Rugby falling to commercial forces
The Ground We Won is an emotionally inspiring New Zealand documentary about rural manhood and rugby. The title is a good one, optimistic, punning and with echoes of a military past when young men lost their lives in an enforced squabble over a sod of foreign soil.
But the film might just as well have been called The Ground We Are Losing, because rural community rugby is relentlessly being driven back over its own line by the forces of commerce.
The film, shot in black and white, opens onto a dusty farming landscape, a man on a quad bike framed by telegraph poles. A tractor comes into view, but you feel it could just as easily have been an horse and plough. David Long’s fine nostalgic score has the strings play something of a lament. This is a remembrance of things past. You feel that the land is dying.
Reporoa is in the midst of a horrendous drought and there is an evocation, surely deliberate, of John Ford’s film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The opening shot of telegraph poles, the dust bowl, the suffering of farmers, the dignity of human spirit in the face of adversity, the slow death of the American/New Zealand Dream. There are common themes that run deep throughout both films.
Where there is a significant difference is that Ford has a man and a strong woman at the core of his film. Christopher Pryor, director, cinematographer, editor and candlestick maker, and producer Miriam Smith wanted their film to be about what it means to be a man. Smith has pointed out that the local library has shelves of books on woman’s studies and one book on male identity in New Zealand.
Early on in the film someone is reported to remark: ‘‘How many more farmers are going to kill themselves until they admit there’s a drought.’’ It’s a global problem. Soil erosion and increasing drought mean that, from France to India to China to New Zealand, too often the son’s inheritance is not only the family farm, but misery, debt and eventual suicide.
What powers The Ground We Won is a remarkable life force, a remarkable optimism at the heart of the three men central to the film. There is the young 17-year-old Peanut, the charismatic skipper Broomie and dad Kelvin, single parent of twins, farmer, junior rugby coach and inflated prop forward whose time has almost burst. Ask Kelvin about superwomen and multi-tasking and he would probably just raise an eyebrow and push on.
Rugby holds these men together. Peanut, with his smile almost as permanent as the scar on his chin, says, ‘‘I don’t know really why you play rugby. I think it’s to work up a thirst for afterwards.’’
By the end of this film Peanut will know why he plays rugby. By the end of the film Broomie, who is stepping away from the game in order to put more time in at the farm, is asked what he is going to do now. There is a genuinely blank look. His face is emptied of all its kindness and mischief.
After a long pause he says ‘‘take up a hobby’’, without knowing what he’s talking about. So many hobbies are lonely and there is enough of that on the farm, roped to a calf, forcing it out of its mother’s womb before dawn. What’s he going to do? Once upon a time men like Colin Meads could farm sheep, play for King Country and make a town proud when he turned out for the All Blacks. He was ‘‘one of us’’. Broomie holds on to that tradition and corporate agriculture marches across the landscape.
Professional rugby has cut the umbilical cord. Young men are removed from their communities and put into professional boot camp. Fewer and fewer people are turning up to watch Super Rugby because the realisation has grown that they are no longer supporters, part of a fraternity, but spectators.
Reporoa, and so many rural clubs like it, used to have five teams, now it has one. One of the twins says: ‘‘I hate rules. I want to play video games’’. But when Kelvin gets the kids down on the pitch, there is still something visceral that they want to be a part of. Rugby and drinking are still a passage to manhood. Kelvin sends one of the boys back to the car for tripping. The tears would have ended the drought if it were not already over.
Reporoa is not the greatest rugby team in the country but it is right in the middle of New Zealand’s heartland. Young Peanut takes up boxing to prove he’s a man. Another young lad, Pom, is wrecked by a drinking initiation. ‘‘He’s an emotional drunk,’’ says a team-mate. But there is also someone there to put his arm round him and say, ‘‘I’m your father’’. And at the end of the day, Broomie sluices out the team bus just as he hoses out the cattle shed.
Over in England Manu Tuilagi has been dropped from the World Cup because he grabbed a taxi driver by the throat and shoved a couple of police women in the chest. Tuilagi’s club chairman solemnly declares: ‘‘All we can do is continually counsel the guys are presenting the right image to the game.’’
What image is that? It’s not the image of Reporoa, not the image of laughter, tears and alcohol to soak up a week’s hardship. ‘‘F***ing smash these c***s. Leave your heart out there on the field.’’ And afterwards, bring on the bubble master and drown the drought in beer.