Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  G: Such as . . .?

  M: High-school school rugby in New Zealand.

  G: You mean the thing that brought us back together, back in the day?

  M: Yes. But I wanted to hear you say it.

  G: Why?

  M: To see if that moment is still as important to you as it is to me.

  G: Well, obviously it is, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here in this insanely beautiful French village, drinking red wine in the morning with you before we go to training, would I?

  M: See, it sounds so lyrical when you say it like that. But just to bring Warren and everyone else up to speed, you and me agree that the level of competition and intensity in secondary school First XV rugby in New Zealand is ridiculous, right?

  G: Yes, which is a shame, because that level of competition can turn a lot of youngsters off playing at a time when young people should be enjoying their sport. But it is also not unexpected, given that rugby is a religion in New Zealand.

  M: Which is a pity. I mean, I remember when there were times you were terrified of coming to school on Monday if you lost on Saturday.

  G: We never really lost much on Saturday.

  M: Well neither did we, obviously, but the underlying pressure was always there, which makes me sad for those who play it for the love of the game.

  G: All of which is a roundabout way of getting us to my humiliation when my school, Hastings Boys’ High School. hosted your school — whatever the hell we’re calling it for legal reasons . . .

  M: Bling’s College.

  G: That’s right. Which is actually a pretty accurate description of the school, come to think of it. We’re talking about the day that Hastings Boys’ defended the Moascar Cup against the challengers from Bling’s College, featuring their star second-five, Machete.

  M: This is a piece of silverware schools have been contesting for over a hundred years, did you know that?

  G: I also know it looks like a Year 9 metalwork project gone wrong, nailed to the top of an old bit of propeller — but yes, you are correct, the school that holds the Moascar Cup can rightfully claim to be the best rugby school in New Zealand — which is akin to being the best footballing school in Brazil.

  M: Or the best wine-making school in France.

  G: I guess so.

  M: Did you know that some schools crave this cup so badly that they deliberately poach the best players from other schools?

  G: That is indeed a shocking thing to hear, Machete.

  M: Some schools are supposed to be Christian schools but they steal their rugby success. There’s one school I know of, that was in our competition . . .

  G: But which you can’t name for legal reasons . . .

  M: Which I won’t name because I don’t want to speak their name, but one year they apparently poached their entire First XV. They poached Fijians, Samoans, Tongans, even an Australian, as well as boys from Hamilton, Rotorua, Napier, Hastings, Palmerston North, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Dunedin and Gore.

  G: Or maybe that part of Auckland was particularly diverse and/or had quite a transient migratory population.

  M: Nah, they totally cheated the system. Anyway, we beat them, thanks to me kicking a last-second dropped goal. One of only two in my career.

  G: I remember the other one. It was in the last minute against England, we were leading by 25 points and you did it to mock them.

  M: Hey, if you can’t mock the English, who can you mock?

  G: Well, I could mock you, right now, for going on about schools poaching players when you turned up at our school playing for Bling’s College.

  M: But you know now that I wasn’t there on a rugby scholarship. You know now that I was there because of the dodgy deal my Aunty Fiona did with the school.

  G: Hey, did they ever find her husband the arms dealer?

  M: Apparently there was an unconfirmed sighting in Colombia. But she’s actually much happier without him. She runs a dog-grooming business in Otahuhu now.

  G: Nice. But getting back to the point of the story, I was totally blown away when I saw you get off that bus in Hastings, on that day.

  M: And I was blown away to see you. I thought you would have been living with your olds on some commune in the Coromandel, learning how to raise vegan chickens.

  G: But there we were, facing off like something out of a movie — old foes who were briefly friends who were now foes again, in the most important game of their rugby lives.

  M: It was a real big deal, that game, eh?

  G: Huge. We had already defended the cup against — do I have to do the thing where I give fake names to other schools too? Or is that just for you?

  M: You should probably do it too, for consistency.

  G: Okay, so that year we’d already defended the cup against Fisborne Boys’ High, Spamilton Boys’ High, Kalmerston North Boys’ High, Duckland Glammer, and our arch-rivals Rapier Boys’ High. One more defence and we could put the trophy back in the trophy cabinet for the summer — ideally at the back of the cabinet where no one actually had to look at it. And then you showed up, getting off the team bus, giving me the stink eye.

  M: In all fairness, the last time I had seen you, your parting words to me were ‘Stuff you, Machete!’

  G: Which was pretty mild compared to what I was thinking.

  M: I could tell. Your lips were saying one thing but your eyes were saying so much more.

  G: You sold me down the river, man. You gave me up to The Man the moment The Man just looked at you.

  M: But you know now that I am over-respectful, some would say fearful, when faced with stern paternal authority figures.

  G: I know that now, because a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then — the bridge that crosses the river you sold me down. But back then, I just wanted to smash you.

  M: I could tell by the way you were giving me the stink eye.

  G: And you were giving me the stink eye back.

  M: Yeah, there was lot of eye stinking going on.

  G: Come game time it was going to rain retribution and revenge.

  M: And then it all went wrong for you, didn’t it?

  G: Yeah, not going to lie, things did not go quite according to the plan.

  M: When our teams lined up for the haka . . .

  G: Our team being the only one with actual Maoris in the team.

  M: Not true. Bong was 1/64th Ngapuhi on his mother’s side.

  G: Our mighty haka was going to ring out across the Heretaunga Plains . . .

  M: I could feel your eyes on me.

  G: I never took my eyes off you.

  M: It actually got a bit awkward, ’cause people were starting to notice that you only had eyes for me.

  G: Then we began. And I over-haka’d.

  M: Yeah, you over-haka’d.

  G: Pulled a hammie, mid-haka. I should have warmed up. Trap for young players.

  M: Mind you, you were giving it everything — the full pukana. I could see all the Maoris in your team looking at you like ‘what the hey?’ just before your hammie pinged and you went down and they had to carry you off.

  G: So, I couldn’t actually play that day, and had to watch, in shame, from the sidelines. Still, at least my team beat your team, even without me.

  M: Yeah, well, we didn’t want the stupid ugly cup anyway.

  G: And then afterwards, during the aftermatch function, you came and found me.

  M: Yeah, I came to see how you were feeling and to lie to you that no one was laughing about what happened during the haka.

  G: And we sat and we talked about what had happened between us and we cleared the air, forever.

  M: And it all became water under the bridge. Water that flowed away with the tides of time.

  G: Machete and The Ghost, riding again.

 
M: And so we rode out of there, under cover of darkness, me doubling you on your bike, to your parents’ place where we sat in your sleep-out in the garage and drank Southern Comfort and Paeroa and talked, really talked.

  G: And you told me all about getting Joanna pregnant and your conflicted attitude towards fatherhood.

  M: And you told me all about your four girlfriends and I thought, ‘Why can’t I be like that?’

  G: And then we both spewed heaps.

  M: Heaps and heaps.

  G: And it was then, as we spewed, side by side, that we truly became brothers.

  M: Because only brothers can spew in front of each other like that.

  Climb Every Mountain

  by Machete

  Rugby, like mountain climbing, is about climbing mountains. Except in rugby the mountains are in your mind, whereas in mountain climbing they are actual mountains. But also they must be mountains in your mind too, because otherwise mountain climbing would be easy, and all my mountain-climbing friends tell me it isn’t.

  Reaching the pinnacle of schoolboy rugby was for me, at the time, a mountain. Bling’s College may not have won the Moascar Cup that day but we beat the evil St Bents to win the national championship and that was a pretty darn good way for me to walk out of that school with my head held high — even as I was lying low because the principal still wanted to kill me for knocking up Joanna, his daughter.

  But if I thought winning the premier schoolboy rugby competition in the country was like climbing a mountain, it turned out it was more like hiking up Mt Eden and making it to the trig station at the top. And once I reached that metaphorical summit, all I really found out was that there were many more trig stations to climb to. (And just as an aside, the thing about trig stations is that they’re nothing much to look at. I have no idea why they’re even designed the way they are. Why can’t the council commission local unemployed artists to create some fancy sculpture or something?)

  But still, the cool thing about reaching a trig station in your life is that in order to find these ugly-looking things, you have to walk up a mountain — or a hill masquerading as a mountain, in the case of Mt Eden. Standing atop the Mt Eden of schoolboy rugby, I realised that the next rugby mountain I wanted to climb was cracking the Auckland team. They were the team I worshipped growing up, and I had always dreamed of putting on the mighty blue and white hoops.

  Weirdly, I was at my new girlfriend’s place one day (Sina, the girlfriend who would become my next baby mama — love you family, this Easter, for sure!) and I was telling her about my dream to climb that particular mountain when my phone rang and it was a pissed off Bunty, the famous and ferocious Auckland coach, asking me why I wasn’t at training. It turned out I had been selected for the Auckland squad ages ago and they’d been trying to contact me and they’d left heaps of messages everywhere for me. I started to tell Bunty how I’d dropped my phone in a nightclub toilet a few weeks back and had only just got a new one, plus Sina and I were at that stage in our relationship where we just stayed in bed together . . . Bunty didn’t want to hear any of this and he told me to get my arse to training. So, I did and then I got selected in the team and that particular mountain turned out to be more like walking up the hill in the Domain where the museum is — which, coincidentally, is where we were when Sina told me she was pregnant.

  But a mountain is still a mountain even when it isn’t even a hill and Auckland was the dominant force in New Zealand rugby at the time I was picked — national provincial champions for so many years now that people outside of Auckland hated Auckland even more than they normally hated Auckland. And here I was, barely out of school, walking into a team that had provided the bulk of the ABs squad for decades and, when I joined, still had legends like Icepick, Lassie, Whale, Hummus and Timtam leading the way. These guys were nearing the end of their careers but had done so much in the game, and had so much mana, that they inspired younger players to the same lofty standards as them. When I finally got to my first day at Auckland training, my dad dropped me off, but only so he could get a photo with them. It didn’t take Icepick smashing me in my first contact drill to know that making the starting XV was still a mountain in front of me.

  Except that turned out to be more of an incline than a mountain because all the old guys ahead of me kept getting injured in training so I started every game my first season, covering everywhere from fullback to wing to centre to second-five. Eventually Teabag would suffer his career-ending tinnitus and the second-five position was mine for the taking — so I took it, scoring heaps of tries and having a ball — even after Sina and I broke up because she found out I was also seeing her cousin Tina.

  By now I was living the dream, but the next dream was the next mountain in front of me — the maunga called Super Rugby and the mighty Auckland Blues. In the past three years the Blues had won the Super 11, the Super 13 and the Super 17 and this year were hot favourites for the latest incarnation, the Super 13 again. Cracking this team, I thought, would be nigh on impossible and I started wondering if I might end up at the Chiefs, who were always desperate for any player they could get. Then all the players who were the Blues legends who were perpetually injured during the NPC season retired all at once and I was one of the first ones contracted. So, Mt Auckland Blues turned out to be more of a walk along Takapuna Beach — which, coincidentally, was where we were when Tina told me she was pregnant.

  My one regret, being named in the Blues squad, was that Ghost was not named in the squad with me. We’d been keeping in touch through all this time and I was well aware of his strange fondness for Mairangi Bay and his dream of wearing the white and sort of purple with black bits jersey of North Harbour. So, I went to Nugnugs, the Blues coach that year, and asked him if Ghost could be added to the squad. Nugnugs told me to f**k off and stick to my job which was f**king playing footie. So I did and it went very well for me and the rest is history, as they say. Another mountain had been ticked off but this one was tinged with sadness as I felt like Hillary without my Tenzing.

  The next mountain came to me in the form of a mountainous man. It was after a Blues game, at Eden Park, against the Crusaders. It was the first time that a NZ Super franchise had put a hundred points on another NZ Super franchise. It was kinda sad to watch the red and blacks wave the white flag that day, and by the time I scored my fifth try, even I was feeling pity for them. The legends in the team were very humble and gracious in victory and Icepick and Lassie led the two teams in a big long prayer on the field afterwards.

  But I knew the Crusader players were gutted and also afraid what would happen when they got back to Christchurch, so I invited them into the sheds for a few lemonades. One thing about the Canterbury boys, as it transpired, is that they can really sink their lemonades. Anyway, one thing led to another and the few lemonades turned into many lemonades which turned into a not entirely team-sanctioned bar crawl that stretched long into the night. And the thing, in my experience, with bar crawls like this one is that they always end up at the same place: the legendary Club Poly.

  Club Poly — much beloved in Auckland’s Pasifika clubbing community — was buried at the bottom of town and seemed to have a 24-hour lemonade licence. It was also one of the most fun places you could ever hang out, after everything else had closed. The bouncers were like everyone’s Island uncle and they were a jovial lot who generally smiled. Everyone knew to keep it that way and there was very rarely trouble. I always knew that when everyone else wouldn’t let me in, I could get in there.

  So I took the Canterbury boys along and, sure enough, they let us in. I thought the Christchurch lads would struggle with the music selection but they must have got on with the DJ because it wasn’t long before Canterbury classics like ‘Living Next Door to Alice’ were blasting through the club. I looked over and there they were teaching the local Samoan clubbing population when to sing that bit ‘Alice, Alice. Who the f**k is Alice?’ so I knew they were having
a good time.

  It was about then I felt the heavy, ominous tapping on my shoulder. I turned around and there in front of me was one of the greatest players to ever pull on the royal blue jersey of Manu Samoa — the legendary Biggie Dave.

  Biggie Dave was a local legend who had come through the tried and true school of rugby excellence that is the Ponsonby Club. He was a blockbusting No. 8 who had done a lot to bring pride to Manu Samoa, and he had as many fans in New Zealand as back on his Island home. Ever since Biggie Dave led the team to a shock upset of England in the 2001 World Cup, Samoa had continued to punch above its weight and was turning heads around the world for their open running style of play. Biggie Dave had retired after that World Cup, but the tentacles of his power and his mana were everywhere.

  So Biggie Dave looked at me and gave me the traditional Polynesian greeting nod — the one where you say nothing but just raise an eyebrow while barely lifting your chin. I gave him the nod back and he beckoned me to his table in the corner, where he proceeded to pour himself a large jug of lemonade before giving me a smaller jug. What did this summons mean?

  ‘You’re not bad, Machete,’ he said.

  Pride coursed through me that Biggie Dave even knew who I was, let alone that I wasn’t bad.

  ‘The next World Cup? Is that us?’

  He wanted me to commit to playing for Samoa at the next World Cup. And because it was Biggie Dave, right then and there, I committed my international rugby future to Manu Samoa.

  Biggie Dave just had that sort of power, plus — as I have already alluded to — when an older Samoan I look up to asks me for something, I just say yes. It’s why I don’t wear a watch any more when I go back to Samoa, because all my uncles fight to be the first one to say to me: ‘That’s a nice watch.’

  I can’t remember the rest of the night, but it was magical and there were lots of lemonades and when I called Ghost the next day, I told him all about how I had committed my future to the blue of Samoa.