Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  Anyway, it was after Duck’s 100th test when I got my chance to find out the truth. We’d had a few lemonades in the shed straight after the match; and then a lot more lemonades up in one of the function rooms, as we congratulated our illustrious leader. Duck dealt with all this unwanted attention by saying very little and drinking a lot of lemonades.

  Now, I’m a bit of a lightweight when it comes to team drinking sessions, so as things wound down I found myself in need of some fresh air. Stepping outside the room, I found Duck, nursing his umpteenth lemonade, sitting on his own, looking out over an empty Eden Park. I was about to run away, to leave him in peace, when he saw me, and beckoned me over.

  I sat beside him and for a while we sat in silence, except for the sounds of the drinking games from inside. Then Duck turned towards me and told me that it was good that I had heeded his advice never to run into him again, because he had meant what he said about punching 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 thanked him for these kind words and told him I was glad I didn’t have to floss rectally.

  Summoning a bit of Dutch courage, I asked him what he’d remember about all this when he looked back. I expected him to talk about the team, about the camaraderie, but instead (after a long pause, during which I thought he may have passed out) he chuckled and said, ‘Well it won’t be having my nuts f**king assaulted, that’s for sure.’

  My chance was here, so I asked him about the legends — were they true? Duck nodded. Which one? He shook his head — all of them. Three times? You got your balls violated three times during a match? Duck nodded again. My mind was reeling (and not just from all the lemonades) and the only thing I could think to ask was, ‘Was it the same ball every time?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Duck. ‘Different one each time.’

  Now I was just confused — but it was three times. This made no sense.

  Which is when Duck, the hardest of the hard men, one of the greatest ABs captains of all time, turned to me and told me that he suffered from the extremely rare condition known as polyorchidism, which is where men have more than two testicles. That night, looking out over the deserted fortress of New Zealand rugby, Duck confessed that he was just glad he wasn’t the one poor bastard who had five gonads.

  ‘Jesus, having three of the buggers was a big enough f**king target.’

  Then Duck stood up and told me there was one thing about the legend that was wrong. The bloke who flattened his third ball with a knee was Welsh, not Australian. The Australian was the one who gave him a spontaneous prostate examination in the process of allegedly cleaning out a ruck.

  ‘Typical f**king Australian,’ said Duck, as he headed back inside for more lemonades.

  I never really spoke to Duck again in the way we spoke that night. If I approached him at an aftermatch function, he would growl in that way that made us younger, lesser players veer away out of self-preservation. So I just had to assume that Duck’s life outside rugby was good — with his lovely wife and seven children.

  Yeah, they may have been a target but they sure as hell still worked.

  Yeah, that’s how hard Duck was.

  Urkel By Machete

  I never used to think halfbacks should ever captain the team. Sure, when you think about it, they are probably ideal to be captain ’cause they’re right in the middle of everything all the time — pointing at the backs and telling them where to go; slapping the forwards on the arse and telling them where to go. And, generally, halfbacks are stroppy little runts who like telling everyone what to do all the time, so I guess that also counts as some kind of job qualification, captain-wise.

  But it’s because halfbacks are lippy pricks that I’d never ever thought they should captain a team. Generally, after a while, during a game, you just want to smack a halfback just to get them to shut up. Even the one on your team. To me, wanting to punch your captain in the mouth is not really inspiring leadership material. Also, even referees generally want to smack the halfback at about the hour mark, just to get them to stop reffing the game for them. I don’t think your captain should be the one getting decked by the referee after explaining the offside rule for the twentieth time.

  Basically, I used to think that halfbacks, as a breed, are too obnoxious for me to want to die for them in battle. Then I played under Urkel and the wool fell from my eyes.

  I don’t know who invented that phrase ‘they broke the mould’ — meaning that they got rid of that particular mould after they finished whatever it was they were moulding. It was probably someone who broke a mould one day at work, and had to think really fast for an excuse. So they explained that they only wanted to make one of that thing, so it would be special — not knowing at the time they were inventing a really cool compliment to say about someone. I applaud that person, because that’s some quick thinking, right there.

  These days ‘they broke the mould’ is a saying that could apply to a lot of players who have represented this great country in rugby. New Zealand must be piled high with broken moulds from every time they moulded great rugby players.

  But even within the players who broke moulds, there were even rarer players who probably weren’t even made with a mould. Instead, they were plucked from a cabbage patch of greatness, but with really different cabbages from the ones you use to make coleslaw.

  (Also, why is the mould in which you make things spelt the same as the mould you get on bread? One is good, one is stink, and it’s not like they have anything in common. Unless moulds get mouldy if you don’t clean them properly after you’ve moulded something.)

  Anyways, Urkel was one of those players. They broke the mould with him in so many ways. Even his last name broke a mould — Urquhart — because it was kind of flash and no one knew how to say it or spell it, so everyone just called him Urkel even though he didn’t look anything like the character from Family Matters despite the fact he wore glasses when he wasn’t playing. People with flash last names like that don’t really become ABs — unless they’re from Canterbury, but Urkel was from Wellington.

  Urkel even broke the mould when it came to those who were chosen by the rugby gods as good enough to become the captain. For a start, a lot of previous captains have had farming backgrounds — men who were crafted out of dirt and bits of old fence posts in the rural sector. But Urkel was a city slicker, the child of two mothers, who were both renowned academics. While still at intermediate school, he had to make the choice between being a rugby player or a concert pianist. He spoke seven languages and knew more words than our front row had eaten hot dinners. And that must have been heaps, because they were wide as f**k. Pardon the rough sailor talk.

  The team usually had a leader who didn’t lead with words, but through their actions, but Urkel was a different kettle of fish. He made the best pre-match speeches of anyone I’ve heard — and aftermatch speeches as well. If only more people in the team had understood Latin, they would probably have been even better than they sounded.

  (And why is it ‘kettle’ of fish? Fish come in baskets or plastic bins or frying pans if you’re frying them. If you put a fish in your kettle your tea would taste fishy. So is a kettle of fish like a mould that you mould fish in?)

  Anyways, after a stirring Urkel pre-match speech — but after the game, obviously — we’d all Google the words we didn’t understand, and just marvel at how clever he was. If it wasn’t Latin, it was Shakespeare quotes, and if the truth be told, some of the forwards would even tear up at some of his allegories. Allegories is one of the words I’ve learned off him. Even Ghost, who thinks he’s pretty smart, would have to look up the occasional word that Urkel used. And occasionally he’d also make a comment about how Urkel had watched Gladiator one too many times. But I knew that secretly he admired Urkel and thought of him as the older brother he never had.

  Urkel wasn’t everyone in the country’s choice to be
skipper. The provincial unions weren’t entirely trusting of players who used words like ‘opprobrium’ and ‘nadir’. But he was the captain the country needed after it had been torn apart by a civil war because of rugby.

  As we all remember from those painful days, that civil war split families and entire communities and threatened the future of the game. I feel bad even bringing up those dark times, when the powers in charge of our game proposed changing our national playing shorts to white, just to glean a few million dollars more in a kit sponsorship deal. Thankfully, New Zealanders cared enough to take to the streets in their tens of thousands on the Dark Night of the Black Shorts and protest despite warnings from the rugby bosses that they could not be held responsible for the actions of the police when confronted with all those enraged rugby supporters.

  I can still remember the moment, marching arm in arm with Ghost that day, down Ponsonby Road (because Queen Street was closed because of that Shihad concert), chanting ‘Black is black, we want our trousers back!’ And then we reached the police line at the top of Franklin Road (to stop the march interfering with the turning on of the Xmas lights). What would the police do? Would they baton charge us? So, when they all, to a man (and woman), dropped their trousers to reveal they were wearing the black undies symbolic of the protest movement, everyone cheered — even the people on Ponsonby Road who weren’t actually marching. Ghost and I looked at each other — we both had tears in our eyes.

  Sure, we both got into a heap of trouble for being at the forefront of a protest movement against our employers, but by then Ghost and I were used to being in the dog box. Sure, we were threatened with never being selected again and having lawsuits for millions of dollars against us. But that didn’t worry us, not for something we believed in passionately: the right to wear black shorts when playing for our country. Also, our agent, Sals, reckoned we’d actually profit out of it if we sold our story to the right magazines and then took the French club deals that were on the table at that time.

  But then it was Urkel who brought sanity back into the room and sat it down at the table, when he gave that amazing speech on breakfast television where he quoted Hobbes, Locke, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Chumbawamba as well as using the word culottes, as he argued passionately that it was not only our right to protest about the colour of our shorts, it was also our moral duty, and if he hadn’t been holidaying in Florence with his opera singer wife, he would have been on the front line with us. The bosses backed down after that. When your captain has got your back like that, your back is in safe hands.

  It’s not that I want to use the darkest days of a civil uprising against a multi-billion-dollar German clothing manufacturer to pick scabs. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about scabs, it’s that you shouldn’t pick at them. Especially, don’t pick at them and then smell the bit that you’ve picked off. That’s really disgusting.

  But I digress, because what I’m trying to say here is that it showed just what a solid dude — and a great leader — Urkel was, during his tenure at the helm of the men in black — and not the men in black with white shorts. Something much better to dwell on rather than scabs is how it was Urkel who led us to victory in the 2013 World Cup, and honestly, if it had been anyone else, we wouldn’t have done it.

  Everyone remembers how, in the semi-final at Eden Park, once upon a time our fortress, how we were six points down to England, with time up, camped on our goal-line. The English fans in the crowd were singing their stupid ‘Swing Low’ song for all they were drunkenly worth. Last play of the game and Urkel was putting the ball into a seven-man scrum, ’cause Flipper had gotten yellow-carded two minutes earlier for sitting on their halfback’s face in a ruck. It was only Ghostie putting his noggin on the line, launching himself head first at the big Tongan Yorkshireman, getting him to spill the ball ’cause of Ghost’s head crushing his nuts, as they set up for the game-sealing drop kick, that had kept us in the game.

  So, there we were, feeding the scrum, a man down against a pack that had been pushing us round all day with their massive beer bellies. There was a break in the play ’cause the English halfback was still having vision problems after Flipper sat on his face. And I knew Ghost was gone in the head because he was talking to the ref like there was nothing wrong in that way that he did when he was trying to avoid a concussion protocol because he knew he was munted in the head and he didn’t want to go off. All this to the tune of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.

  That was when Urkel called us together. I presumed he was going to tell us we needed to get a quick heel, then he’d put up the box kick for Wonder Boy on the wing to chase. With a bit of luck and a lot of accuracy, we could then regather the ball and start working our way up the length of the field.

  Instead, Urkel got us all in a circle and he recited Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. None of us had any idea what he was going on about, yet, at the same time, we all knew what it meant.

  We’ve all seen the videos now, so we all know how it went. The scrum held magnificently. Urkel passed it to Skaterboi, who took it to the line. Ghost ran the dummy and got flattened by the Tongan Yorkshireman again for his trouble, but it created the gap for Skaterboi’s cut-out pass to hit me as I hit the line. There was nothing but the green field of Eden and the annoying English fullback with the double-barrelled name and the shorts that were just slightly too tight between me and the tryline.

  I summoned what little energy I had left and ran like hell as the fullback came up for the tackle. Should I go left? Should I go right? ‘Nah’, I thought, ‘I’m going straight over the prick!’ So I went straight over the top of him, managing to stand on his face in the process, which I thought was an entirely appropriate gesture.

  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!’

  But the annoying fullback had managed to slow me down just enough so that when I registered the Samoan From My Dad’s Rival Village But Now From Bristol coming across to cover, I knew that I wouldn’t make the tryline. But then I felt Wonder Boy at my shoulder! And I knew, in that second, that the Samoan From My Dad’s Rival Village But Now From Bristol would expect me to pass to Wonder Boy, so he was lining him up instead.

  ‘Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them . . .’

  So, as we all know, I threw possibly the most outrageous dummy in the history of rugby football and the Samoan From My Dad’s Rival Village But Now From Bristol sailed past me going one way as I wafted past him going the other. Try under the posts! Skaterboi slots the conversion for the win! And as I’m on halfway, lying under a pile of my celebrating brothers in arms, with Flipper sitting on my face for some reason, all I could think was, ‘At least they’ve stopped singing that f**king song.’

  Sure, that try was a huge reason I got my Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit gong, but Urkel got a knighthood and he bloody deserved it for the moment of inspiration alone. Later, after the final, I talked to him about that speech. I told him that as I ran the length of the field, I thought of that brave British cavalry regiment who followed their orders, even if they were completely incoherent.

  Urkel explained to me that in the real story, most of the British regiment were actually killed by the Russian artillery. What he was actually trying to say was that we were completely f**ked but that at least ours would be a glorious defeat so we should hold our heads up high.

  We didn’t talk about it any more after that, because it didn’t matter. By then, we had that little gold trophy locked up in the trophy cabinet and that’s what was really important.

  Out of all the actual lessons Urkel ever taught me, there’s one that will live long in my memory, like a party guest who won’t leave.

  Urkel was the best team man you could hope to have, but at the same time, he was very private, and never used to hang out with us — even on our hilarious golf days or Mad Monday celebrations, no matter what day of the week they occurred. Even if he�
�d had a blinder of a test match, and deserved to come out for a few lemonades, he’d just say he’d see us there, but he would never turn up.

  One day, after a Bledisloe game, I was last out of the sheds, because I had to do a drug test, and it’d taken ages for my cousin to get me a bag of his urine that I could substitute for mine.

  I saw Urkel in the corridor and asked him if he wanted to share an Uber into town to where some of the boys were having a few lemonades. He told me he’d see me there, to which I laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Machete,’ he said, ‘do you know why I always say I’ll turn up?’

  I said ‘nah’ and he replied, ‘It’s so you’ll all feel cool at the thought of us all hanging out together.’

  ‘So why don’t you ever turn up?’ I replied.

  And I’ll never forget what he said next: ‘Because I love you as teammates but as company you suck, and, if I’m brutally honest, I’d rather drink spew.’

  My mouth must have trembled and my eyes filled up with tears because he took me by the shoulders and looked lovingly at me and spoke in a more gentle tone: ‘But I still love you all enough to want you to never know that, so I just say “see you there”. And Machete, you need to get it in your head that not all that glitters is gold.’

  I still have no idea what that last bit meant, but in general I took it to be the kind of gentle lesson that always remained deeply embedded in me when I think of Urkel — a brilliant man, and one of the greatest and least-understood skippers the black jersey has ever had; a man I will love forever, even after they stripped him of his knighthood and he went to prison for fronting that dodgy finance company that cost all those people all those millions of dollars.