Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  French players definitely smell the best of any rugby players; followed by the Italians; and then, if you’re into a musky, meaty smell, the Argentinians.

  M: Anyways, despite Ghost sniffing the other players all the time, we came away from Canberra with a 15-point win.

  G: And at the aftermatch I got some excellent addresses for where to by eau de Cologne in Paris.

  M: The quarter-final; Brisbane; against Wales (who apparently smell of coal and leeks); 29–9; nothing really to talk about except the saltwater croc that wandered into the dressing room after the match. Australia really is the global capital of things that want to kill you.

  G: At least in Sydney, for the semi-final against the hosts, we were relatively safe from the wildlife — unless you counted the Aussie sheilas who kept trying to bushwhack us in the hotel lobby.

  M: I’m not saying that the Australians cheated, but the 31 to 2 penalty count against us, along with the four disallowed tries and the five yellow cards for such offences as ‘shrugging in the tackle’ and ‘looking at the referee in a questionable fashion’, to me, tells a story.

  G: Still, we ran them close and were it not for the final hooter mysteriously going off five minutes early, when 11 brave men in black were only two points down and camped on their line, with the loose head and feed, things might have gone the other way.

  Apparently, we won the third-place match against England and I scored two of the greatest length-of-the-field tries ever seen, but I have no memory of this because I was still too depressed about the semi-final.

  M: If I can just jump in here and say one thing about the final — where the yellow-bellied Australians defeated a Samoan team at the height of its powers (before the rugby bosses in England decided to cut funding to the Pacific Island nations and concentrate on stealing their players instead) — the one thing I want to say is that I do not believe that it was a coincidence that on the eve of the game the best nine Samoan players were deported for ‘visa irregularities’.

  G: But at the end of the day we finished third and, as Duck so eloquently put it: ‘Third? Who the f**k comes to the f**king World Cup to finish f**king third?’

  M: Amen to that. We left Australia in 2005 beaten and, in many cases, bitten, but with a lot of unfinished business for France, 2009.

  Judge Dreadlock

  GHOST: After the somewhat unfortunate things I’d been reported as saying about the Australian team, the Australian coach, the Australian people, the Australian climate, Australian wildlife that can kill you just by looking at you and Australia in general, after our respective end-of-year tours in which we did the Grand Slam while they lost to everyone, even Italy, it was suggested that maybe my planned Xmas holiday in the outback was not a good idea.

  I wasn’t particularly worried until the video of me actually saying all these things at the end-of-tour function found its way to YouTube (never trust an English waiter), so the ‘deny everything’ option was taken out of play. People disappear out there, in the Outback, Machete said to me. I took the hint. Uluru at dawn would have to wait.

  It was Luci, the fitness instructor/yoga teacher/actress/model/social influencer I was dating at the time, who came up with the suggestion that we hit South East Asia instead. Surfing, meditation, more surfing, yoga retreats, surfing, great food and great beaches for surfing after you’ve eaten the food — I was real keen on the idea and Luci took it and ran with it, making all the bookings.

  It turned out there was a lot less surfing than I would have liked, given that most of the time we were halfway up some mountain or another, in the middle of the jungle, doing downward-facing doughnuts and/or meditating our arses off. We were, as they say, off the grid. But it wasn’t all bad. Spiritually, it was enlightening. And sexually too, after the Finnish nurse and the Swedish hairdresser showed up and started travelling with us.

  The thing was, when I say we were off the grid, we were way off the grid. So things went kinda feral for a while there — long enough that when it came time to head home, my head looked like some kind of small rodent had built a nest on top of it. There was no way I could go back to civilisation looking like that. It was the Swedish hairdresser who said she’d deal with it and she sat me down and started working on the upstairs department. It took ages, with all the back-combing, and then she used heaps of hair ties and then some kind of weird-smelling wax stuff. And it wasn’t until she’d finished and handed me a mirror that I realised what she’d done.

  I now had dreadlocks.

  Sure, they weren’t the longest, most luscious dreads ever — that would, she told me, take time and care — but they were definitely the beginning of something undeniably dready. I wasn’t too sure about it, to be totally honest, but Luci and the Finnish nurse were into it so I kinda went with the flow.

  Back in New Zealand and it was straight into pre-season with the ’Canes, looking for our fourth straight Super Rugby title.

  MACHETE: So, while Ghost was off in the jungle being freaky, I spent what they laughingly call the ‘off season’ in Samoa trying to avoid relatives I never knew I had who wanted to take all my money. Me and him had messaged each other when we could — when he was somewhere with cell service or when I was hiding in a taro patch — but it wasn’t until I saw him on the TV during pre-season training that I became fully aware of the horror that was the top of his head.

  G: So the first time I actually managed to see Machete, face to face, turned out to be when we ran out onto the field for the second round of the comp, at the Cake Tin, for the ’Canes versus the Blues in a repeat of last year’s final. I was feeling pretty good about myself, to be honest. The previous week we’d cleaned up the easy-beat Crusaders by 50 points, down in Christchurch, and I’d dotted down three times. Sure it was only the Crusaders, the perennial wooden-spooners, but it had been a good start and I thought maybe the dreads were bringing me some good early-season form.

  Anyway, we’re getting ready for the kick-off and I see Machete, looking at me, from deep inside his half. So I give him the nod — hey. Nothing. He’s just looking at me, giving me nothing. No nod, just the cold stink eye. It did not feel good.

  M: At that moment in time, having just seen the abomination for the first time with my own eyes, I was beyond any form of communication. When he gave me the nod, all I could see were these things on top of his head, bobbing up and down, mocking me and my culture.

  G: I just thought he was game-facing me, trying to get into my head. He did that sometimes, when we were playing against each other.

  M: Nah, I was just offended on so many levels.

  G: So, about five minutes into the game and we’re up by seven and I’m doing this wrap-around move with Conch. But the Blues cover is reading it pretty well so I put this little grubber kick through to turn them around. And I’m starting to chase the kick when — WHACK!! — I get flattened. It’s Machete and it’s well late — and the referee does nothing, just waves play on. And as me and him are getting up, he says to me . . .

  M: ‘You feel that? That’s Bob Marley turning in his grave.’

  G: And he runs off and there’s no penalty, nothing. I look to Conch — that was late, right? He just shrugs, turns away, and gets on with the game.

  Halfway through the first half, we’re carving out a slick backline move. I’m in the line, I flick the ball on to the Tow Truck Driver, who is belting down the line. I swear I have time to watch him beat two players before — KA-THWACK!!!!! — I get flattened again. Machete. This time it’s so late that surely after the Tow Truck ploughs over in the corner the referee will turn to Machete and brandish the yellow card. Not that Machete seems to care, as he whispers in my ear . . .

  M: ‘While you’re appropriating other people’s cultures, I s’pose you’ll be the white dude playing the digeridoo in Cuba Mall tomorrow.’

  G: Then Machete jogs back to join his teammates under the posts, awaiting th
e conversion. As I struggle to get to my feet, I realise that none of my teammates are coming to help me or check on my state of health. They’re all congratulating TT in the end zone. I look to the referee as he signals the try. He catches my eye, but then he looks away. It’s like I’m invisible. Or, even worse, he can’t bear to look at me.

  When I eventually get enough breath in my body to trudge back to halfway for the kick-off, my teammates stream past me, happy, but no one comes over to see if I’m okay. I’m starting to get the message here.

  And it makes me angry.

  M: I could tell that Ghost was starting to get angry ’cause he went real quiet, which is what he does when he gets real angry. Instead of his usual yapping and giving orders, all I see is this angry man with stupid dreadlocks.

  And I know what’s going to happen next.

  We take in the kick-off, punch it up a couple of times, then the ball is chucked out to me to put in the clearing kick, drive them back into their territory.

  And as I kick the ball I see this other ball, of anger, fly up out of the line.

  G: I think the rule is that it’s, like, if you’re two steps from the kicker and then you hit them it’s a late tackle. So I’m, like, seven steps away from Machete, but no way am I stopping. This is something I need to do. This is a message I need to send. So — THWACK!!! — I clean him out, big time. And I make sure I land on top of him, because I need to explain a few things to him.

  M: So he smashes me, like, absurdly late. Then he’s lying on top of me, yabbering about Finnish nurses and Swedish hairdressers and being in the jungle and how if I’d been there I would have done exactly the same thing. And I don’t want to hear all this freaky shit so I’m trying to get him off me and it looks like we’re wrestling. And then he starts comparing what he went through in the jungle to being like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (which is one of our favourite films to watch together on tour) except being surrounded by hot nude women, rather than the Viet Cong. And now I really want him off me, so I’m telling him that it doesn’t make it right; that he could still have said no to the Swedish hairdresser if he’d had the balls to know when cultural lines were being crossed. And we’re wrestling and struggling to communicate over the roar of the crowd when the referee is there, blowing his whistle, as the other players are wading in, dragging us apart.

  G: Straight red card.

  I look at the referee, with his arm outstretched, holding the card aloft. I ask him about the two times Machete late-tackled me and he looks me in the eye and quotes the Siddhartha Gautama at me. ‘For the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world.’

  M: As I watch Ghost trudge off the field, I feel a twinge of guilt, knowing I drove him into a blind rage. Then I realise that instead of booing, like a home crowd normally would, the Wellingtonians gathered that day at the Cake Tin are silent, nodding in that way the knowledgeable New Zealand rugby crowd does when they know a great wrong has been righted — like every time we beat England.

  But I still feel just a bit bad.

  G: In the dressing room I don’t even get changed. I just grab my stuff and head for my car. It is only afterwards that I realise I couldn’t even bring myself to look at myself in the mirror.

  M: Of course, afterwards, there was all this stuff in the papers about Ghost getting sent off, with particular emphasis on the fact it was me in the tackle and our ‘fight’ in the aftermath. Was this the end of rugby’s great bro’mance?

  I had to admit to myself that even I didn’t know the answer to this question.

  G: After a day or two of soul-searching I went back to training. There’s a team meeting where I apologise to the boys for letting them down — but still none of them are looking me in the eye, so I know what I have to do.

  In the ’Canes, at that time, there were three players, Samoan one and all, who were sporting the dreads: Conch, Jandal and Bus Stop. Behind their backs we called them The Movie Franchise (Predator 1, Predator 2, Predator 3) but we would never say that to their faces because they might biff us in the mouth.

  So I go to them, after practice, and I ask them what they think of my dreads. Being good Jesus boys, one and all, they look at the ground and mutter things like ‘if you’re into it, man’.

  So I ask them again and this time I tell them I want the honest truth — and I remind them as a senior player in the team that if I tell them to tell me the truth, then the truth is what they must tell me.

  So they tell me the truth.

  And the truth hurts.

  And after a few minutes of them telling me how much my dreads suck and that they are just an embarrassment in every possible way and they that have lost all respect for me as a human being, they confess that when we get on the plane to Jo’burg, after the game against the Chiefs (which, thankfully, for them, I am sitting out because of the red card, so they won’t have to be on the same field as my dreads), they were going to wait until I’d taken my sleeping pill and was passed out, and they were going to cut my dreads off and burn them.

  Reeling, I told them that would be a violation of team protocols.

  They told me there had been a team meeting and the action had been sanctioned, for the good of the whole team.

  ‘You had a meeting without me?’

  ‘Obviously,’ they said.

  Not knowing what else to say, I told them that burning anything, even human hair, in an aeroplane at 35,000 feet was not a good idea.

  They told me they knew that and team management had organised a braai in the grounds of our hotel where the dreads would be ceremonially burnt and an intervention would be staged to make sure I never did it again.

  Conch then launched into a long and very eloquent lecture about the cultural and religious importance of dreadlocks, referencing along the way the Nazarites and the Lion of Judah. He finished his sermon, looked me in the eye and asked me how I, of all people, could commit such a crime. I explained to him they were given to me by a really hot Swedish hairdresser who was nude at the time. Conch and the others nodded knowingly — they could see how maybe that might distract me from taking the right things into consideration, in the moment. I showed them some of the photos on my phone. Okay, yes, now they could definitely see how I might have been distracted, but it still didn’t change the fact that my pathetic excuse for dreads had to go.

  So that night, in my apartment, I lit some candles and put on ‘The End’ by The Doors, and I stood in front of the mirror and I cut off the dreaded dreads, one by one.

  Actually, I tried to do it without looking in the mirror, but I stabbed myself in the head with the scissors, so looking myself in the eye as I undid the wrong was as much a safety thing as it was a spiritual cleansing.

  When I was finished, I gathered up the dreads and put them in a box, which I then couriered to Machete in Auckland.

  M: So, this box arrives and I think it might be these wicked sunglasses I’d bought off Amazon. But when I open the box it is full of, like, these gross hairy worm things and I recoil and drop the box and they go all over the floor.

  And then I realise who sent it, what they are and what they represent, so I get some BBQ tongs and pick them up and put them back in the box.

  G: He’s never told me what he did with them, but I’d like to think Machete disposed of them with due ceremony.

  M: I flushed them down the dunny.

  I had to flush three times before they all went away.

  G: The weird thing was, after I went to my barber to professionally correct the mistake, I ended up with a buzz cut not unlike the one Machete rocks most of the time.

  M: So the next time I see Ghost in the flesh is when we’re lining up on Eden Park for the return match. And I look across at him and he gives me the nod. And I give him the nod back.

  G: And as he gives me the nod, I know that everything is good between us. T
he disturbance in the force has been healed.

  M: And then, after I give him the nod, I realise that the prick is copying my hairstyle. So, the first chance I get, I’m going to smash him.

  G: So — KA-THWACK!!! — Machete smashes me, big time. Yellow card, in the first 20 seconds of the game — I think it’s a record that still stands to this very day.

  M: But it was worth it.

  G: And if Luci and the Swedish hairdresser ever read this book, all I can say is that please don’t take it personally, you meant well at the time — and I hope you guys are having a great life together in Stockholm.

  And yes, I deleted all the photos like you asked.

  The Very Unfortunate Leak

  [They say that what goes on on the field stays on the field. Unfortunately, never has this been truer than on a cold Christchurch night before (and during) a Bledisloe Cup test match pretty early on in our careers. It was definitely one of the first times that the public of New Zealand looked at us and thought ‘who are these idiots?’ Sure, it wouldn’t be the last, but it did kind of set the tone for a bunch of stuff that followed over the years.]

  GHOST: That was all his fault. I was the innocent victim in this one.

  MACHETE: I didn’t have any other choice. I mean, what else was I meant to do? If I’d tried to hold on ’til halftime my mental focus would have been gone. It’s real hard to mark up when half your brain is going ‘man, I really need to pee!’

  G: Which is why you go before the game.

  M: And I would have done, like I always do — and always did ever since then — but what’s the first thing you learn when you join the ABs machine?

  G: Never say ‘f**k’ in a post-match TV interview.

  M: Not that one, the one about ‘never be the next person in the dunny after a prop’s been in there’.