By Jeff Piercy,
Fullback
#34
Some play professional football for the love of the game, some for the money, but as far as I can tell, most play for the chicken. That is Kentucky Fried Chicken to some, Poulet Frit Kentucky to others, and just plain “bird” around the locker room.
Now the franchise has an elaborate fining policy in place to reprimand players who are out of line, late for anything, or do something detrimental to the club, however, this is largely ignored. For the most part, if you screw up, “you got chicken”.
Late for meetings? Chicken! Don’t hand your special teams packet in on time before the game? Chicken! Sleep in, miss the train for the pre-season game to Toronto, and miss walk through practice that day? Pay your own way to Toronto, adhere to the fines set in place, AND THEN CHICKEN!
By mid-season it usually gets to the point where most of us, Anwar Stewart in particular, are pointing out team-mates who are out of line, just to get some bird. Because, as Stewie would say, “we gotta have it!”
Now it isn’t as though a single person ends up buying enough buckets of KFC/PFK to feed this entire group of poulet hungry alpha males. Rather the money is collected in 10 or 25 or sometimes 75 dollar increments until there is enough in the cookie jar to feed the team. Does this take long? Not when every person on the roster is trying to get money out of every other player on the roster!
The only other time you feel like everyone is after you is when those buckets of bird actually arrive. This is when the real free-for-all begins. People have been known to claim a non chicken-eater’s pieces for an entire season. Others have been known to bet pieces of chicken as if they were currency. There just seems to be something about the Colonel’s secret recipe that makes people around here go crazy.
So next time you are at an Alouette game and you see someone getting in trouble on the sideline, lean over to the person beside you and say…
“He’s got chicken!”
