Cars parked up for Saturday's club rugby semifinal between Te Puna and Te Puke. Photo / Browndog Media
Cars parked up for Saturday's club rugby semifinal between Te Puna and Te Puke. Photo / Browndog Media
OPINION
The community that plays together stays together.
Too often the importance of sport has been overlooked when it comes to keeping our communities together in challenging times.
Sport is the connector across all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and when it comes to club rugby the intergenerational participation from the little rippers right through to the limping golden oldies is a testament to what can keep a community together.
Last Saturday, everyone came out to play – on and off the field, at the BOP Senior Rugby and Colts semifinals held at Maramatanga Park in Te Puna.
If you are a Te Puna local, you have learned to book a berth the night before or early on game day to get a prime viewing platform for finals footy. If you snooze you lose - it’s as simple as that.
By lunchtime, every man and his dog were all there - on and off the field.
There were cars as far as the eye and the drone could see, as there was more sauce on the sea of hotdogs walking from the kai and coffee caravans back up to the bank where berths had been bagsed long before the hāngī had been put down at daybreak.
And what a trifecta of terrific finals it turned out to be. All three victorious teams had a winning score of 26 and all three matches went down to the wire before a winner emerged.
First, the colts’ game, where Te Puna held a handy lead only to be chased down by a certain try, that was until the “silent ref” showed up. With the try line wide open, the free-running opposition player thought he heard the ref blow his whistle. So he stopped in his tracks, only to be tackled.
First game in the bag for the home team.
Second, the development semi. Which had a similar scenario, with a winning score of 26 to the home team.
Where did the turbo fuel come from in this fiercely contested match with Tauranga Sports? A V8 set of waewae to get the grandson of one of our greats up the paddock to chase down and tackle a certain try scorer? When a small number on the back of a jersey chases down a big number it usually ends in the big number under the sticks. Not so last Saturday.
Game two to the home team.
And then came the main game that thousands, not hundreds, had come to see.
The prems are the idols in the eyes of all the little rippers as they are in the one eye of the opiniated couch coaches, who would have you believe they were all knocking on the door of higher honours back in the day.
Just as in the two previous finals, the home team scored 26 points and it came down to more than the wire - but a seemingly divine intervention, from what many of us felt were our tupuna from beyond the coaching couch veil.
A large crowd gathered to watch the club rugby semifinal between Te Puna and Te Puke. Photo/ Browndog Media.
Te Puna had scored what was thought to be the winning penalty, taken by the best kicker on the paddock. However, the clock was still running, and Te Puke had not one but two chances to win the match. Both missed their mark out in front of the posts and it will be many more full moons at Maramatanga before that amazing set of circumstances will be seen again.
One thing is for sure, there was more at play than mere mortals in this match. We could all feel it and the distant memories of a kick that could have brought glory to Te Puna by an honoured legend of our club rugby were running through my mind as it was for others with long memories.
In 1922 the winger for Bay of Plenty, David Borell, our grandfather, scored what should have been the winning try under the sticks, in our first-ever successful Ranfurly Shield against Hawke’s Bay.
Borell had also scored all the points the same year against the Springboks - 19 of them coming from tries and long-distance kicks.
Sadly, the halfback CN Boucher, also a legend from the same Te Puke team Te Puna faced on Saturday, took the ball off Borell and the kick skewed off the side of his boot and the game was lost.
On that day in 1922, the boot was on the other foot for Borell and his legion of Te Puna followers and now, 102 years later, Saturday, June 1, 2023, is a day they can savour and tell their mokopuna about.
And so, three Te Puna teams are now in the finals, all of them going for club rugby glory, all of them scoring 26 points.
Our community was the winner on the day when the Pirates and Pirirakau battled it out for finals footy and next Saturday we will all be back at Maramatanga Park when the Mighty Marlins take on the Blue and Black army of Te Puna.
Thank you to everyone who showed up last Saturday, especially from Greerton Marist and Te Puke Sports. It was much more than rugby and missed kicks. It was about community and celebrating our backyard boys who are our future leaders.
Haere mai Tauranga Moana - ki Maramatanga Park next Saturday.
- 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.
