It's Just a Game: A Scrumful of Rugby Stories by Graham Hutchins

Author:Graham Hutchins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation/Rugby
ISBN: It's Just a Game
Publisher: Exisle Publishing
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

Smoke signals

You could always pinpoint the whereabouts of ‘Smoky’ Robinson. In the grandstand where the swirling eddies off the wild west coast were neutralised, Smoky would be sitting surrounded by a circle of cigarette smoke. There he would be, like a beacon, lit up by the red glow of a vigorously sucked tailor-made or roll-your-own – or both. For a time they called him ‘Guppy’ because of the sucking. In the murk of overcast, midwinter days, in dim recesses such as the grandstand, Smoky sent out a lighthouse-like signal.

Smoky was a classic chain smoker. If you sat downwind of him you’d get the benefit of a buckshee packet of Pall Mall. Mind you, in those days passive smoke was a term reserved for the big KA steam engines on rare, windless mornings when the black exhaust barely moved in the still air. And even then you’d only call it passive smoke if you knew what passive meant.

Smoky liked to keep to himself on big-match days. Perhaps that was one reason why he smoked so excessively. To keep supporters away, which it did to a certain extent. No one really appreciated a sore throat from second-hand smoke, even back then. If the team wasn’t going well, they tended to give Smoky a wide berth, but when the team was sparking, which was more often than not the case, everyone wanted to be Smoky’s friend, smoke or no smoke.

You see, Smoky was the coach and sole selector of one of the most successful minor New Zealand unions in the 1990s. He was very good at what he did – coaching and selecting and smoking. There was nothing of him. Some wag reckoned that before Smoky took on coaching and selecting at provincial level, he was at a higher personal level himself. In his first year of coaching and selecting and now chain-smoking, Smoky was said to have lost several centimetres in height.

Smoky had always been a smoker but becoming involved with a provincial team rapidly turned him into a compulsive one. The stress was immense. But Smoky was very good at what he did. He transformed a motley rabble of farmers, freezing workers, forestry bushmen and two taxidermists into a team that nearly caused a Ranfurly Shield upset.

Then one day Smoky gave up smoking. Just like that. Cold turkey. Frozen, in fact. No one knows why. The last of his durries were ditched. The roll-your-owns relegated. Smoky descended into a twitching, irritable hell. And the team started losing.

Eventually, to bring back that winning habit, Smoky started puffing a pipe. It was a curved briar, which stained his teeth and often set fire to his nostril hair, as Smoky spent more time trying to ignite the thing than actually smoking it, when he wasn’t trying to extinguish some part of himself.

The correlation between Smoky taking up the pipe and the team finding winning form again was charted by the team statistician. Using a sequence of computer graphics, ‘Numbers’ McNutt was able to reveal that during Smoky’s non-smoking hiatus the team played 20, won nil, lost 20, drew nil.

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