A career shaped by tragedy
It’s been a rollercoaster rugby ride for Tupou Vaa’i, a journey he was meant to be sharing with his older brother. It wasn’t to be. reports.
It was perhaps the most beautiful moment of the 2020 rugby season, but Tupou Vaa’i’s teary Father’s Day phone call was also filled with an extra serving of sadness.
While one and all hung on every word to hear the shock news from this All Blacks bolter, there was a certain soul who was absent from the room, if never from the minds and hearts of this large Tongan family.
Sitting down for a chat with Stuff this week, Vaa’i, the 21-year-old Chiefs second rower, who, in the blink of an eye has catapulted to the top level in his sport, opens up on an indelible childhood tragedy which has sent him through horror and heartbreak.
‘‘It was at a creek in Otara,’’ Vaa’i bravely recalls, of a time he was aged ‘‘five or six’’.
‘‘My brother passed away, drowning.’’
There are no tears during this recollection, but the emotion is palpable, as Vaa’i speaks about Tevita, who was just seven years old.
All this time later, Vaa’i still has clear visions of that horrifying day, and has even lived with a slice of nagging guilt.
‘‘Every time I think about it, like the routes that I was taking to go home – I had to tell my dad that he’s drowning. It wasn’t a far distance. As a young kid it feels like it was.
‘‘It was pretty much 200 metres, but at the time it felt like it was like 5km or something.
‘‘As I look back at it now, I just easily could have done something better to save his life.’’
Vaa’i is one of nine children. There are six girls. His younger brother was adopted out to another family. Tevita was his one big bro.
Tupou Vaa’i
‘‘I get family members always reminding me, saying like ‘Imagine if your older brother was still here’.’’
‘‘So I didn’t really have an older brother to look up to,’’ he says. I’m lucky I had two older cousins that I look up to as brothers. I could follow them and do what they do.
‘‘Obviously when I was little it was pretty hard to deal with. But as you get older you kind of just move on with life.
‘‘He’s always at the back of my head, then I get family members always reminding me, saying like ‘Imagine if your older brother was still here, you both could have been playing rugby together, could have been at school together’, that sort of stuff.’’
While Tevita now does his supporting from up above, the rest of the family are some of the loudest and proudest you will find in the grandstands. The cousins especially.
‘‘They’ve been supporting me since I started playing rugby when I was 12, 13,’’ Vaa’i says.
‘‘You can always hear them cheering. When I was playing for Taranaki, as soon as I run out of the tunnel I can hear them straight away, I can pretty much hear them throughout the whole game.
‘‘Sometimes I get the boys coming to me after the game asking, ‘Bro, who’s that, who’s all those people? They just don’t stop, eh.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, they just love it’.
‘‘They’ve been there since day one, so pretty much all credit to them.’’
And that’s precisely why that video call last year sent so many goosebumps around the world, Vaa’i wiping tears as he spoke, then not a dry eye in the crowded room – the clip going viral after Vaa’i’s cousin uploaded it to her TikTok account.
Vaa’i’s mother, Susana, and father, Ueini, had moved from Tonga to New Zealand, just one daughter in tow at the time, as they aimed to give their children a better life. And now
they had an All Black.
‘‘It was big, to be the first one in our family to be able to represent our country at that level,’’ says Vaa’i, whose family had gathered thinking he was merely calling to thank them for their support for the North v South game the previous night.
‘‘At the time I was just talking to myself saying it’s going to be easy telling them, and then when the time came just all these emotions poured out. I don’t really show my emotions, but when I do show them it means heaps.
‘‘Every time it pops up on social media and stuff, I still feel the same emotions that I was feeling at the time. Even talking about it now, I just get emotional. For them to see my dreams come true, it’s a blessing.
‘‘I was just so speechless at the time, just seeing everyone pouring tears.’’
Later in the day it didn’t get any easier when ringing his mum at work to deliver the news, as she hung up on her boy due to the influx of tears.
Vaa’i still has the goal of using this professional career to buy his mum and dad each a house.
Only a few months prior to his All Blacks call, this New Zealand Under-20s graduate was building timber fences with his old man.
Living in New Plymouth, Vaa’i opted to head to his father’s in Auckland when the Covid-19 lockdown hit, also coaxing one of his cousins to stay there too so he had a training partner to keep him motivated, then spent a few weeks getting his hands dirty.
‘‘It was tough on the body, but you always get a good feeling that you’re taking a bit of pressure off your old man and just helping him out,’’ he says.
And then came the surprise call from Chiefs chief executive Michael Collins, with the franchise desperately needing to fill their locking stocks after injuries and the departure of Tyler Ardron to France.
‘‘For some people, Covid was a bad time for them, but I guess Covid actually really helped me be where I am today,’’ Vaa’i says.
‘‘Obviously I still had a lot to work on, but I pretty much just took the opportunity with two hands.’’
That he did, thrown into an ultimately winless Super Rugby
Aotearoa season, playing seven of the Chiefs’ eight games, including five starts.
All this for a man who had only been playing lock for about four years, having been a prop in his first few seasons in the game, with a body shape so opposite to the one he has now (1.98m, 118kg) and which caused him some sad days at school.
‘‘I used to be a short, chubby kid, and I used to get bullied a lot,’’ Vaa’i says. ‘‘But it’s helped me become a better man – just being able to go through that and know what it feels like so obviously you don’t want to do that to someone else so they feel what you felt back then.’’
With an application backed by former All Black Eric Rush, who he knew from his East Tamaki club, Vaa’i grew, both literally and metaphorically, in his time at the rugby nursery that is Wesley College.
He was the 1st XV captain in his final year, as well as head prefect, played for both Barbarians Schools and New Zealand Schools, and tried to mould his game around Patrick Tuipulotu.
‘‘He’s probably sick of me saying this every time,’’ Vaa’i chuckles.
How eerie a feeling then, when it was Tuipulotu who Vaa’i should shake hands with and replace on the field for his All Blacks debut – that unbelievable Bledisloe Cup draw in Wellington. ‘‘That was crazy, I got on for like the last four minutes, but I ended up being out there for what, 15 minutes,’’ Vaa’i says of the extended thriller.
‘‘It was surreal, running out of the tunnel to a packed crowd. It was a good opportunity for myself to see where I was at. And I was lucky enough I had good players around me helping me out during the week and just trying to make me feel comfortable when I get out there.’’
Vaa’i is ‘‘pretty stoked’’ to lay claim to being the first All Black to be born in the 2000s, and already in his young four-test career it’s been a rollercoaster of a time.
The week after his debut he started the win over the Wallabies at Eden Park when Sam Whitelock was out with concussion. Then in Brisbane he was a game-day addition to the bench when Tuipulotu succumbed to illness, and it was bittersweet for Vaa’i, scoring his first try in the black jersey, but in a match which was lost. Then he had the sour experience of playing in the historic defeat to Argentina in Sydney.
All of this before his 21st birthday. That came on January 27 this year, in a quiet celebration with family, as he readied himself for a first Super Rugby pre-season, but one in which he entered with the tag of ‘All Black’ beside his name.
Did that create some early extra pressure? ‘‘Not really,’’ Vaa’i says.
‘‘I kind of just brushed it to the back. I’m a Chiefs player now. I know that I played for the All Blacks, but at the same time I’m pretty much just a regular team-mate to the boys.
For now, though, the focus narrows to a crucial matchup against the Hurricanes in Wellington tonight, and just getting to experience a first-ever win in a Chiefs jersey.
And that would be sure to make his big bro proud.