Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  They say a picture paints a thousand words. What I would give for some more paint to paint over the thousand words I painted that day. That picture, to me, is way more than just one of the many pictures floating around the internet of the two of us being idiots. That picture, of all the pictures, is the only one I wish I could take down off the internet. But that’s the thing about the internet — once it’s up, it doesn’t come down. Like a helium balloon.

  Some people said we were a disgrace, that we’d put our own puerile need for entertainment ahead of the whole country’s quest for glory. That one really annoyed me, once I had looked up what puerile means. You say puerile; I say what’s wrong with being childish?

  There are a whole lot of children in the world, who have no choice but to be childish. They aren’t adults yet! That’s why they’re childish! Some would say that we were adults and should have known better. But I challenge you to walk a mile in my shoes, and then tell me not to be childish. I have wide flat feet, and they don’t make shoes for my sort of feet that lend themselves to adult behaviour. So you really have no choice but to be annoyed, and do stupid things to distract from the pain.

  Yes, there was pain in that dressing room that night, as me and Ghost stood there in our number ones facing our teammates, many of whom were in the nude by the time we got there. You could feel the pain coming off Duck, saying nothing as he sat in the corner after what turned out to be his last test match. Mind you, it turned out he’d broken the shaft of his penis midway through the match, so that could explain some of the pain. Urkel was in tears. But, then again, Urkel tended to cry a lot in the dressing room, even after we’d won. Even Beany seemed to be in pain as he muttered about getting his gun and shooting f**king rabbits. It was only out of respect for all the pain in that room that Ghost and I agreed never to talk about what really happened in France in 2009.

  Until, like I said before, now.

  Because we’ve never had the chance before to tell our side of the story. We had no choice then but to put our hands up and cop it on the chin. And since then, since the cone of silence went up round the events in Marseille, people have often asked us: ‘What on earth possessed you two f**kwits to break team protocols and go out for a night on the town, after you got wasted at the team hotel on energy drinks and meds, the night before the 2009 World Cup quarter-final against Ireland?’

  And our answer to them has always been: ‘How long is a piece of string?’ That answer had nothing to do with the question we were asked. But it confused them enough to pause and stand still, while we walked off pretending to take a phone call.

  And, besides, Urkel used to always say ‘explaining is losing’. He never really explained why explaining is losing, but I guess if he had explained it, it would have made him a loser which is why, as Urkel also said, ‘we hate losing, so we never have to explain stuff’. This was probably why, at his later fraud trial, Urkel never explained where all the money went.

  The real answer to the question of the explanation is a bit like my relationship status in the early days of Facebook — it’s complicated. But here finally, in our book, we’d like to explain ourselves.

  It was all Ghost’s fault.

  He will deny this of course because, to this day, he denies it. But we promised our publisher that we would tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. And the truth is that the last thing I remember from that night was Ghost saying, ‘I got some more energy drinks from room service, are you sure it won’t react weirdly with the pills we took?’

  Earlier that night, because we were no longer allowed to room together, I had gone to Ghost’s room to play PlayStation games, to relax before the big game against Ireland the next day. One thing about PlayStation is that Ghost thinks he’s The Man at any game he plays. It doesn’t matter if it’s a game he’s never played before, he’ll be The Man right up to the point where he’s one of those annoying players who always has to pause the game so he can check the instructions.

  Anyway, this night I was bored and a bit on edge about the big game, so went down to see what Ghost was up to. His new roommate, Helmet, was already asleep, his headphones on, listening to his whale sounds. Ghost, as I expected, was awake and feeling a bit edgy about the Irish, so to calm his nerves he was learning a new one-on-one fight game and invited me to challenge him.

  I love Ghost like a brother, and we have a lot in common, but we’ve grown up most of our lives together and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that he is useless at PlayStation games. But he’s a confidence player on the field, so that night I knew that it was important for him to be feeling good off it, in order to have that confidence on it. I wanted Ghost to play well the next day which is why, for the first couple of times, I let him beat me even though I could have smashed him to a pulp at will.

  But then Ghost started getting all cocky on it and trash-talking me and that’s when the trouble started. He was saying things like, ‘Hey, Machete, are you going to make an effort, or are you going to keep making a fool of yourself?’ Ouch.

  And his sledges weren’t even that clever. They were like if sledging was like dad jokes. When he said, ‘Oooh, lost again, loser! Is Machete your name, or shall I call you Mashitty?’, that’s when I had had enough. That’s when I started playing to win.

  Ghost couldn’t handle it. He tried everything to put me off, even making jokes about my calf muscles which he knows I am sensitive about. But I had to put him in his place. And his place when he’s being annoying is The Place of Total Humiliation. So I destroyed him. It got so bad, I thought he’d start crying.

  Instead, he started drinking energy drinks, so he could stay up and play all night, until he beat me. Which he never could that night because I started drinking the energy drinks too, so I could stay up and beat him. Our natural high-performance athlete competitive streaks had taken over.

  Then, in an act of sheer desperation, Ghost took a couple of little blue pills, which he said made him stay up longer. He was in for the long run, so I took some of the pills as well, so that I wouldn’t lose my edge and stay up too. This, as it turned out, was not one of the best decisions we have ever made in our lives.

  I should have just told him to get stuffed and walked away. I should have let him win and then we would have called it a night. And I know they say hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it is. But another wonderful thing is not having your mate saying bad things about your calves, just because they can’t handle you wasting them at PlayStation.

  We don’t remember why we needed to go out that night because we don’t remember a thing from that night after we took the pills. We don’t remember leaving the hotel disguised as pot plants. We certainly don’t remember the bar crawl through the backstreets of Marseille. We don’t even remember the naked mechanical bull-riding or dancing with Irish fans who were surprised to see us out, given we were playing their team the next day.

  Doing an impromptu can-can with the ladies-of-the-night-who-weren’t-really-ladies? Nope, not a thing. Performing ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Misérables on the steps of the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde? Nothing. Escaping from the gendarmerie on unicycles borrowed from passing street performers? Were it not for the plethora of video evidence that suggests otherwise, I would swear none of these things ever happened.

  Going back to that hindsight thing, perhaps we shouldn’t have let those Irish fans buy us all that red wine or those shots of Pastis. But we were New Zealanders too, so we took our responsibility as tourists very seriously that night. Apparently. We were there to represent our country, so represent it we did. Or so we were told once we’d sobered up.

  Somehow, we made it back to the hotel, and we may have gotten away with it too. But the hotel reception staff had reported us to the team management for taking the plants in the lobby on our way out. Which was a pity because Ghost spewed in the lobby, right where one of the plants would have been.


  So, do we feel responsible for what happened on the pitch the following day (or later the same day given that we pitched in at 4am, to be accurate)? In our defence, we were very keen to play and it was only Doc Doc pointing out there was no way we would pass any drug test that saw us being dropped for the game. That and the fact we couldn’t stand up.

  Yes, this meant that the ABs fielded a hitherto untried and untested midfield combination against Ireland. And yes, all three Irish tries that day came from midfield breaks. But who can truly say that even if we had been sober and drug-free enough to play that we would have been able to make the try-saving tackles? No one, that’s who.

  Not that any of that makes this in any way palatable, in terms of our proud sporting records. It’s as palatable, to be honest, as eating a spider’s arse. But let’s not forget that from spiders’ arses comes silk. And it’s my hope that by finally telling the whole story about what happened that night we can somehow make silk from a spider’s arse of a situation.

  Oh, and Beany, I know it’s you who still calls me late at night and sings ‘Oma Rapeti’ down the line at me.

  G: All I have to say about this is that it takes two to make a potentially career-ending ‘scandal’ of this magnitude.

  Oh, and yeah Beany, I know it’s you too. ‘Get over it, man.’

  Downhill, All The Way Home . . .

  G: I don’t think the enormity of what we hadn’t achieved in France really hit the team until we got back to our Marseille hotel. It was certainly then that the phrase ‘lynch mob’ started to be whispered and the players began to phone home to see if their houses had been burnt to the ground.

  M: Ghost and I were trying to keep a real low profile at this stage, so I can say for a fact that everything that followed had very little to do with us. We were witnesses, more than we were participants, absolutely.

  G: So, basically, the team decided to deal with the disastrous loss in the way that teams have always dealt with disastrous losses: by drinking a lot of alcohol as quickly as possible. Even the good Christian boys who don’t normally drink at all suddenly felt the need to get rat-faced, such was the magnitude of the disaster.

  M: Even before the party left Marseille, travelled to Paris, then got on the Eurostar and ended up in London, things had gotten kinda weird. After many lemonades at the hotel, when we were getting on the bus for Paris, suddenly Beany emerged wearing some kind of weird black latex dominatrix suit. Udon, who was rooming with Beany, explained that this was actually his Catwoman outfit — and that Beany sometimes wore this outfit to bed. None of this made it any less weird.

  G: I think something must have snapped in Beany that day, the day he got some truly weird looks from Customs officers in both France and England when he wore that freaky suit all the way to London. It was the start of a period of his life when he would randomly, inexplicably, turn up to things (press conferences, team-building days, funerals) dressed as something weird and not of his gender — Minnie Mouse, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn. I can tell you from experience, it is hard to pay your last respects to a former great player when the bloke singing hymns alongside you is dressed as Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was such a blessing when, after he was struck by lightning, Beany gave up this particular form of crazy and found more normal craziness to do.

  M: I have never seen as many lemonades consumed in such a short space of time in two different time zones as I did over the next many hours. And also, with the many lemonades, came some truly strange behaviour. For some reason, on the train, everyone decided that cutting each other’s hair would be a good idea. So the men who had mullets became skinheads, while those with normal hair inevitably ended up with some variation of the mullet.

  G: I am not ashamed to say that Machete and I hid in the toilets until this phase passed — especially after we heard Udon say, ‘Hey, this is all Machete and Ghost’s fault — let’s do their pubes as well!’

  M: As the Eurostar neared London, wild mood swings became the order of the day for the party. A guitar would come out and the mood would be lifted as everyone sang songs together. Then someone would smash the guitar over someone else’s head and the mood would turn dark again. Then another guitar would come out. And then that guitar would get smashed. And so on and so forth.

  G: I realised Machete and I would need to plan our getaway if we wanted to get out of this alive when, as the train pulled into St Pancras station, Duck lurched up to me and shouted in my face, ‘My cock hurts because it’s broken! But do you know what hurts more? Losing!’

  M: When we arrived at the hotel in London, everyone got off the bus, singing and dancing and lurching. As our teammates milled round outside the hotel, cheering on Tiny Dancer as he danced on the bonnet of a BMW, it looked a bit like that scene in the romantic comedies my friend Ghost is so addicted to, where all the passers-by suddenly, spontaneously, burst into song and exquisitely choreographed dance. Except this would be a very dark rom-com, I feared, where the dancers would turn on you and stab you with pieces of broken guitar before tearing you limb from limb. There was just that kind of vibe in the air. Then, as everyone cheered as the police chased Tiny Dancer down the street, as he jumped from car to car, Ghost was at my shoulder. ‘Iceland,’ he said.

  G: I figured that Iceland was about the last place on earth any rabid New Zealand rugby fan would find us to tell us what a disgrace we were to the nation. Machete nodded, and we quietly slipped away, as everyone watched Tiny Dancer get Tasered by the London Metropolitan Police Force. We ended up staying in Iceland for a month.

  M: While we were in Iceland, I spent a lot of time climbing volcanoes and thinking about my rugby future. I also met Freyja, who would become my next baby mama (ég elska þig bornin!). Ghost, meanwhile, spent the time climbing various hot hotel staff/part-time models/folk-musicians-who-were-vaguely-associated-with-Sigur-Rós.

  G: I have to say, I found Iceland to be a welcoming and loving country, compared to the lynch mob waiting at home. Even the fermented-fish-based cuisine became edible eventually.

  M: Iceland reminded me of Samoa, but with ice instead of coconut palms. I liked it there — it was peaceful and calm and not an angry New Zealand.

  O Captain, My Captain

  [Not everyone is a born leader. Not everyone can become a leader through hard work and duty. Sometimes when people are thrown into leadership roles, through necessity, they will suck the kumara, big time. This is the way of the world, whether we like it or not.]

  We, Machete and The Ghost, are not born leaders. We know this in our DNA. We have enough trouble keeping our shit together, let alone worrying about everyone else’s shit at the same time. Looking to either of us in a moment where leadership is required would just end in disaster. The Ghost would immediately throw it back on everyone else, trying to seek some kind of team consensus and then we would stand round forever, talking instead of doing. Machete’s brain would just shut down, and while he might be able to bark out a few orders, he would immediately forget what he’d said and, most crucially, his part in whatever had been concocted.

  Very early on, the back-room boys in the rugby management team think tanks realised we would never be the ones first on the podium, accepting the silverware and shaking hands with the PM. They realised that if things were left to us to lead, there would be no silverware. It didn’t matter how experienced we became or how many caps we had to our names, the little (c) on the match-day programme would never rest beside our names.

  And we were (and still are) cool with that, because it meant we could stick to doing our thing, but on someone else’s watch. All care and no responsibility — and also not having to do as many aftermatch interviews where we might say dumb-ass things that would get us into even more trouble.

  So, over the years, we have walked onto the pitch behind many captains — some good, some not so good, and some downright shit.

  Or, in the case of these three
mighty men, some absolutely freaking awesome, each in their own different way.

  DUCK By Ghost

  Duck was my first ABs captain and he was definitely the hardest man I ever met. Literally. In my second test, as we were camped in the Welsh 22, I got my lines very wrong on a double-back move and instead of hitting the gap I ran into Duck instead. It was like running into granite.

  Duck was also very old school in his leadership style. In my second test, as he stood over my fallen body after I ran into him, he leant down and told me, in a calm, clear voice, that if I ever f**king ran into him again he would punch my f**king teeth so far down my throat I would have to stick my toothbrush up my arse every time I needed to brush. I didn’t know what to say (I may have been concussed), so I told him that my dentist had said I need to brush twice a day. Duck growled in a way that was not entirely human, then walked away to join the scrum.

  I never ran into Duck ever again.

  Duck was a thing of legend. I’d heard these legends growing up and when I became an AB I wanted to know if they were true. The most legendary of all the Duck stories was to do with his testicles. I’d heard three different versions of this legend. One was that a French forward had almost ripped one of Duck’s testicles off in a ruck, but that Duck had played on. One was that a South African forward had bitten one of Duck’s testicles almost right off in a ruck, but that Duck had played on. One was that an Australian forward had crushed one of Duck’s testicles into a bloodied pancake mess by dropping a knee on him as he entered a ruck, but that Duck had played on.

  It was years after I made the ABs when I finally got the chance to confirm or deny these legends. Until then my investigations had been confined to the occasional sneaky glance in the changing room, trying to assess the physical state of Duck’s balls, but not only did it feel kinda weird, checking out your captain’s bits, but Duck always wore a towel wrapped round his waist coming out of the showers so there was nothing of value to see other than all the scars of battle adorning his torso.