What a night from hell.
I cringe that yet another lot of sportsmen got caught with their pants around their ankles, as it were, in a public place where any idiot would know they'd get busted, either by paparazzi or police.
It's not just the doing of it that's stupid, it's the pathetically getting caught because you're stumbling drunk. And it's not as if they're teenagers, who we hope will grow up one day. Bromwich and Proctor are 28, an age when people do stuff like get married, get mortgages even, and read books with small print; an age when R18 written on a DVD jacket no longer thrills automatically, and they don't need mothers to tie a Windsor knot in their ties any more.
It still astounds me the way young men are so often out of an evening drunk and groping the nearest hapless woman, picking a fight, or both. And this is having a good time? Only a mother could love them, and only then if she didn't see what they get up to. Yet they get girlfriends.
The night out has cost Bromwich his captaincy of the Kiwis, and his teammate Proctor, too, a place on the World Cup team. They let everybody down, and at the bottom of it was our booze culture.
In February former All Black Ali Williams was nabbed in the touristy heart of Paris buying coke with an ex Wallabies footie star. Caught with them were two dealers, one of whom sold them 2.4g of coke for 180 euros, which sounds like a lot.
Williams is 37, a traditional age of maturity, and for his folly lost his lucrative job with rugby club French Racing 92 and fined. Previously his pranks, like lacing the beer of his Auckland teammates and coaches with Viagra in 2002, had him nicknamed Comical Ali.
Talk about laugh.
Fellow ex All Black Dan Carter, 35, got caught speeding on the Champs Elysees and drink driving around the same time, a lousy look in both cases for supposed role models. Their nights out drinking had the potential for both to lose their jobs, and put a question mark over whether Williams, at least, could be banned from playing rugby in France.
All Blacks, heroes of little boys and coveted by pretty girls, is this the best they can do with opportunities others can only dream of? Is this a case of thinking that when you're overseas what you do doesn't count, or that what happens there, stays there? How could it when you have a high profile and the world is remarkably small?
No wonder we've got a problem with male sporting clubs lower down the pecking order, yet our sportswomen manage to get by without getting drunk and making fools of themselves.
Even that is part of our culture: women are the nation's finger-waggers, and men are the macho delinquents with a traditional, tacit boys-will-be-boys acceptance by us of the unacceptable.
You may think it's cute.
I think it's pathetic.
