Scotty Stevenson: Pro rugby is a brutal beast, but it heals too

Liam Squire is living a new life. Photo / Stephen Barker

There just might be a good story here, if you give it a chance. That will come as a disappointment if you're after a dissection of the Hurricanes or a panic piece on the Crusaders, but you'll have to wait for those.

At the heart of this story is a 15-year-old kid who decided to leave school, and a 22-year-old kid who is making up for lost time.

It starts though with this point: professional rugby can be a brutal place for young men. The current debate on concussions, for instance, forgets that in most cases these guys haven't even given their brains a chance to fully develop before they are bashing them about in the sport's relentless contact zones.

It is an intensely physical game played under an intense spotlight and therein lies a quandary. These players, largely in their "emerging adulthood", may be at their physical peak yet many (if not most) are still developing the necessary mental and emotional maturity to deal with the pressure. Quandary? Curse more like it.

Professional rugby can place these young men in the eye of a storm they do not understand. We hold these men to a higher moral standard than most because we are the paying customer for the services they provide.

We talk of their responsibility to be role models for our youth, because that's what we see the paycheque demands of them. We expect them to perform on the pitch, and have no hesitation in criticising them when they don't.

Yet rarely do we witness the private struggle for function, or for form, or for fitness, and less do we really care.

Professional rugby has chewed up and spat out plenty of young men, and we have all read the headlines and witnessed the carnage. But what if I told you it also saved a kid from himself?

When Liam Squire runs out on to Waikato Stadium tonight, he'll be doing something that even as recently as three years ago he wouldn't have expected to be doing.

That's not his humility talking, even though he has that in abundance. But three years ago Liam Squire had just started playing rugby again, having not put on a jersey since he was that 15-year-old kid who decided school wasn't really for him.

Now he's that 22-year-old kid making up for lost time.

Squire is a rarity in the modern game: a player who never played for his school first XV, let alone came through the conveyer-belt ranks of age-group representation. In fact, by his own admission, Squire was almost lost to the game completely.

Perhaps if you removed the words "to the game" from the preceding sentence, you would be closer to the mark.

Picture an oversized Manawatu teenager looking for a different path than the dead-end one he found himself on; who was self-aware enough to realise he "wasn't really going too far". His redemption - he calls it his "second chance" - came through rugby, first with a call from Nelson Marist, then through exposure to the Tasman Academy, selection for the New Zealand Maori and, tonight, that run-on debut for the Chiefs.

For a kid who couldn't wait to get out of the classroom, he's found himself on a steep learning curve in Hamilton, but if he can replicate the impact he made in his bench debut against the Highlanders he will have gone some way to earning his diploma in deliverance. Perhaps, by getting this far, he's graduated.

He says he wishes he had stayed in school, that if he could go back and talk to his 14-year-old self he would advise him to take a different path. He says he never really liked homework, but now at the Chiefs he can't get away from it. He says he took the hard route to get here, but now he is here, he has no intention of quitting again.

Liam Squire may have made some mistakes in his life and, as he's only 22, he'll probably make one or two more. But the fact professional rugby has given this guy a chance to get his life back on track is a story to celebrate.

And you don't need much in the way of mental or emotional maturity to agree with that.

Oh no he didn't, did he?

Are you sitting down for this? Okay, here goes. When pushed on the trends he has seen from the opening weeks of Super Rugby Chiefs coach Dave Rennie did something completely unexpected and praised the sharpness of Australian sides. Just when I
thought I had misheard him, he repeated the compliment. The reason? They have more time to prepare for Super Rugby. The implication? New Zealand sides will surely start to apply pressure to follow suit.

One of the good guys

Yesterday news broke of Otago and Highlanders winger Buxton Popoali'i's forced retirement from rugby on medical grounds. I cannot stress enough how saddened I am by that news. New Zealand rugby is full of great characters, but "Bucky" was one of
the special personalities of the game. Always quick with a smile and chat, he was as elusive on the field as he was magnetic off it. Plus, there aren't many blokes who
knock themselves out scoring tries. Thanks for the memories Happy Feet.

Centres of Attention

Not forgetting Tanerau Latimer's 100th Super Rugby game tonight how about a weekend in which two of the finest centres in world rugby will each bring up a ton of appearances for their respective sides? Not only that, how about two captains who share such similar stats? While de Villers may have a couple of years and 21 caps on Smith internationally, this season they have mirrored each other's numbers in terms of carries, metres, average gain, passes, clean breaks and turnovers conceded.