All for the love of the game? I don’t think so.

If there’s one thing all Kiwi’s love, it’s their rugby. But I discovered firsthand that the popularity of Wellington’s Rugby Sevens tournament actually has very little to do with sport—unless dressing up in a 6-foot inflatable penis costume has finally been recognized by the Olympic committee.

So here’s the deal with the Sevens: it’s a two-day tournament featuring qualifying teams from around the world. I have no idea what they have to do to qualify. Compete in the Rugby Three-And-A-Halves? It’s a mystery. What’s not a mystery is why they call it the Sevens. Basically, rather than 15-a-side like normal rugby, in this tournament each team fields seven. And a match is comprised to two seven-minute halves. It makes for pretty fast-paced play. I found it quite exciting.

Somewhere along the line, though, people decided that the Sevens needed a little something extra. Some spicing up. An element of audience participation. So they started dressing in drag or as legos or as sexy (insert any occupation known to man here). It’s pretty much New Zealand’s equivalent of an American Halloween, except the drinking starts at about 1 p.m. on a Thursday and doesn’t end until after brunch on Sunday morning.

My friend Max managed to wrangle us some tickets for Saturday afternoon. It was completely last-minute, so the best I could come up with costume-wise was a bottle of Steinlager beer (fascinator beer cap coupled with a bottle green shirt). It was kinda lame, but I tried—that’s what counts. Max went as the farmer from Footrot Flats—a Kiwi comic book that I’d never heard of.

Anyway, aside from being forced to spend the day as an anthropomorphized hangover waiting to happen, my initial clue that rugby was just a convenient excuse for debauchery was when I was pelted with ice cubes by assholes sitting on a bar balcony in a rude attempt to get me to flash my boobs. (I didn’t.) My next clue was at the stadium itself, where a grand total of about 17 people actually showed up to watch the tourney. Of course, this number increased throughout the day up until the final match between New Zealand and England, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for all the teams that had travelled from far off places only to play to 30,000 empty seats. I do have to admit, though, that I was actually glad there weren’t many spectators when we—meaning the US— got our asses handed to us by Scotland. Rugby is most definitely not our national forte.