Then one day, when it was just the two of us at home, Purity found a half-deflated rugby ball on the back lawn — it must have been kicked there by one of the neighbours. Purity brought the ball into my room and kept hitting me with it until I agreed to get out of bed and play with her.
Outside, it turned out her idea of playing was to give me the ball and tell me to run past her. Then she used me as a tackle bag all day, flattening me every time I went anywhere near her. One time I decided to run away with the ball but she chased me all the way to Te Atatu Road and tackled me there. For a four-year-old, Purity tackled harder than many players I faced as an AB (especially the Australians), and after a month of playing this game with her I was as bruised as a grape at the bottom of a shopping bag of canned goods.
But out of this I certainly learnt how to take a tackle. And eventually I learnt how to fend off a tackle. And then, when I realised that I could give her the ball and tackle her, I learnt how to actually tackle. It was not long after this that Purity declared the game was too rough for girls and started a gang instead.
By then, thanks to Purity, I was not only over my depression, but many of the fundamental rugby skills that have stood me in good stead were already in place. I got Dad to sign me up for the local club, Te Atatu, where they gave me the nickname Machete because of the way I would cut down the opposition players. What they didn’t know was that every time I smashed someone, in my head I was tackling my four-year-old sister.
To this day, Purity is probably my biggest fan and my harshest critic. After I played a test she would always text me from prison, on her hidden cellphone, to tell me what I did wrong and how I needed to harden up. I used to love getting those texts, even though sometimes the truth in them stung — like Purity herself was tackling me again.
I love you, Purity, and when you hopefully eventually get parole, I will be the one standing outside the gates to welcome you back into society — and not just because everyone else has turned their backs on you.
Growing up Ghost
There’s only one way in and out of Auckland’s North Shore and that’s going over the Harbour Bridge. Except if you take the Devonport ferry. Or any of the other ferries that go to the North Shore. Or if you go west on Highway 16 and then veer off at Westgate and head down Highway 18 through Greenhithe, which I guess is technically part of the North Shore, before you end up in Albany, which is definitely the North Shore because my beloved North Harbour play there.
No matter how you get there — and going over the Harbour Bridge is still by far the most popular option — the point remains that the North Shore is a ghetto of sorts. It is the ghetto Aucklanders mock, in the same way that the rest of New Zealand mocks Aucklanders. As a Shore man, strong and proud, you learn to absorb those taunts, use them as fuel. But as a boy, an only child, growing up in the beige belt that hugs the coast from Takapuna to Torbay, the Shore is still a ghetto, albeit a very upper-middle-class one.
I was born, Neil Charles Turnbull, at North Shore Hospital. Well, strictly speaking, I was initially born in the spa pool at my parents’ Mairangi Bay home, until the midwife slipped on the deck and broke her collarbone. Then I was partly born in the ambulance on the way to North Shore Hospital. Then I was finally born on a gurney on the way to the delivery suite at North Shore Hospital, when I apparently shot out of my mother and used our umbilical cord as a bungy cord. There is some dispute as to whether my head actually hit the floor before I bounced back upwards. If I did, this might be an omen — a foreshadowing that my later rugby career would be littered with head knocks.
I think the less than ideal circumstances of my birth may have, in part, explained why I was an only child. Although, as I later found out, my mum and dad were very enthusiastic when it came to partaking in the act that starts the baby-making process, my birth, it seems, put them off ever again seeing that process through to its possible outcome.
When I was growing up, my parents were very into sports. The main problem, however, is that they were into sports that I hated. My father, for example, was obsessed by water polo. To this day, I have no idea why he had this obsession, but he was always going on at the dinner table about how grown men, in togs, grappling with each other below the waterline, was the pinnacle of sporting excellence.
Thus it was that one of my first sporting memories was of being thrown into the pool at our Mairangi Bay home when I was about five or six. I couldn’t touch the bottom so I had to keep myself afloat while my father, dressed in his customary red Speedos even in the middle of winter, patrolled the edge of the pool flinging a volleyball at me. The idea was that I had to catch the ball and fling it back to him as quick as I could. Sometimes this worked out well and my father was happy. Sometimes the ball would simply hit me in the head. Sometimes my father had to dive in and save me before I drowned.
I guess the good things that came out of these pool sessions, for my later rugby career, was that I learnt early the value of the quick catch and pass. And also some of the body swerves I employed to avoid getting hit in the head were ingrained in me when, on the rugby field, it came to ghosting my way through the tightest of gaps. Also, I never actually drowned, which is definitely a good thing. On the downside, the first time I remember being concussed was by being hit in the head by a volleyball thrown at me by my father.
From my mother, I got my hatred of hockey. She loved hockey. Many were the nights when she’d have a few gins and tell me all about her glory days on the high-school hockey field. But all I could ever think, standing on some godforsaken East Coast Bays hockey field on a miserable Auckland winter morning, with my mother on the sideline yelling out tactical advice, was how pointless and stupid the game was, with too many rules that no eight-year-old could ever understand. To me, hockey was like giving the social failures at school an outlet to vent their frustrations on each other. Luckily, I figured out very soon that if you used your stick to whack as many other kids in the nuts as quickly as possible (didn’t really matter what side they were playing for), then you could get sent off and you’d get to sit somewhere dry — like in the car as Mum drove the long, silent drive home, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
In my family, sport was expected. It was the done thing. Dad would pull on the Lycra and disappear for hours at the weekends on his bike. And also sometimes for hours during the week, especially during the long summer nights that you get on the Shore. Meanwhile, Mum and her real estate agent workmates were forever spending their evenings competing in some social sports league — indoor netball, indoor cricket, volleyball — the sport didn’t really matter because it was all about the camaraderie. And beating the hell out of the teams from other real estate agencies. And the drinking afterwards, on those long summer nights.
For most Kiwi kids, those long summer evenings are a thing of magical memories, but for me it was all about being at home on my own, learning to cook for myself. To this day, I am a very good cook, but also to this day, I often cry while I cook. I can’t help it, it just happens.
So, playing a sport was expected of me, it was just a question of which sport. For a while there, golf was the chosen one (not by me), after I accidentally monstered a few when my dad took me to the driving range and put a club in my hands for the first time. After that unfortunate accident my father fancied me as the next Tiger Woods, which meant that he turned into Earl Woods, driving me on to perfection. This did not go well — not once my dad realised what he’d seen was a fluke not sheer natural talent. Thus, a set of specially cut-down kids’ clubs ended up in a pond at Chamberlain Park. They may still be there today. And I wasn’t the one who threw them.
To this day, I cannot go onto a golf course without breaking out in a cold sweat. Every time the boys in whatever team I was playing for organised a golf day, I was always the one you’d find far away — at a museum or a library or an art gallery or in my room at the hotel, pretending I was nursing an injury. In the end, my abs
ences only added to my Ghost persona. Thanks, Dad.
While sport was the expected thing in my family, it had to be the right sport. Rugby was not the right sport. Rugby, in my family, was the sport of thugs — only one step up the evolutionary tree from rugby league. Being on the North Shore, we had South African neighbours — the Jonkers. They were really big on rugby and every time the Springboks played anywhere, they would wear their green jerseys and fly the South African flag. My dad called them the Bonkers and my mother would mutter about how they lived in New Zealand now so they should support New Zealand and it just wasn’t right or patriotic.
One night, just before my ninth birthday, I confessed to my parents that I might want to play rugby. Lots of kids at school were into it and I’d tried it during lunch breaks and I found I was really good at running around with the ball avoiding getting tackled — a trait that stayed with me through all the years that followed. I thought my parents took it pretty well. At least they didn’t tell me to wash my mouth out with soap for even suggesting it.
On the morning of my eighth birthday my father gave me the worst birthday present I ever received — but the one birthday present that shaped my future. I hopped out of bed that morning and walked down the corridor to our kitchen, where Mum told me Dad had something special for me. I walked outside and there, gleaming in the morning sun, were some soccer goalposts, and my father standing there with a soccer ball. He had decided that from this day on, I would be a soccer player.
We started our father/son bonding session that day with him in goal and me trying to smash the ball past him. In my entire rugby career, I only ever kicked one penalty goal — the most famous penalty goal in rugby history, some commentators have called it — and I think the groundwork for that moment was laid that day. Shot after shot I fired at my father that day and every one of them sailed over the bar and over the fence and into the Jonkers’ place. Dad got super pissed off, having to climb over the fence to retrieve the ball. Eventually, when I took out one of their ranch-sliders, the Jonkers got pissed off too.
So we changed places. I went in goal and my father, in a repeat of the water polo era, fired the ball at me. But in that moment, I decided that it was time to stand my ground — literally. Rugby was to be my sport, not soccer. So I stubbornly stood there, not moving, even when the ball hit me in the head. I was not going to play my father’s game; I was going to play the sport of my choice: rugby union football. Eventually my father got the message and told me to go inside and get ready for school. That day I went to school and the best birthday present I got was when I signed up to play for the rugby team.
If I say so myself, I was awesome at rugby when I was growing up. Running around the field, avoiding the oncoming tacklers, was heaven to me. And I wasn’t one of those little arsehole kids who are good, and they know they’re good, so they never pass the ball and have to score all the tries themselves. No, I actually enjoyed being the guy who got through the gap, drew the man — boy or girl — and then passed the ball to someone else just as I took the tackle.
Of course, when you’re young, more often than not the kid I flicked the ball on to would drop the pass and all my good work would go to waste. It was definitely the start of my quest to play alongside someone who would always be at my shoulder, ready to take that pass and hold on to it.
The other thing I learnt about myself during this time was that I really liked it when the kid who tackled me was a girl. They’d feel good about themselves for tackling the starry boy player and I just kinda liked the way they felt as they dragged me to the ground. There was nothing sexual about it — that sort of stuff would come later — but it also definitely set a pattern in my life.
My parents never really supported me in my burgeoning love of rugby. They would drop me at my games and then (usually) picked me up afterwards. After they joined the freaky cult and sold our Mairangi Bay home to move into the cult compound in Glenfield they became even less interested in my rugby career, in favour of doing freaky cult stuff at the weekends. It was just luck there was a rugby club down the road, within walking distance, where I could carry on playing my little heart out.
I was very much your classic only child, always doing my own thing and taking care of myself. At the compound I would give pretty much everyone a wide berth as they went about their freaky cult business. I would find a quiet place to read or clean my boots or cook myself dinner while my parents were at chanting sessions round the firepit. I wasn’t what you’d call lonely, but I certainly wasn’t happy either.
It wasn’t until I met Machete that I realised what was missing in my life: a friend who shared my love of rugby.
Like Tom and Huck
Part One: The Cute First Meet
MACHETE: I remember the first occasion I ever met Ghost because it was the first time I ever played on Eden Park #1. Auckland Under-13s versus North Harbour Under-13s. It was a curtain-raiser for something, but I didn’t really care what because the important thing was I was playing on the same field as my heroes.
As we ran out onto the field, I was giving the other team the stink eye — which is what I did when I was young, to try and intimidate people. There was this one kid on the Harbour team who was looking back at me like he didn’t care I was giving him the stink eye, ’cause he was giving me the stink eye back. He was this tall skinny palagi fella. I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to tackle you so hard I will break you in half and see how you like that, Mr Stink Eye.’
GHOST: I was one of those kids who grew very quickly to the height I am today, and then just kinda stopped growing. Thus, at the genetic freak show that is intermediate school, I was the freakiest of the freaks, towering over everyone except Bonnie Hunter who had been my first girlfriend and was also the tallest person at our school. Of course, ours was a love never meant to be once her parents found out my parents were in a freaky cult.
To fill the void left after Bonnie and I were cruelly separated due to intolerance, I wish I could say I threw myself into my rugby, but I didn’t. Yes, I was still playing rugby and, yes, I was very good at it, but because of my early growth spurt I had been thrown into the forward pack, as a lock.
Being a lock not only sucks but it makes no sense. Why are the tallest people on the field expected to spend large amounts of playing time buried in the middle of the scrum, pushing, their heads getting crushed between the arses of the two fatties in front of them? Tall people should be left to roam free, like giraffes. And in terms of pure physics, a scrum must surely be more stable with two more fatties anchoring the middle of it rather than the big sway-backs and long legs of the locks. Come lineout time, just get the tallest guys in the team and throw to them, doesn’t matter what position they play between lineouts. I’ve tried to get the rugby so-called brains trust to thank me for this radical piece of thinking, but they are so stuck in their ways.
And don’t even get me started on what being a lock does to your ears, let alone the horror when a prop farts in your face.
M: I have since learnt, over the years, repeatedly, at considerable length, over and over again, that the tall skinny fella hated playing lock, which probably explained the stink eye he was giving me. But that still doesn’t change the fact that I wanted to tackle him so hard he would break in half.
So I did.
G: First time I got the ball, this brown blur came flying at me and hit me like a train just as I caught the ball. I was folded in half, all the air driven from my body. I thought I was going to break into two distinct pieces, with my guts spilling from my broken body onto the Eden Park pitch. As I struggled to get air back in my body, I caught the eye of the brown blur as he stood over me for a second, before running off to smash someone else. He grinned at me and said, ‘They call me Machete and you just got chopped.’ Then he was gone.
M: The ‘you just got chopped’ thing was kinda my trademark back then. I was so into it I learnt to say it in English, Samoan
, Maori, Tongan and even Spanish: ‘Mi nombre es Machete. Acabas de ser talado.’ Looking back, I guess I was bit of a dick back then, but at the time I thought I was way cool.
I had to give full credit to the skinny palagi kid though, ’cause once he could breathe again he got up and got stuck back into the game. Even better, he seemed to want to take out his frustration on Calvin Harris, not me.
Calvin Harris (not the Scottish DJ and EDM pioneer) played first-five for the Auckland Under-13s. I played second-five, like I would for the rest of my life. But the thing about being second-five when Calvin Harris was first-five was that you would never see the ball. Calvin was one of those little pricks who wanted to do it all himself. This meant he would either run with the ball; or put in a little chip kick for him to regather; or put in a little grubber kick for him to regather; or, even worse, try and drop kick a goal from just about anywhere. Calvin was a dick and I hated playing outside him.
G: I decided, after that first tackle, that I was going to dedicate the rest of the game to getting revenge on the dick with the stupid nickname. I wanted to smash him as bad as he smashed me. The problem, however, was that the runty little first-five inside him was one of those dicks who never want to pass the ball. So I figured I had to deal to him first, to give him the incentive to move the ball along the line as quickly as possible.
Luckily this kid was as predictable as he was a dick. The first time I smashed him he tried to sell me the most ridiculous dummy, which I did not buy and then I drove him back about five metres and deposited him on the cricket pitch. The second time I smashed him he decided to put in the little chip kick over my head. I reached up, caught the ball, dropped my shoulder and let him run into me. Then I ran over him, just for good measure.
Machete and the Ghost Page 3
