Netballer Maria Tutaia, who has a public profile as high as her 1.88m stature, loves getting glammed up for glittery dos but says she was a "hardcore tomboy" as a child. Photo / Dean Purcell
Of course I knew that the netball player and captain of the Northern Mystics, Maria Tutaia, would be tall. She is the shooter. She is 1.88 metres tall which is almost six foot two, which I also knew because, for one thing, netball teams put such statistics on their websites. Also because it is the one thing most people know about her - other than that she is a netball star who is an ace shooter and she seems to have a profile as high as her stature, rather unusually for a netballer.
Still, knowing and experiencing are different things and when we arrived at the cafe near the Millennium Centre in Mairangi Bay where she had been training, we saw her legs first, striding into the cafe. Her legs are hard to miss, not just because they are of course very long but because the ends of them were clad in turquoise blue knee socks and ended in sparkly purple trainers. She was wearing lycra shorts and I failed to pay any attention to what she was wearing on the top part of her because I was so busy looking, enviously, at those legs.
She bent down, a long way down, to give me a peck on the cheek and looked at me, a trifle warily, I thought (although perhaps that was an after-thought) through her eyelashes. It was like being pecked by a very beautiful, elongated gazelle. The very beautiful, elongated gazelle said: "Sorry. I'm a bit stinky."
She wasn't remotely stinky. She is quite earthy. You can imagine her telling faintly rude jokes. She is widely held to be a good sport. She likes a laugh and "a chinwag" and a bit of banter. She was a guest on the first day of the new Paul Henry show and he asked about whether she'd been wearing knickers at some do they'd both been at. She said: "I love Paul Henry! He's such a great man!" I had been going to ask whether she thought being asked about her knickers, or lack of, a bit pervy, but plainly not. "He's hilarious!"
So that is one side of her and the other is the side you see on the court. She is cool under pressure and she said that her face rarely changes in its expression - which is to say that it is expressionless - whether she makes or misses a shot. She is often called an elegant shooter but she wasn't sure what that means. She said she is just there "to get the job done". How she plays is "just the way that I play". It might be better not to over-analyse it. "Oh, totally. And in any situation you want to keep things as simple as possible. And the teams that I've been in that have kept it as simple as possible have been the most successful. You can get over-analytical. You can over-analyse not just yourself but the opposition."
Still, I wondered whether certain personalities were suited to certain positions in netball.
Shooters tend to get most of the glory, and so the flak, and so much of the attention off and on court. I thought shooters might be the most outgoing of netball players. She said: "Everybody labels shooters as the princesses of the team." And why might that be? I asked, imagining, with ease, her wearing a sparkly tiara which would nicely set off her sparkly shoes. I asked the photographer if he had one handy and she said that she had one, in the car. Does she really? "No. I've got more than one."
Ha, ha, because, it is, she said, "absolute rubbish" about shooters being princesses but the idea persists. "Well, because we're the ones who put the ball through the hoop, for the glory shot. And then you've got the defenders who are the hard-grafting ones and you've got the mid-courters who, you know, they just grind for the full 60 minutes. But that is not true!" She said, hamming it up, regally: "We are all equal. Ha, ha."
She was, probably inevitably, a "hardcore tomboy" as a girl because she has always been tall and sporty and she played with the boys at primary school. She discovered, at high school, that girls did peculiar things like plucking their eyebrows and shaving their legs.
"And I discovered tweezers. Because my eyebrows! I had doormat eyebrows. You could literally wipe your feet on my forehead my eyebrows were that big. Funny how we're talking about my eyebrows!"
Not as funny, I'd have thought, as talking about her underwear and we'd already done her socks. We did the socks early on because you really couldn't not do the socks. She has them in a range of amazing colours and they look amazing but they are actually compression socks which she wears because she had a couple of injuries last year and these help the blood flow in her calves. Hardly anyone could make compression socks, which are the definition of unsexy, even if they do come in turquoise, look like high fashion, but she does. Her calves, you could say, are sponsored by the compression sock makers and I bet those socks are selling like hot cakes.
Of course I knew that she would be beautiful. I had looked at her Twitter page. There are lots of pictures of her looking beautiful and not a few of them are of her looking beautiful in bikinis. She also did a shoot for a women's magazine in January which got, as I primly put it, not wanting to compete with Paul Henry: A bit of attention.
She, not being a bit prim, said: "Oh my God! It was so funny. The nipple shot! I'll tell you what. My dad got the shotgun out. Ha, ha, ha!" I had wondered what her parents thought and I thought her dad might have been upset. She said he wasn't upset but: "Oh, look. It's not a photo you want to see of your daughter."
I don't, actually, feel at all Victorian about the pictures, but I was interested in why she wanted those sorts of pictures taken and made available publicly and ending up being the other thing everyone knows about her. In what doing such photo shoots gives her, if you like. If I looked like her I'd never be out of a bikini and she looks, in addition to beautiful, strong and athletic, obviously, glowing with health. She takes being a role model for young women very seriously, so good for her. But people (meaning pervy people) will also gawp at those sorts of pictures and I thought that might make her feel a bit exposed. But she said: "No. I don't. Not at all. I mean God blesses us with one life and with one body and Mum and Dad have always been huge on us embracing what we have and living in the skin you're in and being proud ... of our heritage."
And anyway, I said, Dan Carter's always getting about in his underpants - and nobody blinks an eye. "Yeah, but you can't really see his ning nong, can you?" she said. Ning nong! She does say some funny things which are sometimes not intentionally funny. She told me, by way of explaining how funny Irene van Dyk is that: "She has the personality of a 12-year-old!"
She is 28 and the youngest of seven and she lives downstairs in her house in Henderson and her parents live upstairs. She is currently "happily single" but says that when she does get married (I think she was joking when she said that she wants seven kids of her own, but maybe not) she will probably still be living with her mum and her dad upstairs. After a game she has a team debrief and then she goes home and has the mum and dad debrief. She says her mum is always telling her off and that her teammates are always giving her stick and so she's pretty unlikely to become a princess. She says she no longer reads what is written about her in the papers, or watches the sports news but she did put on Twitter something about how her hair remains perfect during a game! Well, how does it? "It doesn't happen overnight, but it will happen!"
She once said in an interview that she had a "bad chick instinct" which she had to keep in check by keeping busy and so out of trouble. She probably just made that up, she said. I said I thought that she'd never done a bad chick thing in her life and she said, cheerfully: "Yeah, I was just talking a load of crap!" On her Twitter page she claims to be a pie-eating champion but that is more made-up nonsense. "I just made that up to make my profile sound really cool! Ha, ha, ha."
She was drinking a kale smoothie. She said: "I do love pies. Mince and cheese pies. You can't go wrong. Big Ben pies are my favourite. Do you know, they're $1.80 now? They used to be $1.20. Rip off, eh?" How much did that disgusting kale smoothie cost? "$7.50. Which is quite a reasonable price for a smoothie."
I still don't quite know about her relationship with her public image which is netball but also those pictures and being seen at glittery dos, all glammed up. She said: "I'm all about making the most of opportunities." She is both sensible and ambitious. "Yes, of course! Those are great words, Michele!" She is having fun with her opportunities. She loves fashion and getting glammed up because it's such a contrast to her work uniform which is tracksuits and compression socks and trainers. She is both kale smoothies and mince and cheese pies. She wears six-inch heels because she loves shoes and why shouldn't she wear high heels just because she's tall and, as she likes to say, looms like the Sky Tower? She wants to be a shoe designer after netball and design shoes for women like her - with big feet.
I wasn't to put in her shoe size because: "Oh. No. My God. Please don't do that to me. People don't need to know what my shoe size is." I do know but I'm not going to put it in because I find it endearing that even she has bits of her body she's yet to learn to love.
The other thing I wasn't to put in was any mention of any of her previous boyfriends and we came strangely unstuck about that. I'd only asked about one of them because I was asking about whether she had any theories on why young men sports stars sometimes came unstuck and young women sports stars didn't. I said I wasn't sure how much of a star one of her previous boyfriends had been, which shows how little interested I was. But she said: "This isn't part of the interview is it?" She had already spoken about the boyfriends in other interviews so I don't know why she is sticky about them now. She later asked through her agent to see a "draft". So perhaps she is capable of being a tiny bit of a princess. She is an ace shooter after all and if I was an ace shooter who looked like her I'd be the biggest princess ever.
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