Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  ‘No one is bigger than the team.’ It took a while but eventually they decided it was about watching your diet and not getting too fat, so that you can’t keep hitting rucks and you get subbed off before halftime.

  ‘Leave the jersey in a better place.’ This was translated as: after the game, don’t leave your dirty jersey in the changing sheds for someone else to pick up. Eventually it was agreed that the best ‘better place’ was giving them to your mum to wash for you, so you can donate it to your school later on.

  ‘It’s an honour, not a job.’ This kinda blew their minds for a while because playing rugby was the only job they’d ever known. Eventually they got quite close on this one when they decided it was better to be an AB than a farmer.

  M: The second half of the Book of Black is blank. Not because, as Ghost reckons, the rugby bosses ran out of money after forking out all that dosh on DP’s contract to stop him going to France, so they couldn’t afford to print any more words. No, the actual reason the second half of the Book of Black is blank is that — as they tell you when they give you the book — it hasn’t been written yet and it is up to you to write it. It is the space in which you are expected to share the knowledge and wisdom you gain whilst wearing the black, to be passed on to future generations. You carry the Book of Black with you at all times (except on the field or in the shower, obviously), when the team assembles, in case wisdom strikes.

  G: Call me a cynic, but lightning is more likely to strike most of the people I played rugby with than is wisdom.

  M: Ghost is a cynic who failed to see the potential of the Book of Black in growing and maintaining team culture. And, as if to prove my point, I know for a fact that one AB, Beany, has been hit by lightning.

  G: Beany is a 6-foot-9-inch-tall idiot who got hit by lightning because he refused to come off the golf course during a thunderstorm because he was two under the card and said he didn’t believe in God. In return, God showed Beany that God can hit a 2-iron. And it didn’t make Beany any wiser, just a religious fanatic who suffers from wild mood swings and has the ability to make the lights in the room flicker just by walking in.

  M: The point I’m making is that Ghost is a cynic and everything that happened that led to us being the only two ABs ever to have their Book of Black taken off them started with him.

  G: In my defence, to start with I almost took the whole writing your collected wisdom in your Book of Black thing seriously. I even wrote down a few thoughts, like: ‘Let the darkness of the jersey become the dark night of our opponent’s souls’ and ‘The man in the jersey does not wear the jersey, the jersey wears him’.

  Okay, I confess, I took it semi-seriously (at best). Mostly I was amused at the thought of future generations of props holding their Book of Black in their pudgy hands, their lips moving as they read my words of wisdom, their brows furrowing as they struggled to figure out what the f**k the squiggles on the page meant.

  But I soon got bored with that game and gave up on my Book of Black. I figured I’d jot down a few meaningless mantras at the end of my career, hand that over and everyone could walk away none the wiser. But then we were in Edinburgh, on an end-of-year tour, when my foolish roommate left his Book of Black unguarded, on his bed, while he went off for a massage.

  M: Your Book of Black is meant to be a sacred text, for you and you alone, to do with as you please. Reading and then defacing another man’s Book of Black is just wrong.

  G: There was nothing in it. The blank pages seemed even blanker than when they were printed that way, so empty were they. I was worried for my mate — had he stopped thinking? Were there no thoughts left in Machete’s head? It troubled me.

  M: Sometimes I like to take my time with things. I like to let things, like pithy thoughts expressed in words, evolve over time and with repeated thinking, before committing them to paper for eternity. I’m not some poseur who needs to write down every stupid thing that pops into his head.

  G: I thought it was a cry for help — that he had left the book on that bed for me to kick-start things for him. So, to help my friend get over his thinker’s block, I wrote one aphorism, just one, to get the thought ball rolling.

  M: ‘Leaders don’t come last. That would make them lasters.’ What the hell is that about? There’s no such word as ‘lasters’! When I got back from having my massage from Big Steve I was feeling good, but when I walked into that room and saw Ghost’s smug, grinning face I knew something was wrong. Then I noticed my Book wasn’t where I’d left it. Then I read what he wrote and I hit the roof. Literally, I hit the roof with the Book when I threw it at him.

  G: Personally, I think ‘Throwing The Book of Black at your teammate who was only trying to help is not worthy of the jersey’ should be added to the Book of Black. I was offended that my helping hand had been slapped away. Which is when it became my life’s mission to fill Machete’s book with awesome aphorisms.

  M: Every time we were on tour, no matter where I would hide my book — under the mattress, behind a ceiling panel, wrapped in plastic in the toilet cistern — he would find it and write more stupid things in it. ‘Pressure is an oven. Be a scone.’ ‘Always improve. Even when you’re the best. Otherwise you’re not.’ None of them made any sense, no matter how much you thought about them.

  G: The aphorisms I gave Machete, over several years, were some of my best work. I was a teacher, teaching him to open his mind to new forms of wisdom. I was also a student, learning that Machete is really useless at hiding things.

  M: ‘Real men wear black but can also be comfortable in other colours.’ ‘Black is the colour of victory. And of space and other things that are black.’ ‘Humility does not mean weakness. Nor does it mean the amount of water vapour in air.’ It was driving me mad, finding these nonsensical brain-farts scribbled in Ghost’s shitty handwriting, in my Book of Black. It was only a matter of time before I realised that revenge was a dish best served pithy.

  G: I’d been waiting for him to write something in my book for years. It had got to the point where I truly wondered if Machete actually had nothing to say. It got to the point where if he’d said ‘Give me your Book so I can I write in it’, I would have happily handed it over. Instead Machete did Something Very Stupid.

  M: Okay, with hindsight, setting off the fire alarm of an inner-city London hotel, causing not only the evacuation of all the hotel staff and guests, but also of all the buildings around the hotel, and the shutting down of the London Tube system for two hours at rush hour, was probably not the wisest way to buy the time to find Ghost’s book and create my masterpiece. But it did buy me the time — at least until the search party that was sent in to find me found me in the act of creating my masterpiece.

  G: In the team management meeting-slash-trial that followed, the unfortunate backstory came out, because Machete is a blouse who always cracks under pressure when confronted with authority.

  M: I can’t help it. It’s part of my DNA, my cultural upbringing, to be honest when confronted by scary old dudes. Also I really really wanted everyone to know that Ghost started it.

  G: And so, like naughty schoolchildren, we were instructed to present our Books of Black for inspection. Machete showed them all the things I’d written. And, in return, I showed them the drawing of a cock and balls with a speech bubble containing the words ‘I AM GHOST’ coming out of the external urethral opening that Machete had drawn in mine.

  M: My plan had been to actually write something in his Book, but then I couldn’t think of anything I liked, and then I realised what I actually wanted to say was that Ghost was being a dick — and then everything else just kinda fell into place from there. I was actually really proud of that drawing — the hair on the balls looked almost lifelike. It was the best penis I’d drawn since intermediate. I was genuinely sorry when they burnt it.

  G: Yes, they made us hand over our Books. Then they told us that we would never desecrate another B
ook of Black and that when we retired they would get some hack from the marketing department to ghost-write our pithy aphorisms. Then, as a symbolic gesture of how much we had pissed them off, they burnt our Books, right in front of our very eyes.

  M: And they really didn’t see the funny side when, for the second time that day, the fire alarm went off at that London hotel.

  . . . The Aftermath

  [So after the disaster in London, with the burning of our Books of Black and the multiple fire alarms, when we got back to New Zealand the rugby bosses thought it was a good idea to do what they always do when players stray in such a disrespectful fashion, which is to wheel in a legend of the game to remind us of the grand history of the jersey. This was not a good idea.]

  Ghost: For legal reasons we cannot name this man, especially because, afterwards, the rugby bosses told us the meeting we’d all just been at had never happened, even though we were all there and saw what happened. So, instead, we will just call him The Old Codger. This is not out of disrespect to him or his achievements during his career. It is simply the acknowledgement that many former rugby players, great or otherwise, turn into old codgers. It is, very likely, a fate that awaits both Machete and me.

  Machete: No way am I ever turning into an old prick like this bastard.

  G: So, Machete and I are not long off the plane back from London and we’re just settling in to our holidays. I was about to head off to Goa with the dancer/model/hot-yoga instructor I was dating at the time, while Machete was off to visit one of his families round the world, I can’t remember which one. Anyway, we’d both planned to skip the Rugby Awards — not because we weren’t nominated (again) but because after what happened in 2004 it was very strongly hinted that no one would mind if we never came back ever again.

  M: So we rock up to the awards, as ordered. I’m wearing my best ie faitaga, while Ghost is in the purple velvet suit he wears to these functions to piss off the black-tie brigade. I keep telling him that it makes him look like a sad-arse Prince wannabe but I think that only adds to the appeal for him.

  Anyway, we get to the awards, to find that (as a result of what happened last year) we’ve been put at different tables at opposite ends of the room, as far apart as humanly possible. In true grown-up fashion Ghost responds by making sure everyone at the rugby bosses’ tables gets delivered vegetarian meals.

  G: So we’re just about to go our own ways, for three hours of boredom interspersed with our choice of chicken or beef (or, if you’re at the top table, the vegetarian option), when one of the boys from the brains trust tells us someone would like to have a word with us.

  M: So he takes us out to the bar, where The Old Codger is having a lemonade or three, pre-loading before the thing where everyone pats themselves on the back by handing out trophies and making speeches. The Old Codger has heard what happened in London, with our Books of Black, and he’s decided he wants a word with us. And then he starts ripping into us.

  G: I’m standing there, at the bar, surrounded by all these penguins in their stuffed suits, listening to The Old Codger go on and on and on about ‘back in the day’ and ‘in my day’ and ‘back then’. And the expectation is that I’m meant to stand there and just take it, as a lesson in respecting my elders and, in turn, respecting ‘the jersey’. As if I was just going to let that tsunami of shit just wash over me.

  M: When you know Ghost as well as I do, you can tell when he’s getting real angry because he gets this look in his eyes; then he gets this little smile on his face; then when he speaks it is real calm, real quiet. You put all that together and I know that he’s about to teach The Old Codger a lesson. Of course, The Old Codger doesn’t know this, because the first thing Ghost always does in these situations is to give the man the rope to hang himself.

  G: So I let The Old Codger go through his usual routine about how tough they were back then (‘you didn’t leave the bloody field unless you were dead and even then they’d try and revive you and send you back on’); about how they were real men who played the game the way real men should play it — for the love of it (‘you’d do a full day’s work, on the farm or down the mines, and then train for three hours every day, even if you were coughing up coal dust’); and how today’s players are pampered like little children (‘we never needed bloody nutritionists — we could eat half a lamb and drink ten beers and still go out and win a test match’). I just waited patiently for my opportunity.

  M: To give The Old Codger his credit, he covered a lot of territory in a very short space of time. How ‘back then’ the players didn’t have the ‘bloody ridiculous’ haircuts of today — ‘back then’ it was ‘all short back and sides — to a man’. How they went home to their wives and families after a game instead of ‘bloody walking up and down in their undies in some bloody fashion show’. How you played your heart out, ‘even when the field was like the bloody Somme’ and if some ‘Jaapie bastard punched you, you punched him right back and the bloody referees understood this was the way men sorted things out’. It was about then I could see that the bloke from Rugby HQ was starting to worry about how this was panning out. With good reason, because this was when Ghost started to reel The Old Codger in.

  G: The best way to beat these dinosaurs is to let them be what they are — fossils. So I started asking him about what he thought about the nature of the game today — how the fields we play on are no longer quagmires; how technology has meant a rugby ball that doesn’t turn into a leather brick the moment it gets wet; and how the punters seem to enjoy the free-flowing game that is the ABs brand these days.

  M: The Old Codger went off like a rocket, about the ways the game today is worse than the way the game was back then. Eventually he got to the moment where Ghost could reel him in, when he said, ‘Jesus Christ on a stick, if I was coaching you fellas today, with your running around all over the bloody field, throwing the ball to each other, instead of doing your bloody jobs, I’d bloody take to the lot of you with a four-by-two!’

  G: Hook, line and sinker — as I told him that if a coach were to hit any of his (or her) players with a four-by-two these days that would be a serious breach of everyone’s employment contract. A moment of silence; then I point out that the real problem here is that he spent his life slogging his guts out for nothing more than becoming a legend and maybe cashing in on that, if he’s lucky, whereas I am making a living out of the game I love. ‘Face it, mate, you and all your kind are just jealous.’

  M: To which The Old Codger went off all over again, about the professional game and everything that was wrong with it.

  G: Which was when he really strayed into the wrong territory.

  M: I’m a pretty cool guy, most of the time. People can think what they think — that’s up to them. But there’s some shit you best not say out loud.

  G: Knowing Machete for as long as I have, I can tell when he’s getting angry. Actually, anyone can tell when Machete is getting angry because he just looks really angry.

  M: When he was going on about how women were playing the game these days — the game that is meant to be a man’s game — I started to get a bit ticked off, on behalf of women. Then the alarm bells really started ringing, as he somehow veered into how, ‘back then’, everyone had normal names, ones you could pronounce, but now there are all these names no bastard has a hope in hell of pronouncing.

  G: Then The Old Codger hit the jackpot, straying into an area which is guaranteed to set Machete off like a rocket, because it’s one of the prejudices he’s been fighting all his life.

  M: So then The Old Codger starts talking about work rates and work ethics and how some players have more of it than others. That’s when I saw red.

  G: In defence of The Old Codger, he didn’t actually single out Pacific Islanders — even though everyone knew that was absolutely what he meant. And in defence of the Rugby HQ guy, he’d realised this was not working and was trying to get the Old Codge
r to shut the f**k up. And in defence of Machete, he wasn’t entirely to blame for what happened next.

  M: I wanted to tell The Old Codger how hard I work, in the off season — all the time actually — to maintain my fitness levels. I wanted to tell him how my work ethic, on the field, is up there with the best — and I have the stats to prove it. I wanted to tell him that young Pacific Island men, trying to make it in rugby, work harder than anyone else because they are carrying the hopes of whole villages sometimes. I wanted to tell him all these things, so I took one step towards him.

  G: Machete took one step towards him and The Old Codger went down like a sack of spuds. In Machete’s defence, it was later proved that The Old Codger hitting the deck was way more to do with the many lemonades he’d consumed that night and the fact his blood pressure was way through the roof.

  M: In my defence, it was mainly Ghost’s fault that his blood pressure was way high.

  G: As the CCTV footage of what became known as ‘the incident at the Rugby Awards that put a legend in hospital’ proved: (a) Machete did not touch the guy; (b) I had my hand on Machete’s shoulder, gently restraining him; and (c) my suit looked good, even on shitty CCTV footage.

  M: They let The Old Codger out of hospital later that night, with a warning about his blood pressure and mixing all his medications with too much alcohol, yet somehow I was still the bad guy.

  G: And somehow I was also the bad guy just for being there.

  M: And winding The Old Codger up in the first place.

  G: At least when I’m old and turn into an Old Codger I won’t have that underlying strata of racism going on.