Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  MACHETE: So this chapter is about a guy who, for legal reasons, we cannot name.

  G: Also for moral reasons, in that I do not wish to say his name.

  M: And also because Ghost doesn’t want to say his name. Anyways, this nameless person who shall not be named, we shall call The Bigot. He once played for a country not far from New Zealand, a country that for geographical reasons we will call Australia. In truth, he was a pretty flash player, but the main problem he had was that as a human being he was a righteous Bible-bashing fundamentalist horror show.

  G: If there’s one thing I can’t stand it is intolerance. And if that means I can’t stand myself because I cannot tolerate the intolerant, then so be it. That is some self-loathing I can live with.

  M: I can be a bit slow on the uptake, but one of the things I’ve learned along the way is that if you’re going to be a dick, don’t be a dick on social media. I’ve also learnt if you’re going to take a picture of your dick, don’t accidentally send it to your mother, but that is a whole other story for another book sometime. The point here is that being a dick on Twitter means you are being a dick to the whole world.

  Now I’m not as up on the Bible as I should be, I will confess. I go to church with my mum like a good boy, at Christmas and Easter and for weddings and suchlike, but if you ask me to pick my Deuteronomy from my Ezekiel, I am immediately way out of my depth. About all I know for sure is that there is some pretty freaky stuff in the Bible.

  So when the dude we hereby know as The Bigot tweets some old-school Bible scripture about how a whole list of people are going to hell unless they repent, part of me is, like, ‘dude, relax’; while another part of me is, like, ‘hang on, I’m on this list (an occasional fornicator, a sometimes drunkard et cetera) and hell seems a bit harsh in these instances’; while a third part of me is, like, ‘bro’, lighten up’; then a fourth part of me says that my cousins in Australia who go to church with this guy reckon that he’s okay and that he was just doing what his heart tells him to do; then a fifth part if me is all, like, ‘but dude, do you seriously mean this stuff?’

  So as you can tell, I was somewhat conflicted by this whole thing.

  But then I’m not The Ghost, am I?

  G: Free speech should not be called ‘free speech’. Just ’cause something is free, it doesn’t mean you can do with it whatever the hell you like. When you use your free speech to say that gays and a whole bunch of other people who don’t live the same Christian life that you do are going to go to hell for the sin of just being who they are, I’m sorry, but you have crossed a line right there. Now you have made me a very wrathful unclean, lascivious fornicator/drunkard/seditionist/reveller/heretic or whosoever else is hell-bound according to The Bigot and the Book of Galatians.

  M: I always thought that the Galatians were the mortal enemy of Doctor Who. I guess I’m probably going to hell for that too.

  G: Undoubtedly.

  M: I think one of the reasons why Ghost has been my best friend for all these years is that we both love to get wound up about stuff that is dear to our hearts — usually to the point where we end up getting in the shit for it. But this time, when Ghost decided The Bigot was going to suffer for being such a tool, this was pretty scary to be around, even by Ghost standards.

  As it turned out, the week after the offensive Tweet came out, we were scheduled to play Australia in Brisbane in the Rugby Championship. When I caught up with Ghost, when we assembled in Auckland, there was something different about him. There was a darkness in him; a sense of steely determination, like Keanu Reeves in the John Wick movies. Also, he was reading the Bible, which was something I’d never seen him do before. And he wasn’t even reading the Bible in the way we used to do at Bling’s, with a war comic inside it. That’s another thing I’ll probably go to hell for, right?

  Anyways, Ghost and I were rooming together in Brisbane and for the entire time we were there he never left the room, except for training and team stuff he couldn’t not attend. The rest of the time he just stayed in that room, reading the Bible, marking certain passages with Post-it notes. It was deeply unnerving and every time I asked him about it, all he said was that I would see ‘when the time comes’ and that ‘when the time comes’ he needed me to have his back. I started wondering if Brisbane was getting to him or if The Rapture was actually scheduled for 7.35pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

  Come Saturday, we got through the anthems and the haka without anything untoward happening, especially the righteous ascending to heaven, leaving the rest of us sinners to play the match. But it was only a couple of minutes into the game when I started to understand the need for the Bible study — and also that Ghost was not going to treat this like any other game.

  G: The thing about those who use words to hurt others, is that sometimes you need to hurt them first, before they will reconsider their bad choice of words.

  M: So, The Bigot makes this line break and I’m thinking, ‘Why isn’t Ghost covering that?’ when I realise that he actually is, and he’s actually herding The Bigot towards the touchline. And the second The Bigot decides he can score in the corner, then Ghost puts in a few big strides and collects The Bigot, driving him not only over the sideline but pretty much into the advertising hoardings. Then Ghost gets up, stands over The Bigot and says almost the strangest thing I’ve ever heard on a rugby pitch: ‘Does it not say in the Book of Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 1, that we should love each other as brothers and sisters?’

  And then Ghost just walks away, as The Bigot slowly gets to his feet, looking a bit dazed and confused — and theologically challenged.

  About five minutes later, the Yellow-bellies are trying to break out of their own half. They’re running a basic skip move off the back of their scrum, which is going backwards in a hurry as per usual. The Bigot hits the line as a dummy runner — and Ghost does not miss his chance. Never mind where the ball is going — I have that covered and hit the guy so he spills the ball and we get the scrum. Meanwhile, Ghost has absolutely driven The Bigot into the Suncorp Stadium turf and again he’s standing over the fallen body and saying something to him — only this time I couldn’t hear what he said, over the sound of the crowd cheering the tackle I just made. (That’s pride, isn’t it? That’s another ticket to eternal damnation, right?)

  And the weird thing, thinking back on it now, was that the Welsh referee, who should have penalised the heck out of Ghost for such an outrageous off-the-ball tackle, just waved play on.

  And the other weird thing, come to think about it, was that no one protested the tackle — not anyone in The Bigot’s team; nor anyone in the usually rabid Queensland crowd. Odd.

  G: The second time I hit the prick, I went to his source material and reminded him that in Galatians, chapter 5, verse 14, it tells us to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. It seemed appropriate at the time.

  M: So, off the ensuing scrum, we score our first try of the night, with Littlefinger going over in the corner after a great inside ball from Reek. As we’re waiting for Yoshi to take the conversion, we’re all in a circle doing our breathing thing when Gunner looks to Ghost and asks him, straight up, if he’s quoting scripture to the Bible-basher.

  G: So I told Gunner — and, by association, everyone — that I felt it was my duty, tonight, to fight homophobia and to remind the haters on this pitch that there’s a lot of stuff in the Bible about love and forgiveness and that sort of shit.

  Gunner asked me if I thought that during a test match game of rugby was the right time to deliver such a lesson. I told him that you had to take your opportunities when they presented themselves. Also, I reminded him, we’re only playing Australia, so the rugby side of things should take care of itself.

  M: We were all looking at Gunner. How would he react? Would he tell Ghost to pull his head in and to climb down off that soapbox? There was a pause, then Gunner nodded: ‘Yeah, fair enough.’

&
nbsp; And it was like letting a cork out of a bottle. Suddenly we all wanted in on this game.

  G: I think I actually only managed to smash The Bigot one more time in that game (James 4:12: ‘Who are you to judge your neighbour?’), which was a pity because I’d spent all week learning heaps of Bible quotes. But the great thing — and why this remains one of the greatest test matches I’ve ever played in — was watching the work my teammates did off the ball that night in Brisbane.

  Every time The Bigot touched the ball, he ended up flat on his back, with an AB in his ear, giving him the hard word on tolerance and humanity. Sure, not all of what they were saying was Bible-related, although the boys who had been to Catholic schools did a pretty good job of dredging up their enforced Religious Studies curriculum. And a lot of it didn’t make sense — like how Squidgy kept quoting Star Wars at him — but it was all sending the message: we don’t want your bigotry in our sport. When he got trapped at the bottom of a ruck with two large props, Helmet and Flipper, atop him, singing selected highlights from Cabaret, my heart almost burst with pride.

  M: It took me ages to get in on the action, but eventually I managed to chop him down, Machete-style, and as he lay underneath me, whimpering, I took great pride in serenading him with my rendition of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood anthem to tolerance, ‘The Power of Love’.

  G: Machete actually sang the Huey Lewis and the News song from Back to the Future, but it was the thought that counted. I was so moved by it I almost forget to pick up the loose ball and walk over for the try.

  M: By halfway through the second half The Bigot was a beaten man. He was actively running as far away from the ball as is possible within the confines of a rugby field. This was when I realised that his own teammates had joined in. No matter where he hid on the field, they kept throwing him hospital pass after hospital pass, just so we could smash open-mindedness into him. Every time he lay on the pitch, beckoning to be taken off, the Aussie management and support staff told him to get up and get on with it. I was so proud of our trans-Tasman neighbours that night I almost forgot all my own prejudices against them.

  The crowning glory was when, after Gunner had levelled The Bigot for the last time and then serenaded his barely conscious body with Soundgarden’s ‘Jesus Christ Pose’, when they brought on the little ambulance thing to carry The Bigot off, it ran over his hand, crushing the fingers that had started everything with the Tweet of hate.

  And through it all, no matter how late or off-the-ball the tackles were that felled The Bigot, the Welsh referee had never blown his whistle once.

  G: The Bigot never played test rugby, or any rugby, ever again after that night. Of more importance, he never again spewed his homophobic bile into the ether of social media. Job done, I reckon.

  M: Job done.

  The Fallout Boys

  MACHETE: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’

  I can remember writing that in my new Book of Black, the one they gave me when I joined the leadership group, to replace the one that had been ceremonially burnt years ago. I wrote it one moment when I was alone in my room on tour somewhere.

  I don’t know why I was feeling so emo, but in my head I blamed Frodo. He was the hot new whippersnapper wing/fullback who had just burst onto the scene and from whom big things were expected. As one of the rookies, one of his jobs was to do the music on the bus and he played mostly his two favourite bands, groups I found out later were called My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. If I ever see anyone from My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy, I would offer to pay for their counselling. To this day, I still don’t know how I didn’t murder Frodo at the end of that year.

  Every time on the bus, when one of their songs would come on to bring me down, Ghost always held me back from saying something to Frodo, insisting that we had to make the new generation welcome and let them know that this was an environment where they could play their music. I half-suspected he secretly enjoyed that it was driving me to self-harm with teaspoons.

  Then, years later, after Frodo shifted to league, he wrote about the bus music in his book Fellowship of the Ball: ‘Most of the team actually used to listen to their own music anyway, but it was a job I had to do. My favourite music was Island reggae but Ghost told me Machete would murder me if I played that, and instead I should play as much of his favourite bands, My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, as I could. And that if Machete looked upset during the songs, it was because they reminded him of an old pet that had passed away.’

  I should have killed Ghost retrospectively for doing that.

  GHOST: To this day, the emo bus music remains one of the most fun times I’ve had one up over Machete. It doesn’t make up for the time he messed with my phone settings and I accidentally tweeted a picture of my pee-pee to the world, but it was still pretty cool.

  M: It’s that music that I blame for making me feel all emo and write in my Book of Black: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’ It’s like that dark music had oozed into my brain and was making me feel all emotional and vulnerable. There have been many times since, when I think that I should have listened to those feelings. I should have really explored that statement and thought about what that means about ‘winter’ and who do I mean when I say ‘our’.

  But back then, being vulnerable and exploring those kinds of statements wasn’t the done thing. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps I should have listened to more songs by My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. If I had, perhaps I would have known that by ‘our’ I meant me and Ghost.

  And by ‘winter’ I meant the unravelling of our friendship.

  G: The season started well enough, with three solid wins over the touring Georgians who by then were the fourth-ranked team in the northern hemisphere. These guys loved scrums, so Planet and the rest of the front-row forwards had their work cut out. The rugby public of New Zealand loved those titanic forward struggles, but then they were still on a high from the success at the World Cup in 2013 and that our team had a winning core of players who had remained undefeated for the two seasons since that World Cup. The thing about forward battles, however, is that it leaves the backs (literally) standing in the cold, thinking dark, cold thoughts.

  Next up was the Rugby Championship where we swept to easy victories against the hapless Aussies and the old foe, South Africa, and the cool aloof-looking ones because they spoke less English, Argentina. With the silverware safely stored away for the year, it was business as usual on the field, and so off it, Machete and I started looking at making moves to maximise our earning potential while we were still playing. Which was when we had our genius idea that turned out to be the worst idea ever.

  M: We had the genius idea that we would go into business together. We would take our partnership on the field, and in life, and turn it into a huge money-spinning venture. It sounded so easy when we talked about it back then.

  G: It wasn’t the first time we’d talked about getting rich together. Way back when we first met, when we were building our raft on that fateful day, we fantasised a future where we would be wealthy professional rugby players with a string of business successes to our names. Given that that day ended with us being torn apart and estranged for many years, possibly we should have heeded that as an omen.

  M: Of course, the thing with omens is that they only become omens after the fact. You look back and go ‘okay, that was an omen, we should have seen that’, but at the time of the omen it is just a thing that you don’t notice — that later becomes an omen.

  G: The thinking was hugely simple. Machete and I were proving a very effective team on the field, and the media and fans alike began always associating us together anyway, so why wouldn’t we team up, cash in on our ‘brand’ as the greatest bro’mance in rugby history and make bucketloads of money to set ourselves up for life after rugby?

  M: A lot of what Ghost was saying started to make real sense, and I liked the idea of
bucketloads of money so I thought, ‘Why not?’ My dream was to buy my mum a house and to cover the ever-increasing overheads of my own life, especially the ever-increasing child-support payments as the number of my baby mamas increased. I just wanted the simple things in life — the things every man with children scattered all over the globe would want.

  Ghost and I trusted each other like brothers. But if I’d only taken a moment to think about that a bit more, maybe I would have realised that just because we seemed to have an eerie psychic connection on the field, that didn’t mean we should also be business partners. I should have been listening to my ears and seen the trouble coming when I first heard Ghost’s first business idea.

  G: Bottled air.

  M: Like, actually, what was I on to even consider that would in any way be a good business proposition? I argued that we should go into the undies business like DP and the other boys. I even had a cool name for our undies brand — M&G. And I could see us both, in our M&G undies, strutting down the catwalk at Fashion Week. So cool. But Ghost was adamant that because all the other boys were doing undies, that was the reason why we had to do bottled air instead.

  G: By then I had travelled fairly extensively. It was my favourite thing to do in the off season. And one thing I was always struck by on my travels — apart from the beauty of the local women — was the different quality of air, depending on where I went. For example, on Machu Picchu the air has a different quality altogether from the air around the pyramids of Egypt. With the world so polluted and our resources diminishing, I just knew, in my heart, that people would go crazy for buying air from pristine environments around the world.