Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  G: Yes, those are, indeed, wise words.

  M: So, I’m getting my kit on that night, in Christchurch, and I’ve got my headphones on, listening to Tupac to get in the zone, and then I think ‘Okay, time for a waz . . .’

  G: A waz? Is that what they call it in Samoan?

  M: That’s what I call it, so I guess yeah. Up to a point.

  G: The point being you.

  M: Yeah.

  G: Oh, okay, good to know.

  M: Anyways, so I get up to go, which is when I see Bobo coming out of the bogs . . .

  G: And if there is one prop you do not want to be the next guy in the toilet stall after, it’s Bobo. There’s something about the mix of a lot of red meat and all the protein powder that makes for something that is so toxic that the Geneva Convention should outlaw it.

  M: But I need to go, you know, so I take a deep breath and head on in. And then it hits me. I can feel it getting into me through my skin. And I almost make it to the urinal, before suddenly I’m real close to chucking so I turn and run back to the dressing room.

  G: And he’s so white that I’m like ‘Whoa, and they call me The Ghost?’

  M: And then Plato starts up his team talk and all the way through I’m thinking, ‘What am I going to do here?’ I even thought about pissing in Bobo’s gear bag, ’cause he freakin’ deserves it for his crimes against humanity. And then Gunner starts up his talk and I’m actually wondering if before we run out I can sneak into the Aussie dressing room and go there, but Gunner’s talks were always, like, three words . . .

  G: ‘Do your jobs’ or ‘make yourself proud’ or ‘look deep inside’ — pithy but insightful, but sometimes confusing.

  M: Yeah, yeah, but the point is there was no time, no time to go anyway. So, to this day, I have no idea what Gunner or Plato said to inspire us that night, but the next thing we’re all in the circle of brotherhood and before you know it, we’re running out onto the pitch.

  G: The first time I’m suspecting something was wrong with Machete was when I’ve got my arm round him during ‘God Defend New Zealand’ and instead of singing along, like he normally does, he’s kinda jiggling and humming and looking up at the sky a lot.

  M: It’s Christchurch, man, where they all think they’re classy and everything, so they’ve got this opera singer dude in and he’s doing, like, the slowest anthem ever. And all I’m thinking is, ‘Don’t piss yourself in the middle of the anthem, ’cause they’ll chase you out of town with the stupid Crusader horse and then you’ll be, like, charged with treason!’ My mind was starting to wander by now.

  G: And then we’re doing the haka and I’m beside him, catching him out of the corner of my eye, and I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, there’s something definitely off here’, ’cause he was hardly moving at all — not giving it his usual 110 per cent.

  M: And all the way through the haka I’m thinking, ‘Don’t piss yourself during the haka, ’cause all the Maoris will hate you and then you’ll be charged with treason or something!’ But at least, during the haka, I had my idea.

  G: It was not the greatest of ideas.

  M: It was the best idea in the worst of times.

  G: So, as we’re getting in position for the kick-off, Machete comes over to me and says that he’s going to kneel down and he wants me to kneel with him — in front of him — ‘like we’re praying’.

  M: And the next thing Ghost is crapping on about how he doesn’t believe in a higher power so it would be hypocritical of him blah blah blah. So, real quick, I have to explain my predicament. Not being very helpful, he asks why I didn’t go before the game. So, real quick, I tell him about Bobo and then he finally gets it and I can tell him that I need him to kneel in front of me while I take a piss so that all the people of Christchurch don’t see my knob.

  G: It was definitely one of the strangest requests I’ve received on the rugby field. Trying to be helpful, I suggest maybe the first ruck he’s in, he just lets go — no one will ever know who did it. But Machete points out that Gunner is always the first man to any ruck so he would inevitably end up wearing it, which isn’t very respectful to your captain.

  M: So, finally, he gets it and we both kneel and I get my thing out and I let rip. Man, it was good. I tell you, it’s the best feeling in the world when you’re really busting and you finally get to go. Even when you’re surrounded by 25,000 Cantabrians who would take it very personally that you were pissing on their pitch . . .

  G: Especially after some of the stuff you’d said about the Crusaders over the years.

  M: It still felt so good. Up ’til the point where I couldn’t stop.

  G: So I’d been thinking ‘quick leak, get on with the game’ but once Machete started pissing on hallowed Crusader turf, he could not stop.

  M: I don’t know what it was — the cold weather maybe — you know how you pee more when it’s really cold?

  G: Yeah, why is that?

  M: No idea, man.

  G: Anyway, so there you are, pissing like a racehorse in the cold weather and suddenly there’s this — lake — forming between us.

  M: And I’m thinking ‘stop, stop, stop’ . . .

  G: And then I realise the cold ground is not absorbing the urine and the lake is spreading and I am now kneeling in Machete’s urine.

  M: It was so cold the ground must have been kinda frozen so it wasn’t draining away.

  G: Exactly. That’s what I just said.

  M: Either way, it wasn’t good.

  G: And then Machete starts to panic because he can’t stop pissing . . .

  M: And suddenly there’s piss going everywhere — all over me, all over Ghost . . .

  G: Which is when the referee whistled time on and Australia kicked off.

  M: Which meant they kicked the ball straight towards the two freaking clowns kneeling on the pitch doing God knows what.

  G: To this day, though, one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen on a rugby field was the way Machete stood, gave it a couple of quick shakes, tucked his thing back in his shorts, caught the ball, took the tackle of the boofhead Australian winger and then presented the ball perfectly for the next phase.

  M: Sometimes you do stuff and it’s all instinct.

  G: Not only that, he managed to turn the Aussie boofhead in such a way, in the tackle, that the Aussie’s face landed in the puddle of piss. Classic.

  M: But still nothing to be proud of.

  G: Except that the way the Aussie boofhead got up and his eyes were all stinging ’cause there’s piss all in them.

  M: Yeah, that was kinda funny.

  G: But after the game we vowed we would never speak of that moment ever again.

  M: And then it turned up on YouTube.

  G: Yeah, that scuppered that plan.

  M: Plato was not impressed. Even though he totally got the bit about never following a prop into the bathroom. And Gunner gave me the filthiest look ever — one that said ‘you let down the nation, the jersey and your teammates, but most of all you let down yourself’.

  G: Gunner could pack a lot into one glare.

  M: Meanwhile we’re also getting the glare of public opinion on the Book of Face and the ’Gram and the Twitter . . .

  G: Yeah, we got into a world of shit over that one. A lot of public ridicule.

  M: And a lot of hurtful comments on YouTube about, you know, size.

  G: But it was a very cold night, bro’. On any other night, you’d have been fine. Whole different story.

  M: Can we stop talking about this now?

  G: Fair call.

  World Cup France, 2009

  And It All Started So Well . . .

  MACHETE: You know it could be said that, in a way, we actually achieved one of our goals in France in 2009. In 2005, when we finished third, we vowed that we would never finish third in the
World Cup ever again. And in 2009, we most definitely did not finish third.

  GHOST: But surely, Mr Brightside, the underlying assumption in not wanting to finish third is that we want to finish higher than third — second or, ideally, one higher than that.

  M: True, true. I guess I just don’t want this chapter to be a downer, for the people reading the book.

  G: By, say, telling the truth about what happened in France in 2009?

  M: Hey, I’m just trying to look for the silver lining. I mean, things started very well — even before they started. You were very excited about the fact the tournament was being held in France.

  G: Well, I am something of a Francophile, as you well know.

  M: Yeah, when the squad assembled you were talking to everyone in French. Impressing them with your basic grasp of the language. And then Urkel talked back at you in perfect French and you stopped doing that thing.

  G: Yeah, well, no one likes a smart-arse halfback.

  M: It was Duck’s last World Cup as captain and we wanted to send him out on a high. Or at least with all his testicles in one piece.

  G: And yes, I guess you could say things did get off to a cracking good start. You were great against Italy in the opening match.

  M: We both were. Three tries each, as I recall, in what turned out to be a good, fun game as we put 70 points on them. Couldn’t get a better start, really. And then, against Romania, I thought the whole team played well.

  G: Although after we cracked the ton, I did start feeling sorry for the Romanians.

  M: I got that after you started patting them on their backs and talking nicely to them in your broken French after every try we scored.

  G: A lot of Romanians speak French and I thought it would be nice for them to know that we still cared about them, even as we put them to the sword.

  M: Then we both sat out the Portugal game — another hundred points for us — but that was not a bad thing, I thought.

  G: Well, we were in Lyon, weren’t we? The food, the culture, the food, the fact Lyon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site . . .

  M: Mainly the food. Best food of any World Cup, I’d say. Just looking for another upside to the whole thing.

  G: And after we dispatched Scotland 40–0, I did have to say that things were looking pretty darn good.

  M: And you’d got through the whole tournament this far without even the slightest hint of a concussion, which was another good thing.

  G: True. So, we headed to Marseille, to face Ireland in the quarter-finals, safe in the knowledge that no New Zealand team had ever lost a World Cup quarter-final.

  M: When you say we were ‘safe’ in that knowledge . . .?

  G: At the time we felt safe in that knowledge.

  M: Yeah.

  G: Yeah.

  M: Man, we f**ked it up.

  G: Boy, did we ever.

  Where It All Went Very Wrong . . .

  M: It was my specific wish that in this chapter heading the word ‘scandal’ was to be in those fancy quote marks. Why? Because those quotation marks are the international grammar sign for something that someone said. But more than that, they’re also the international grammar sign for something that someone said, but is actually no big deal so why are you getting all up in our faces about it, even now, years later? Quotation marks are the international sign for ‘get over it’.

  And that’s exactly how I feel every time I think back to the so-called Energy Drinks and Pills ‘Scandal’ of the 2009 World Cup. Not that I like to think back on it because, quite frankly, it hurts.

  It hurts because some of the press attention at the time was very mean about us.

  Okay, yes, all of the press attention was brutal, if we’re splitting hairs about it. And the comments on social media were even more brutal. Me and Ghost were accused of not taking the World Cup seriously — which is completely the opposite to what actually happened; if anything, we were taking it too seriously. Some said that we were a disgrace to the jersey — which is only partly true because we did what we did to honour the jersey and it just went kind of pear-shaped is all.

  A couple of anonymous blokes even sent us death threats, which was completely overboard and unnecessary. What is wrong with some people? How would killing us have solved anything when the damage had already been done? And why do people jump straight to death threats on social media? What’s wrong with first calling us idiots or dickheads, or any number of names and then moving on to the death threats? Why not start with threatening to throw eggs at us, or rotten tomatoes; then maybe work up to slapping us around the head, or even a punch in the guts — those really hurt — and then get to the ‘you deserve to die’ shit?

  But no. Some guys jumped straight to wanting to kill us, even though they were all the time hiding behind fake profiles and not man enough to use their own names. And what really hurt the most about some of those death threats was later that we found out that the people behind those fake profiles were forwards in the team that played, and lost, that day. They were on the field and we weren’t and they lost, yet they still blamed us.

  That’s just not the sort of behaviour you expect from international rugby players, especially ones who get paid well for their jobs and who are expected to be role models in the community. It’s not like they don’t get up to stupid stuff off the field too. Whatever happened to the old code that said ‘what happens on the field or off the field stays on the field even when we’re off the field’?

  And this time, when I’m using quotation marks, it means because it’s important, not for any other reason, okay?

  Just as a purely hypothetical example, have I ever gone online and threatened one of the locks in our team at the time with death? Did I ever threaten Beany (just to pick a name at random) with death after the Bledisloe match in Brisbane in 2008 when he dropped that ball which even I could have caught in the lineout when we were hot on attack and which cost us the game and the Rugby Championship? No, I never did. I may have thought about it, but I never did.

  (Not that I’m directly saying, for legal reasons, Beany was one of the forwards who threatened to ‘shoot us like we were no-good vermin, like rabbits on my farm’ after the World Cup debacle.)

  (The fact that Beany owns a notoriously rabbit-infested farm is a pure coincidence here, it should be noted, according to our lawyer.)

  Rugby’s a team game, and you can’t single out individuals or individual moments for costing the team a result. I mean, everyone knew that if Beany had taken the ball cleanly that time and set up a driving maul like he was supposed to, we may have scored and won. But then again, we may not have won. If, say, Beany had dropped the ball slightly later, say as he flopped over the line for the winning try, we would still have lost. It’s a team game, is what I’m saying, so when the team fails (even when you’re not on the pitch with the team), the team needs to take it on the chin.

  I mean, that night in Brisbane all Beany got after the final whistle (which was straight after he dropped the ball) was a filthy look from Duck and, in the sheds, a hug from Urkel and a suggested affirmation to help him do better next time. And you should have seen him in the sheds after. It was like a funeral, and everyone was giving him caring hugs, and not talking about how he lost us the game. Because that’s not what our team was about. At least it was that night.

  But I’m not going to make Beany feel bad about that and go on about it just because he may or may not have been one of the forwards who later threatened me and Ghost with death after the 2009 World Cup quarter-final loss to Ireland. It’s just not the New Zealand way.

  No, the point I’m making here is that me and Ghost didn’t exactly get the same courtesy in terms of caring hugs and affirmations in the dressing room from our teammates that night in Marseille, did we? Sure, part of this was to do with us giving the dressing room a bit of a swerve until management told us we had to stop h
iding in that corporate box and actually go into the dressing room with the rest of the boys, but that’s kinda beside the point.

  What I’m saying here is there are enough mindless people making mindless death threats on social media, without our own teammates putting the boot in too — especially when they said a lot with their cold dead eyes and their silence when we did actually front up in the dressing room, under that stadium in Marseille.

  Sure, maybe our timing could have been better. If it had happened in the off season, or even in the privacy of my own house, no one would have cared. It was only the fact that it happened the night before the quarter-final of the 2009 World Cup that made it seem more important. It was only the fact that because of it we didn’t play in the match, that elevated it in importance a bit more. It was only the fact that it ended Duck’s tenure as captain in ignominy, that didn’t really help matters. It was only the fact that we lost and suffered our most ignominious World Cup finishing position in history, that made everyone lose their marbles, if everyone’s marbles were made out of shit.

  What hurt most was not that our teammates threatened us with death online, it’s that they felt they couldn’t be honest and threaten us with death while using their real profile pics or, even better, to our faces, that night in France. If they had been honest then, it would have hurt less. Sure, it would have hurt more at the time — especially if someone like, say, Beany had tried to follow through on his threat there and then. But that never happened and, instead, the hurt festered.

  And the true story — our side of the story — was never told.

  Until now.

  Yes, it is a fact that Ghost and I were dropped for the quarter-final that we lost, and the whole country treated us like pariahs — and not just your average garden-variety pariah, but a pariah who the whole country had lent money to and instead of paying it back we had spent it on milkshakes.

  And, yes, we might have shown more remorse at the press conference the next day, if we weren’t still half off our nuts. And now, to this very day, that picture the press took of us doing the fingers instead of acting remorseful is out there on the internet, and will be there forever.