to do if one of them tries to touch her".
“It's not nice and perhaps the stripper shouldn't have been hired, but I'm reluctant to say that the boys were out of line," she said.
Comer, who is also a trustee on the board of Waikato Women's Refuge, has since apologised.
And if blatant sexism wasn’t enough, the Chiefs threw in a bit of homophobia just to top it all off. A man who was visiting the pools with his partner said player Michael Allardice shouted "here come the gays" and other sexually explicit comments.
I was unfortunate enough to find myself in Hamilton last year, and ended up at a Chiefs game. Naturally, I decided beer was more than necessary to forget where I was, and was pretty shocked when it turned out you had to pay with cash. Not only that, you have to be in a different line to get cash out. Look, I’m not about waiting the whole of the first half just for a few diluted Waikato Draughts. I can see why Chiefs fans do it though – they get to miss the whole first half where their team ends up down by double digits, and then get plastered in the second half with said beers to forget the game ever happened.
Fuck the Chiefs.