Sensitive thugs, y’all need hugs.

Professional athletes should be commended for not running to rehab like politicians or actors when they get caught acting a fool. The offender’s team or agent writes an apology that the player couldn’t have written and everyone moves on besides the victim(s). Just ask Leonard Little and Chris Henry who made a “complete 360″. Someone should have explained this to French rugby player Mathieu Bastareaud before he checked himself into Le Looney Bin.

Bastareaud claimed that he was jumped and punched by five men while returning to his hotel after France played New Zealand in a test match last week. Not quite. You see what had really happened was he hit his head on a table after drinking too much. Want to try that again? It turns out he was acting a fool and one of his teammates settled him down by laying him out.

“Drunk and aggressive, Bastareaud was reportedly calmed down by a fist from one of his teammates,” the daily Le Parisien reported.

Bastareaud admittted lying about the incident. He thought he could cover up the truth but that didn’t work out so well. Instead of ending the situation with an apology and cover up from French rugby officials, he decided to check himself into a mental hospital for two weeks after suffering “serious psychological problems”. Stade Francais president Max Guazzini said the media pressure became too much for the player to take.

Maybe we’re being too hard on the kid. He is the cousin of Arsenal and France defender William Gallas who everyone agrees is batshit crazy. It’s not his fault. It’s in the blood.

There’s not much like a lazy afternoon rugby match between two inconsequential island nations. New Zealand and the Cook Island are the kind of places you end up due to a shipwreck or plane crash. The two countries decided to see who could out-Haka who before their match and hilarity ensued

Check the two players at the bottom of the picture who hug and walk off as though nothing is going on behind them. At least the Cook Islands guy went back. The New Zealand player had his team’s back. Way back.

One would think the Cook Islands team would be on their knees crying as though they were saved. “Please, we were eating each other! No man should get used to the taste of another human…well, depending on the circumstances.”

“You’re gone! You are with little rabbits! You are in the pen!”

What does that even mean? I don’t know but this is one hell of a try and a conversion afterwards. Don’t sleep on rugby.

It wouldn’t be a proper Tri-Nations without your 2007 Rugby World Cup winners South Africa so here’s a gem from the 80s TV show Spitting Image. Leave it to the English to bring this up during the leadup to the RWC final this past weekend. Before you get all uppity, self-righteous and Peace Corps on us, remember this was made during the apartheid era when I wouldn’t play Sun City.