Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  M: I wish even just a few of those people Ghost knew would go crazy for the air in bottles had bought our bottled air. We invested so much money into getting the best air from around the globe. Even just the development phase set us back heaps.

  G: First, I needed to travel to various sites around the world to assess the air quality: the Taj Mahal; the base camp at Everest; Iguaçú Falls; a babbling brook on Mt Fuji; the well of a remote village in Lapland; a quiet grassland in the Mongolian steppe, that sort of thing. Then I needed to ethically hire local workers to capture the air in giant tinfoil balloons, which were then shipped back to our bottling plant in Rotorua.

  M: I should have listened to the alarm bells being rung by my mates who I’d gone to Bling’s College with, who were now all captains of industry, and all of whom laughed when I told them about the bottled air idea. But Ghost kept assuring me that the deposit on my mum’s house was safe, and that our investment would soon multiply like gremlins being fed after midnight.

  G: I got a focus group in to give us feedback on the first production run. We hit two problems that, at first, seemed minor but actually turned out to be insurmountable. The first bottle we opened was from the Taj Mahal. The focus group said it smelled like shit. I explained that it was from India, where everything smells like shit. Then we opened one of the Lapland bottles — and it too smelt like shit. It was then I realised that we had a contamination issue and that maybe Rotorua wasn’t the best site for our air bottling plant.

  But the second and ultimately more insurmountable problem was that the focus group was united in saying that it looked like we were just trying to palm off empty bottles on the public and that paying $7.50 for an empty bottle was a total fraud. No matter how we looked at that problem it was, yes, insurmountable and that was the end of the bottled air dream.

  M: It was just as well that things were going well for us on the field at this time, because otherwise our relationship would have fallen apart even sooner. But that year, first up on the international calendar were the touring French, who that series had a different coach for each test. Ghost and I starred as we swept them and, for that short while, the footie was more important to us than business investments.

  But even as we conquered on the field, off the field Ghost kept going on about how business is all about how you get back up, not how you succeed. And so, in the months that followed we got quite a bit of practice at not succeeding and then getting back up, thanks to the other ideas Ghost had for a business we could do together.

  G: I still, to this very day, can’t understand why new-born baby yoga classes didn’t take off. Or the fashion shop specialising only in hankies. Or the goldfish-farming business.

  M: The problem with goldfish farming, I learnt, is that the number of consumers who want to buy goldfish is not many, compared to the millions of goldfish you can farm. Also, you can’t eat the surplus goldfish.

  G: By this stage, we were losing a fair bit of coin and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t starting to cause tension in our relationship. But it’s weird, the worse things got, the less we talked about what was going wrong. On the field, we always had each other’s backs. If one failed, the other cleaned it up. We naturally assumed that would happen in the field of business too.

  M: I don’t know why we made that assumption but we did. I did occasionally worry to my mum about it when I caught her between shifts. But she’d always just say, ‘That Neil is a good boy, he is white like Jesus.’ If my mum was cool then I had to be cool, so I just kept backing Ghost’s creative business ventures. Which was a bad, bad idea.

  G: In the end, even I couldn’t ignore the telltale signs that we were in trouble.

  M: The main telltale sign being that our manager, Sals, had called us into her office to tell us that apart from the money I’d squirrelled away for my mum’s house, we were broke. Naturally, I blamed Ghost since he was the ‘brains’ behind our operation.

  G: We had to accept that maybe there were ideas whose time hadn’t come yet — like baby yoga.

  M: We tried not to let it affect what was happening on the field, and so far we’d been lucky in that it hadn’t. But, if the truth is to be known, deep down I was starting to trust Ghost less and less. In the Brisbane test against the Aussies that year, there was a pivotal moment when we had to execute a play we’d normally be able to do in our sleep. But we weren’t quite in synch like we normally were so it went very very wrong and we ended up running over the sideline instead of the tryline. Luckily, it was against Australia so it didn’t matter in terms of the result, but it was definitely another omen that we did not heed.

  G: That period was a bit of a struggle for me, income-wise. I was barely keeping my head above water, just relying on my basic contract plus match fees plus the few endorsement deals I had going. Hard times. I wasn’t like Machete, with his flash rich friends.

  M: Thankfully, I had the Bling’s old boys’ network to see me right through our times of hardship. They rallied around me with business and financial advice. A lot of them were the heads of big companies and really knew their stuff. Bong, in particular, was a godsend and he was able to apply some of the investment tricks he’d picked up as a hedge-fund manager at J.P. Morgan. It wasn’t long until I was back on my feet.

  G: It was then I had my truly great idea. I knew this one was a winner. I just needed an investor.

  M: It had been a tricky 2015 season but we got through undefeated. In the media, there had been whispers of us falling out, but so far, publicly, we had maintained the appearance of a united front. But off the field and off the training paddock, the truth was we weren’t really speaking. In the off season, I was focusing on doing my own thing, getting my golf handicap down, and hadn’t seen Ghost for a while — until the day that triggered the fall of the empire of our friendship.

  When Ghost showed up at Royal Auckland Golf Club that day, I have to admit I almost didn’t recognise him. The other members wanted to call security to have him evicted for failing to meet the dress code, but then I saw it was Ghost and I told them I would deal with it — which I did by taking him into the carpark to talk to him where no one else could see us.

  G: I had parked myself at a wellness centre in Bali, which is where my idea hit me. By the time I jumped on a jet back home, I was feeling great but probably looking a bit feral. So, in the carpark of Royal Auckland, behind the greenkeeper’s shed, I told Machete about how over the last month of living rough in Bali, I’d done a lot of thinking. And strangely, how I had thought lots about his mum’s recipes and the ones she’d taught me over the years.

  M: This is when he pitched to me the idea of My Samoan Food Chest — where you delivered to people all the ingredients you need to cook your own Samoan meal in the comfort of your Remuera home. Your first Chest would come with instructions on how to dig your own umu pit in your backyard.

  G: It couldn’t fail. Selling people meal plans, ingredients and recipes based on the Island soul food Machete’s mum had taught me. It was genius.

  M: I wasn’t so sure and I should have run it by my Bling’s mates, but he was my uso, and it broke my heart to see how hairy and unkempt he’d become in Bali. So I asked my mum and she was happy to give it her blessing. Armed with that, I helped Ghost out and gave him some money to set up an industrial kitchen and hire some staff and to get cooking.

  G: I knew I could depend on Machete and his mum.

  M: Unfortunately, I couldn’t depend on Ghost. It was only after My Samoan Food Chest launched that I found out he had redesigned my mum’s sacred recipes to replace some of the ingredients with so-called ‘healthier options’.

  G: I argued that good nutrition is a necessity for people who love Island food but lead lifestyles that are too busy for them to cook it.

  M: And I argued that putting healthy stuff into Samoan food completely changed the taste of the food. Like when my mum’s recipes call for tinn
ed corned beef or tinned pineapple, you can’t instead use slow-cooked brisket and real pineapples. It doesn’t taste the same!

  And, as if to prove my point, the overwhelming number of people who actually bought My Samoan Food Chest were busy corporate Pasifika and when they cooked it they didn’t recognise the food they thought they were making! And then most of them thought their own mums made it better anyway!

  My Samoan Food Chest died within weeks of going to market — and, at first, I was sad for Ghost.

  G: And I felt terrible for him feeling sad for me.

  M: And then I was furious at Ghost once I found out that my mum had not only given him her recipes but had invested the money I’d given her for a house deposit in the stupid business! I couldn’t believe it. And then, when I told her that all her money was gone, she wasn’t even mad at Ghost. No, she was confident that I would one day save up some more money to buy her a house — and maybe I should give Ghost some money too while I was at it, because he’s a lovely boy who just doesn’t have a head for business — a bit like Jesus.

  G: Machete’s mum was very forgiving. Machete, on the other hand, not so much.

  M: I didn’t care about the money I’d lost, but to take my mum’s money — and her recipes? That killed me. Now I definitely wasn’t talking to him.

  G: And we couldn’t keep it from the public. Not after that disastrous first game of the 2016 season when we lost to England at home, and they got all their tries by crashing through our midfield. A midfield that, until then, had been impregnable but was now two former friends with a void between them. The void through which they ran.

  M: After that my old man passed away, and 2016 turned to mud. And because I wasn’t talking to Ghost, when he would have helped me deal with my grief, we grew even further estranged.

  G: After the death of his father I wanted to take Machete in my arms and tell him everything would be alright, but pride and anger at the things he had accused me of kept me at a distance. Even worse, by now the press were openly reporting our arguments at training and Machete’s temper tantrums at me and the time I ‘accidentally’ keyed his car. The New Zealand public was getting pretty worried at the state of us.

  M: I don’t know why. It wasn’t like it was any of their business.

  G: Well, with the 2017 World Cup just around the corner, it kinda was.

  M: Oh yeah, that.

  World Cup England, 2017

  MACHETE: What do you do when you are no longer brotherly towards your brother who is not actually your brother, but who has been like a brother for many years, when you are with your band of brothers who need the two of you to have brotherly love for each other in order for the brotherhood to triumph?

  Yes, that was the situation that Ghost — or as I called him at the time, Neil — and I found ourselves in at the 2017 World Cup. That’s how bad things had got between us, that we were calling each other by our proper names. If we passed in the hotel corridor I would nod and say ‘Neil’ and he would nod and say ‘Leilei’ and then we would pass, like ships in the knife. In public we kept up appearances, but I know when we got to our separate rooms there was nothing but hurt and probably a few tears.

  GHOST: It didn’t help that the World Cup this time round was in England, where gloominess is the national default setting. It also didn’t help that the organisers from the self-proclaimed home of rugby, in an attempt to crush the soul of the upstart defending world champions from the former colony, had scheduled all our pool games in the grim North, where the bleakness of the weather matches the bleakness of the people. There is nothing bleaker, let me tell you, than playing Georgia in Leeds. And for me, playing in formerly great cities now in terminal decline, like Newcastle and Sunderland, was a constant reminder of the formerly great relationship I had with Machete — or Leilei, as he was to me on those cold days, when the sun refused to shine, which was every day in the North of England.

  M: About the only thing that made anyone happy during the pool phase was what happened over in Pool A where England, who were favoured to meet us in the final, managed to lose to Japan, Fiji and Wales and did not even qualify for the knockout phase. Yet even witnessing this with my own eyes, I could barely summon a smile.

  G: As a proud New Zealander, watching England lose at rugby is usually one of my favourite things, yet even the sight of them on their knees, weeping, after the loss to Japan, as no one at Twickenham sang ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, could lift my damp spirits. It was as if the dampness in the Newcastle air had seeped into my soul.

  M: On the pitch, in our first game together, under leaden skies, playing Georgia in a Leeds where we were not united, we dealt with things through silence and throwing lots of cut-out passes to our wingers — each of us cutting out the other at every given opportunity.

  G: At first the cut-out pass strategy actually worked in favour of the team and we managed to put our wingers away for a couple of tries. Eventually, however, the Georgians figured out what was going on, at which time they became less cut-out passes and more hospital passes. Our wingers, Wonder Boy and Putt-Putt, ceased to be happy with us.

  M: After the game, Plato called us into his managerial suite at the hotel and in his own special way told us: ‘Whatever shit is going on between the two of you, you need to take that shit and flush it down the crapper.’ Many of Plato’s words of advice were toilet-related, probably due to the fact that before he was a rugby coach he was a plumber.

  G: Being men and being proud, we didn’t listen, of course. The next game we started together, against Argentina, we simply did not pass the ball any further along the line if there was the slightest chance that it would go to the other. The number of overlaps that were spurned that day, as either Machete or I decided instead to cut back towards the forwards, was remarkable. By the second half, every time one of us cut back towards the forwards all we were confronted with was our forwards yelling at us to f**k off back the way we came. Still, at least we won, in the sleet and snow of Newcastle that day.

  M: After the game, Gunner summonsed us to his captainly hotel suite. It was his turn to tell us to get our shit together. Being Gunner, however, all he did was sit us down and look at us in a way that said ‘get your shit together’ and then he went off to have a bath. Ghost and I sat there in silence — because everything that needed to be said had already been not said. Then from the bathroom came the sound of Gunner singing ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ so we left, because it was weird.

  G: The next game, against Tonga, they split us up. I started the game, with Horse at second-five, while Machete was on the bench. It seemed to work too, as all the Tongan players were attracted to the Tongan-born Horse, because they wanted to smash him. This gave me the space to score a couple of tries and set up Putt-Putt for another two. Then, with 30 to go, I got the call from the ref that I was being subbed off. That’s when things got awkward.

  M: As I waited to go on, I knew things would be awkward. Tradition has it that the arriving player and the exiting player must exchange brief manly hugs. This is the ABs way. But as I stepped onto the pitch and Ghost stepped off, our eyes met, and we both knew it was too soon. So we sidestepped each other. It did not go unnoticed.

  G: After the game, I was told that I needed to go and see Big Steve for a rubdown. But when I got there, I found that Machete was already there, being worked on by Big Steve’s offsider, Little Steve. Through an excruciating hour that followed, the two team masseurs told us, via their elbows and fingers of steel, that we needed to get our shit together. Yet even as we hobbled out of the massage room, in more pain than before we went in, we were still too proud to talk about it.

  M: So they dropped us both for the next game. Sure, it was only against Namibia, but it was definitely sending us a message — that we needed to get our shit together.

  G: But still we did not talk. Even after the word came through that Horse, after having been smashed repeatedl
y by both Tongans and Namibians, was out for the rest of the tournament, which meant that me and Machete were pretty much it as far as the starting midfield combination, still we did not talk.

  M: We were playing Ireland in the quarter-final. The one thing you can be sure of when playing Ireland is that at some stage in the first 10 minutes a fight (or what passes for a fight in rugby these days) will break out. And the thing about fights — even the girly pushy-shovey ones of today — is that you stop thinking about things. The subconscious takes over.

  G: So, of course, in the first 10 minutes Machete puts a shot in on this Irish bloke that looked totally legit to me, but to which the redhead in green took exception. Suddenly there are green and black jerseys coming from everywhere. And I’m in there too, doing what comes naturally — without thinking.

  M: So I’m wrestling with this stroppy Irish bloke when suddenly Ghost wades in and grabs him, tells him to man the f**k up because there was nothing wrong with the tackle and then deposits him on his arse on the pitch.

  G: I just did what I would normally do in that situation — without thinking.

  M: As the referee was talking to Gunner and the Irish captain, asking them if that meant we’d got it out of our systems, I caught Ghost sneaking a look at me. Our eyes met, but just for a second, before we both looked away.

  G: That day, in the fog, the Irish gave us everything and then something more, so for most of the game Machete and I were too busy doing what we needed to do to worry about each other. Then, in the second half, with the game still in the balance, it happened.

  M: It just happened. Again, it was without thought, but I took the ball to the line, near their 22, and as two of them converged on me and hit me in the tackle, I knew — I just knew — that if I popped the ball into space, that someone would be there to run on to it.

  G: I just knew. I just knew where the ball would be for me to collect at precisely the right angle to wrong-foot the cover defence and to go in under the posts. I just knew.