by Tony Wilson
Dad had driven the boys five minutes to a high school in Mermaid Waters. When they’d arrived they’d spotted the big redheaded kid firing banana kicks at the Rugby League posts at the far end. The weird thing was that he was kicking a Rugby League ball, but lining up like an Aussie Rules player.
After a few minutes of watching, Adam went over to investigate. His brothers followed. Dad stayed in the car, keeping an eye on them all.
‘I mainly play Rugby League,’ Daniel Merrett said, ‘but I’ve started getting into AFL. I sometimes come down here to practise my kicking.’
Troy tossed him their Aussie Rules ball. ‘You’ll find it a whole lot easier with one of these,’ he said.
Adam invited Sauce to join in kick-to-kick. Joel knew how much the twins loved kick-to-kick. It was always one twin paired with Scott, kicking to the other twin paired with Joel. Each time they’d pump their kicks high — a nice sitting-duck invitation for the other twin to climb onto a little brother’s back. Understandably, Joel and Scott were slightly less in love with kick-to-kick, at least when played with the twins. The younger Selwoods would scrap and hold and do anything they could to try to stop Adam and Troy, but it rarely worked. The twins were just too big.
Daniel Merrett, though, was even bigger. With his wild mop of red hair and white freckly skin, he really was something to behold. He walked down the same end as Joel and Adam.
The first kick that came their way was propped up perfectly. Joel knew how this usually played out. Adam would muscle him with one arm, and then leap forward and pluck the mark. Or Adam would allow Joel to stand under the ball, and then climb over the top of him, often with a blunt knee to the small of Joel’s back. Or they’d both jump for it, side by side, and Adam would mark it because of his superior height.
Joel’s main hope was that Adam dropped the mark. Then he could beat him to it on the ground.
For this first kick, the ball was spinning magnificently against the blue sky. Joel moved hesitantly. These were big kids he was standing beside, and there was no sense in charging at the first mark. Adam moved into the drop zone with his eyes on the ball. With Joel out of the picture, he would have expected to take a regulation mark.
Suddenly, there was a loud cry of, ‘Meeeerrrrrett!’ and Sauce soared into the contest with a mighty leap. He crashed into Adam’s side, and delivered the perfect little rib tickler that Joel was so used to receiving from his older brothers. The ball clunked into Sauce’s hands and almost disappeared. To think this kid was thirteen! Thirteen!
Adam was on his hands and knees.
Daniel was standing tall with the footy.
Joel started clapping slowly.
‘You say you don’t really play?’ Adam said a little breathlessly. ‘Can I tell you, that was a pretty decent mark. I actually thought I could play this game. People don’t do that to me very much.’
Sauce blushed with pleasure. ‘I do like footy. I’d like to get better at it.’
They resumed battle, and Joel knew Adam would be ready this time. Sure enough, he wrestled, bumped and outmarked Sauce more times than the other way around. Yet there was no doubting the ability of the big Gold Coast local. Often, the two older boys spoiled each other and the crumbs fell to the ground, which was great for Joel. He ended up collecting plenty of kicks.
Sauce’s only slight weakness was his kicking. Adam was just demonstrating the ball-drop, when a voice rang out from the side of the field.
‘Yo, Sauce, whatcha doin’ playin’ sissy AFL for, bro?’
Joel turned in the direction of the voice. There was a gang of four teenagers striding across the field. The biggest and muscliest one was in the lead. He had a Rugby League ball under his right arm, which was pushing out his already impressive bicep. ‘I said, Sauce! Whatcha playin’ sissy AFL for?’
‘I like AFL,’ said Sauce, without looking at the new arrivals. ‘And it’s not sissy, Tama. It’s one of the toughest sports on earth.’
The one called Tama and his mates fell about laughing at this. ‘AFL is like . . . I dunno . . . netball or somethin’,’ said Tama. ‘Youse all just kick the ball round in circles, all gentle-like, until somebody or other kicks a goal. No real tacklin’. No real men.’
Tama was taller and wider than the twins and had dark skin. He also had that missing-neck thing going on that Joel thought was common to many rugby players. He was big and intimidating. Still, Joel felt he couldn’t allow an insult to his beloved footy to stand. ‘What are you talking about? AFL players are so tough. Have you heard of Glenn Archer? What about Jim Stynes? They’d run through a train if they had to.’
‘Yeah, maybe a marshmallow train.’ One of the kids behind Tama guffawed.
‘Maybe one of those kiddie trains you get at the playground,’ joked another.
‘None of youse can take a proper tackle,’ Tama said, and his friends grunted approval. Up close, Joel could see they were all older and bigger than the twins. All wore singlets. All were a bit light on for necks.
‘Sure we can,’ Adam said. ‘We’re just as tough as League players, but we’re not brainless. We don’t just smash into each other all day for no real reason. Our game actually takes skill.’
Joel glanced at Adam disapprovingly. That didn’t seem the smartest tack to take.
‘Our game takes skill, too, bro,’ Tama returned. He dropped the ball to his feet and placed his hands on his hips.
Joel chewed the inside of his cheek. This was getting a bit intense.
‘Yeah, it’d take an Aussie Rules player about twenty minutes to master your game,’ Adam continued hotly.
‘Whooooooah!’ the League boys started laughing and clapping at Adam’s provocation. ‘That sounds like a challenge,’ grunted one of Tama’s henchmen.
‘All right then, superstars,’ said Tama. ‘What about a scratch match? Youse against us. AFL versus League. Except let’s play League rules ’cause our game’s so easy to play and that.’
Troy glared at Adam as if to say, great effort. ‘Scooter’s only seven,’ Troy said. ‘Joel’s only nine. It’s uneven numbers. We should get Sauce.’
This seemed to unsettle Tama. ‘Sauce is League,’ Tama said.
‘I do like AFL, too,’ Sauce said. ‘I think it’s a brilliant game. I’ll play with them.’
‘It’ll be five on four,’ Tama said, suddenly less sure.
‘We’ve got two little ones,’ Troy repeated.
Joel didn’t like being called a ‘little one’, but he did like the idea of having Sauce on his team.
‘Okay, it’s on,’ said Tama, removing his singlet. There was a whole lot more Tama underneath. ‘We’ll go skins,’ he said. ‘Youse can be shirts.’
Holy cow, Joel thought, eyeing Tama’s freakishly muscly frame. It was like he already did weights at the gym. This was going to be a bit different from playing against grade fours.
ELEVEN
Sauce gave the four Selwoods a crash course in Rugby League in the pre-game huddle.
‘The teams line up facing each other. It’s a game of territory. We run at them, and they run at us. You can’t cross the other team’s line and call for the ball — that’s offside. You have to run it forward through their line while passing it backwards to each other. After six tackles, possession turns over and the other team gets a go.’
‘Full-on tackling?’ Adam asked.
‘We’ll play “hold”,’ said Sauce. ‘That means you can get grabbed but not dumped. Call “hold” when they’ve got you. And stop running. The tackler has to let go.’
Joel had seen enough League highlights on the TV to have a rough idea of the play. ‘Can we kick it forward?’ he asked.
‘They do kick for territory in NRL,’ Sauce explained. ‘But for a scratch game like this, only kick if you’re going for a try on the fifth tackle. Then you dink it up and over the tryline, and hope one of us can run onto it.’
Immediately before the game, Tama’s skins team did something resembling a haka. If the idea wa
s to make Joel nervous, then the haka did its job.
Within about thirty seconds, Joel was regretting his big brother’s big mouth. It turned out Rugby League wasn’t so easy, after all. Whereas Tama’s team flung the ball around with arcing, spiralling passes, the Selwoods struggled to get length and power in their scrambled drop-punt throws.
Tama’s teammates were called Bushy, Harms and Trainwreck. Bushy was more of a grunter than a talker. Harms was a fidgeter, jumping from foot to foot and laughing at everything Tama said. And Trainwreck was a massive unit, perhaps a Maori or a Pacific Islander. Surely he’s sixteen or seventeen already, Joel thought. As far as Joel could tell, Trainwreck never spoke. He stared at the ground a lot and wore a Brisbane Broncos baseball cap low over his eyes.
Fortunately, Harms and Bushy weren’t lightning fast, which meant the Selwoods did a reasonable job of holding them up in tackles. Tama, however, was a gun. For a big kid, he took dainty little steps, and could explode in either direction with frightening pace.
‘Hey, maybe this game is easy, ay?’ Tama said, as he walked the ball in for a second try. ‘What’s that, eight–zip?’
Trainwreck didn’t appear particularly interested. When he did get the ball, though, he almost walked through the Selwoods’ tackles. Only Sauce seemed to be able to stop him. Heaven help them if Trainwreck started trying, Joel thought. They might end up facing a cyclone.
Things started looking up for Joel’s shirts team when they settled on a new strategy. That strategy was called, whatever happens, throw it to Sauce.
Daniel Merrett was a star Rugby League player. Like Tama, he had pace to burn and he was awesome at changing direction. He also did this shuffle, where his legs seemed to slow down but his body kept going. Joel watched him in awe. It defied logic unless you saw it happen.
None of Tama’s team could hold Sauce when he was in full stride. The big redhead had perfected what in both codes of footy was called ‘fending’ — pushing the tackler away with the hand not carrying the ball. Tama himself was his team’s strongest tackler and buried Sauce twice, but Sauce was also breaking through.
‘Twelve all,’ Sauce said as he ran in his third try.
It went on like this. Tama dominating for the skins team, Sauce starring for the shirts. Joel smiled when he saw Troy attempt a shuffle a bit like Sauce’s. Trainwreck saw straight through it and rag-dolled Troy over the invisible touchline.
‘Aren’t we playing “hold”?’ Sauce asked, annoyed. ‘Why is Troy flat on his back?’
The game got rougher and rougher. After forty-five minutes, ‘hold’ was a distant memory. Troy, Adam, Sauce and Joel were all eating dirt. The skins went a little easier on tiny Scott, but this was undeniably a full-on game. After one extreme tackle, Dad called from the car to see if Scott still wanted to play.
‘Daaaad, I’m fine,’ Scott answered, embarrassed. Joel grinned. Scott would cop any number of bone-crunching tackles if it meant being included with the big kids.
The shirts on the Selwoods’ team were dishing it out, too. Sauce was a tackling machine, who seemed to be put on this earth for big body clashes. The twins were strong and brave, and fast enough to cover a huge area.
Joel felt like he was a human punching bag. There was one time when Joel stood in front of Tama and the large boy ran straight over him, like a stampeding elephant. Joel thought it must have resembled that famous footage of All Blacks great Jonah Lomu at the 1995 World Cup. His head thumped into the turf.
‘You’re nuts!’ Sauce said to Tama, while helping Joel to his feet. He then shared some tackling advice. ‘Get low, watch the hips, and drive at the body. Don’t get distracted by fancy footwork. Don’t look at the ball or their hands or their eyes. Just watch the hips.’
It was golden advice. Troy and Adam immediately started sticking tackles. Joel landed a couple, too, hanging on and dragging those big teenage boys with the full weight of his body. His best one was on Trainwreck — a nine-year-old David wrapped around a Goliath.
Both teams ran in tries.
The sun climbed in the sky.
It was so hot and exhausting that all the banter had evaporated. Both sides just puffed and sweated and kept playing.
Joel was having a ball.
‘Forty-four all,’ Tama said wearily. He was dripping with perspiration and had lost a lot of his swagger. All nine boys had hands on knees. ‘I’ll give youse this. Yer better at this game than half the kids up here.’
Dad had left the car and was walking down to the edge of the field. ‘C’mon, boys, we’ve gotta start thinking about lunch!’ he called.
‘Next try wins,’ Tama said. ‘Sauce, you kick it up in the air to see who gets possession.’ The shirts team agreed. This was it.
Sauce roosted it. That suited the Selwoods because they spent their lives jumping up at high balls. Harms jumped and turned, attempting a mark in the Rugby League way, while Adam soared with arms extended and took it at the highest point.
Possession! The Selwood team had the advantage.
They were away. Quick-hands to Troy. Quick-hands to Joel. Joel followed the team rule and threw to Sauce. Sauce accepted the ball and charged.
He was a rampaging bull — breaking the first and second tackles, fending off the third. But then Bushy had him, first by the shirt, and then by the hips.
‘Hold,’ Sauce called.
He played the ball back by foot to Troy. Troy quick-handed to Scott. Scott looked bewildered for a moment before handing it over to Joel.
Joel tucked the ball under his arm. He searched for Sauce — team rule — but this time they were separated by too much distance. Joel started a diagonal run for the line. He dodged Harms, he sidestepped Bushy. He fended off a third tackler. It was Tama, the skins’ best defensive player. This was it! He was in the clear.
Adam and Troy were screaming for him. ‘Go, Joely! Go for the try, Joel!’
Joel suddenly saw something huge arriving out of the corner of his eye. He realised in an instant it was Trainwreck. He also realised that for nearly an hour, Trainwreck hadn’t been playing flat out. This was a different Trainwreck. This was the cyclone Joel had worried about. He was flying, taking ground off Joel with every stride, and the cap had been flipped off, revealing a shaved scalp and a wide furrowed brow.
Trainwreck snorted air through his nose like a braying stallion.
‘Go, Joel!’ one of the twins cried. ‘Get there!’
Joel tried to find another yard, but he was already flat out. Trainwreck was gaining on him. He’d gobble him up before the tryline.
Then Joel did something that surprised even himself. He stopped without any warning. Trainwreck lowered and prepared to launch for the tackle, but Joel did a nifty trick where he raised his arms and shrugged his shoulders. Trainwreck’s arms slid from Joel’s chest up and over his shoulders. An AFL umpire might have blown the whistle for too high. A moment later, Joel had slithered underneath and was free. He jogged through to the line.
‘Try!’ Scott and the twins shouted as Joel placed the ball on the grass.
‘Yeeees!’ joined in Sauce.
Even Tama’s team was gracious. ‘Geez, this has been fun,’ Tama said, grinning. ‘For AFL fairy floss, youse give it a fair crack.’
The Selwoods laughed and shook hands. They said their goodbyes to Sauce.
‘You’ve gotta keep playing footy,’ Troy said to their new friend. ‘With that speed and tackling, nobody will know what’s hit ’em.’
Sauce grinned. ‘Maybe. We’ll see. Been nice meeting you guys.’
They headed to the car. Dad was promising fish and chips on the beach and a surf on the new new boogie boards.
‘What was that move?’ Adam asked Joel. ‘That one where you slipped Trainwreck’s tackle?’
Joel mimed the arm lift and the shoulder shrug. ‘I dunno, just something I dreamed up.’
‘Well, go with it,’ said Troy. ‘It was brilliant. It won us the game!’
Joel felt the tired a
nd happy glow he loved after sport. The twins were smiling, too. There was no talk of kryptonite now. They were Team Selwood, united as four, and they were off to the beach for fish and chips.
TWELVE
The truth was, Joel didn’t like heights.
He could hide it okay at Wet ’n’ Wild, the Gold Coast’s popular water park. After all, water slides were just slides with water in them. At least that’s what Joel kept telling himself.
He hated climbing the stairs, and refused to look down at any point. He just fixed his eyes straight ahead and thought about the gentle slides at the local park in Bendigo.
He actually loved the four intermediate slides on White Water Mountain called Cascade, Bombora, Riptide and Pipeline. All of them funnelled into the same pool, and for two brilliant hours, the boys played the queues so they could line up four across and push off together. Pipeline was the fastest. Even Scott with his small body mass could win if he took Pipeline. Bombora was the slowest.
Joel tried to slide as fast as he could. He pushed his bottom up so that only his shoulders and heels were making contact with the slide. He welcomed the water on his face. He felt like a luger at the Winter Olympics, leaning into the corners, trying to match the twins while knowing their bigger mass would pull them to victory. He could have stayed on White Water Mountain all day.
Joel knew what was coming though.
‘Okay, enough warm-ups,’ Adam announced. ‘Time for Twister.’
Joel swallowed hard. Twister was White Water Mountain’s big show-offy brother. It was higher and steeper, with black-and-green flumes wrapped around like serpents strangling each other to death.
The twins charged for the queue, earning a ‘Don’t run’ from Dad. Joel and Scott followed. There was a plastic cartoon surfer dude at the bottom of the ride holding a cut-out surfboard. ‘Yo, little dudes!’ read the sign. ‘If you’re not taller than my board, you can’t ride.’