Tommy Kapai: Wall to wall rugby and winners galore

With back-to-back championship wins in the bag we can all crouch and hold for another season and soak up the success of the Chiefs.

All across the land of the long white try line there were close games separated by a few points and for many who worship the game of rugby they were all winners, if you were backing the home teams - and overlooked the sharks biting the Warriors on the backside.

For me and my mates it started at Bay Park watching club finals and ended up four games later heading back across the Kaimais from Waikato Stadium with the chanting of chief fans still ringing sweetly in my ears.

We started at Bay Park watching Rangiuru defeat Poroporo by a few points, then Arataki take Kawerau to the cleaners by much more than a few points, followed by the Mounties who went down by five points to Tauranga Sports.

Then to top off a wall-to-wall rugby weekend it was back-to-back wins for the chanting Chiefs at Waikato Stadium, when they rode the Brumbies out of Hamil-Town by three points on Saturday night - a win that clearly made the point you have to have belief to be a chief, both players and fans.

Off the paddock there have been some "games" going on and working out who is blowing the whistle on the GCSB that leaves many of us walking around in a daze like a Brumbies ball carrier after trying to fend off the left forearm of a Liam Messam tackle.

Political point scoring locally and nationally played out their own pre-election grand finals with truth being about as rare to find as a runaway try in the dying moments of a Warriors match. The jousting between John and the journalists about the "Eye spy with my little eye" saga can only turn to custard for Captain Keyora and should be dropped like a hot hangi stone, if he wants to clean sweep his way back into the Whare at the next election. Make your point and move on should be what his advisers are telling him.

Locally the performance points have been awarded to the local councillors by a hard-working hack I call CuzzyBro - aka John Cousins in his annual award. Many voters use this as a guideline and for my two bob's worth of salt he has it bang on.

It was pleasing to see the top point-scoring "A lister" Mayor Crosby showing his coolness by showing up at the TED X Talks last Tuesday night, the first held here in Tauranga and hopefully the first of many more to come.

If you haven't been turned on to TED yet, Google TEDX and do yourself a flavour by tasting what has to be the best menu of edu-taining, innovative ideas ever served up. The point that TEDX Talks makes is the currency of success that will become the benchmark in the future will not be money, but the legacy we leave behind for others to benefit from.

So you may ask what the point of all these points is, as do my mates when they ask me why I spend my Sundays thinking up, drafting, and then writing a column when I could be watching more rugby or reading the Sunday papers and sipping chardonnay with them?

I guess the point is I get to make my point to 40,000 people every Monday and not just to a bunch of blokes knocking back a few beers on a Sunday.

Some get my point and others don't - and never will, and that's the beauty of democracy.

Many times I need to point the finger at my own idealistic inadequacies, given my thinking is heavily influenced by the glory days of my "Happy Hippy" era. I often reflect on our baby booming, peace-loving era as one of pioneering that today's generation fear to follow and that in itself is more than enough motivation to make a point. Hopefully the point of difference is writing something worth giving a second thought to and, just like other TEDX speakers, there is a motive captured in our korero not about money or mana, but about collective thinking to implement change.

When like-minded people of all ages start to think like a team they can take on the world and win, just like the Chiefs.

broblack@xtra.co.nz