Te Puna perform a victory haka after the match. Photo / Brown Dog Media
Te Puna perform a victory haka after the match. Photo / Brown Dog Media
OPINION
Two Cars/One Night is a classic Kiwi film by Taika Waititi.
It’s an all-time favourite for me, its hard-case backyard humour captures the pulse of community living. For me, Two Cars/One Night tells the tale of simple acts of kindness that weave the korowai (cloak) of a community together.
Kindness matters most in my books and just like down the coast, up these ways we have the cast of a hundred hard-case characters who could fit the role in Two Cars/One Night, as was the case on Saturday at the Bay of Plenty premier club rugby finals.
The title for my, imagined, movie was One Car/ Two Mounties.
It played out up on the bank last Saturday at the finals between the Mighty Mount Marlins and The Blue and Black Army of Te Puna.
As predicted, every man and his dog from both sides of the harbour bridge showed up and so did the relentless rain. It roared down and there was no place to shelter unless you had booked a berth the night before for your family car.
Such was the case for Aunty Hera, the star in my One Car/Two Mounties movie I scripted up in my mind after hearing it.
Here is how it played out - Aunty Hera had the prime spot up on the bank courtesy of coming down the night before and parking her little waka ready to roll for the two finals games.
Who ended up in the little waka watching both games - dry as a bone and toasty warm - is the heartwarming story.
‘Hey Aunty, there’s some strange ladies in your car,” asks Bernie.
“Yeah, I know boy. They were cold and wet so I said ‘jump in my car girls and watch the game, nice and dry in there’.”
Bernie says, “But Aunty they’re Mount supporters.”
“So what?” says Aunty.
“They still feel the cold and the wet just like us.”
“True that eh, Aunty”
And so, they did. Stayed dry and warm and watched the game, even turning the engine on now and again to give the windshield wipers a hurry-up and stop the battery going flat.
Can you picture it, two Mount mamas snuggled up in the nice warm waka with the blessing of Aunty sitting a few cars up watching the game with her whānau.
And at full time, the Mountie mamas were happier than kids playing bullrush in the mud. All of them blessed to be part of a caring, kind community.
The sporting spirit evident among all at the Baywide club rugby finals was heartwarming, columnist Tommy Wilson writes. Photo / George Novak
It didn’t matter who won the game. There was so much mud around they all looked like they were playing for the brown team.
The ref and touch judges did a superb job sorting out who was offside, inside and on what side of the 30 mud larks trying to play a finals game of Bay of Plenty club rugby.
There were kids playing pool rugby behind the dead ball line and having heaps of fun, especially when AJ (who like more than a handful of hearty Blue ‘n’ Black Army supporters had flown back from Ngati Skippy land - just for the finals day) challenged them to bullrush down the slippery-as bank.
The crowd went wild. AJ lost and the 30 players in the middle of a Maramatanga mud bath kept wallowing around in the rain.
By the final whistle, we were all about ready to roll to somewhere dry, so the speeches were short and the winners’ haka loud and proud.
What was heartwarming about our winning haka was our non-Maori players going hard. If there has been a turning point in Te Puna Club rugby for me, it was when we started to see players of all ethnicities join the club, and now we have one of the strongest junior and senior clubs in the Baywide competition.
This is not chest beating or mana munching, it is a snapshot of what we as a community and a country can achieve when we get past the blame game on both sides of the cultural coin.
Sometimes it’s okay to say how sweet our own kūmara tastes without being a whakahihi (show-off).
Sometimes it’s okay to celebrate success without feeling you have surrendered the virtue of being humble in the eyes of your whānau.
I didn’t stick around for the after-match speeches as I had another speech to listen to by Julian Batchelor, straight after the full-time whistle had blown, over at the Mount in the old folks’ hall.
Talk about a game of two halves, from running around in mud to throwing it at each other.
What I thought of the kōrero is not as important as the right to free speech inside and outside the hall. If only we could capture the culturally cool kaupapa of One Car/Two Mounties, then what side of the bridge you belong on or what political pōtae (hat) you wear matters least.
What matters most is what we can each contribute - in our own backyards, to the korowai of kindness that will weave our communities together.
Tommy Wilson is a best-selling author and executive director of Te Tuinga Whānau, a social service agency committed to serving the needs of the community
