Smashing the rugby stereotype

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The late afternoon sun casts long shadows across the pitch. The team, in fluorescent orange kit, stretch in near silence, in a solidarity of concentration. The wind is chilly and their faces are ruddy. They spread out and trot to the far end of the paddock, passing the balls back and forth. "Keep it nice and tidy," says the guy in the dreadlocks.

Apart from the occasional sharp command and the sound breath makes when it hits cold air, a Black Ferns training session is a strangely quiet affair.

Until, that is, they divide into two teams and begin playing in earnest. Then they talk it up. It's no longer quite so nice and tidy. Women are not immune to one of the more disgusting habits of rugby players which involves blowing bodily fluids out of nostrils.

Coach Darryl Suasua's dreads weave in and out through the pigtails and ponytails and the peculiar little headscarves favoured by the Amish people and, apparently, a fair number of Black Ferns.

The next day at the Millennium Institute of Sport and Health at Mairangi Bay, a trail of women wearing shorts and the occasional towel troop through the lobby dragging heavy kit bags. In seven hours the Black Ferns will fly to Barcelona for the Rugby World Cup. Detailed instructions are written on a whiteboard. Under Today's Colour is scrawled: "Everyone in black. Pink undies preferred. Clean ones please."

The phrase for today: Donde esta el equipage? Where is the luggage?

There is a plea from one of the players: Melodie has lost her grey shorts. Could everyone please check their kit?

Melodie is Melodie Robinson. She's upstairs, says the publicity guy, "making herself gorgeous for you".

He's just being cheeky. People are cheeky, and sometimes outright rude, about Robinson. She has a profile - although she denies it - which is rather higher than most of the team. She has the gall to express opinions about blokes' rugby and she does it on Sky television as a commentator, on radio and in her columns on the Xtra website. Lots of people have an opinion about Robinson.

That column, for example, really gets them going. It's called Sportgirl and it is subheaded: What would a woman know about rugby?

She plays it, for one thing. And has done since 1992, the year of her first game at Otago University, where she did her BA in physical education. She majored in the sociology and history of sport. She used to be a model and was Miss Canterbury.

The former beauty queen is at the top of the lodge stairs. Robinson doesn't look as though she has spent much time making herself look gorgeous. She has bruises on her bare legs and a graze on her arm. Her lips are chapped and she hasn't been near a make-up bag today.

She does look gorgeous, though. She has skin that glows with the inner health of the serious athlete, she's got corkscrew curls and clear, clever eyes.

We sit on couches in the common room of the lodge where the team has been staying for the past week. The place smells of new paint and shampoo. Everyone looks a bit tired, and a bit excited. To acclimatise to the time difference - Spain is 10 hours behind New Zealand - they have been staying up later by half an hour each night.

On Tuesday night, the last before their Wednesday evening flight, they were kept up by team management until 1am. There was an aerobics session at 10pm. Robinson said she didn't get to sleep until 2.30am.

Today, despite those lost shorts, she is one of those responsible for making sure the training gear makes it on to the plane.

Talking to sportspeople about to embark on a major sporting event is a disconcerting experience. They have that faraway look; they're focused on a ball which is not in the room. And as Robinson says, when you're part of a team, "there is no I".

So the 28-year-old loose forward wrinkles her nose when you ask her about her catwalk career. (Although if she doesn't want to be asked about it she shouldn't put that piece of biographical information on the Sportgirl site.)

" "That was definitely at a different stage of my life really," she says. "You know when you're into girly sorts of things. I've always been a tomboy but the modelling, it was just that kind of scene, it was a cool thing for a girl to do when you're young and you don't know any different. As soon as I went to uni that all changed. "

What opened her eyes, she says, was studying theories of society, "much of it based on studies of media and their coverage of women's sport, and that really piqued my interest. So all that other frivolous stuff went." She went on to do a postgraduate course in journalism. Her ambition now, she says, tongue firmly in cheek, is "to be Keith Quinn, of course".

Her modelling career ended on an appropriate note: rugby and fashion collided. Rugby was the winner on the day. She turned up to do a Farmers' lingerie parade after having played rugby the day before. She was covered in bruises, she had broken one hand and had split the webbing between her fingers on the other. Her agent tore strips off her and Robinson thought: "Oh stuff. I'm never doing this again."

That "oh stuff" is interesting. I had been told that Robinson possessed a delightfully vulgar streak. Her nickname is unprintable (it rhymes with Madge) and it is hardly a secret. But she gets a bit embarrassed about it and says "It's from my first year at university and ha ha ha, let's leave it at that. It's one of those things from when you're young and having a good time. Terrible nickname, isn't it?"

More terrible, for my purposes anyway, is that she is, on and off the field, behaving very properly indeed. She denies the vulgar reputation, so she must be a real lady. "Well, I don't know about lady, eh? You could say that a lady is always looking good, polite, delicate. But if that's the definition of lady, I'd never want to have anything to do with it."

We talk about the image of women's rugby and how perceptions have changed since she began playing. Robinson played her first test in 1996, and now has 13 test caps, which puts her in the top half of the team in terms of experience.

When she first put on her boots, for Otago University's 2nd XV, "people would say to me or my friends, because we were all fit and average-to-small build, 'You don't look like a woman's rugby player'."

The stereotype, says Robinson, was "larger, maybe masculine, maybe butch and a little bit rough. That wasn't true and I don't think it ever was."

Maybe just a little bit rough. It is the physicality of the game that appeals. Before women's rugby, she says, "women didn't have an opportunity to play sports like this, with full contact. I always used to love basketball, which was a little bit rough at times."

What does she love about the rough? "Just the, you know, tackling somebody and that physical dominance over another human being. It's just a really huge rush. It's like wow. If you make a big tackle it's like, gee, that feels so good."

It's an answer which proves the gender of the player matters not a jot. Thinking about those injuries and about physical domination, I tell her: "You're all mad."

And she laughs and looks at me with the sort of sympathy the true believer reserves for the lost soul.