Paul Lewis: Rugby spirit alive and well in Reporoa

Kelvin and the kids in The Ground We Won remind us why we love rugby. Photo / Supplied

If you ever feel rugby in New Zealand is dying (and the Blues make it seem terminally ill), go and see The Ground We Won, by Miriam Smith and Christopher Pryor and you may think the future of the game is alive and well and in Reporoa.

It's not that the grassroots players in this outstanding new fly-on-the-wall film are the athletic future of the game - they emphatically are not. But they help explain why rugby, in spite of some major (and self-inflicted) negatives, is still No 1, retaining a compelling mystique for many.

The movie is a gem, covering far more ground than just rugby, although it provides the canvas for this portrait. There is a scene in the dead of night when one of the Reporoa player-farmers belly-creeps up on a calving cow (so as not to spook her) before helping the birth. It underlines the rural tyranny at play - no matter how you ache from the game, no matter how drunk you got, no matter how damaging the drought, the cows still need milking, calves still need a hand and, in the case of one single father with twin boys, rugby-mad sons still need reminding to put on clean undies.

Rugby folk will recognise many in this movie and their humour ("The village idiot's under pressure; we have a contender ... ") as well as some of the associated scenery.

In a long and mostly undistinguished rugby career, I saw countless changing rooms like Reporoa's - concrete floors and wall, steel hooks, gear that doesn't quite wash clean and everything as cold as sin except for the super-heated swearing.

If it wasn't for the cellphones and up-to-date farm equipment, The Ground We Won's black-and-white photography might persuade you it's set in the 1970s and not in the 2013 drought in the Waikato-Bay of Plenty.

But it has some timeless truths about rugby. Some can't quite explain why they keep playing and training at a level so below that of the All Blacks, it is positively subterranean. The answer is never verbalised but it's there in the misty darkness of a practice session on a ropey pitch where the lights struggle to cut through the murk - but don't obscure the simple joy of a game of touch.

There's a kind of beauty there and not just in the cinematography; an indefinable spirit flows through these blokes trying to set matters straight after a disastrous previous season. It's in the banter, mateship, community spirit and "being a man". And, yes, it's in the drinking - and there's a lot of that and some execrable behaviour.

Those prone to seeing the negatives of Kiwi blokedom will have plenty of weapons and good luck to any well-meaning government body that tries to separate these sportsmen from their beer.

But through it all, you develop empathy with them. They genuinely seem to look out for each other.

That empathy is also in the gentle and humorous way the senior guys coach the kids. Every rugby player can remember a small boy - someone's son or little brother - kicking a ball around the fringes of the team, loving being part of the big boys. One hanging round our first XV at school became a celebrated All Blacks first-five, Nicky Allen.

So it is in Reporoa. These are the people for whom the All Blacks play.

The movie romanticises some things, sure - there's no mention of the downside of that kind of turbo-charged drinking, like depression, drink-driving, farmer suicides, domestic abuse, occasional trouble with the law.

But it called to mind characters and humour from my own experiences - the guy who unscrewed his artificial arm before the game and whose tackling style (illegal but wholly effective) involved doing a forward roll at the ball-carrier's feet; the guy with a glass eye whose after-match trick was to drop it in your beer when you weren't looking; the larger-than-life prop raided in his hotel room by touring team-mates interrupting a tryst - only to find he'd pulled a bloke. Another clubmate became an MP - but is also remembered for a pre-game frenzy that saw him head-butt the same sort of concrete blocks as in the Reporoa changing room. If it all sounds a bit childish, it is. That's the point. It's a game and it, the mateship and drinking appeal to the child in us all.

It's an escape from the taxing routines of life - blending the pleasure of physical exercise with the bonding and drinking; a release from reality to a parallel universe where you can forget the drought and you don't have to pull a calf out of a cow with a cable tied round your hips after a heavy drinking session, struggling not to blow the groceries.

The reality is Reporoa used to have more teams and players but, watching the kids delight in training and the pleasure of the past-their-best-long-ago adults, it seems clear rugby in New Zealand will prosper while the Reporoa spirit is alive.

And in the week when Jerry Collins, one of rugby's men-of-the-people, left us, it was a good connection to make.