Me and League

I was 10 years old when I was first exposed to rugby league. I was vaguely aware of organized sports as a concept from possibly the age of 5, there was something called soccer were you kicked a ball around, there was running, an activity for which I lacked any natural ability at that early stage, but the thrill of athletic competition wouldn't truly capture me until a few years later where opportunity skipped over preparation, but found luck anyway. My lunch times and play times in those budding years were occupied by wild feats of my own imagination, I'd pretend to be various things, none which included sports stars.

In 1990, my final year of primary (elementary) school, I shifted from the then backsliding, according to my parents, Grey Lynn school (20 years later my youngest sister would finish what I started by once again attending the school I'd been pulled from, proving that either (a) there's never any parenting mistake that you can't fix by having other children or (b) and slightly less believable, government funded institutions, like public schools, can actually improve over time) to Westmere Primary. While there I made friends, broke up with friends and re-befriended them again; I threw a tennis ball like a girl and have done so ever since; I went Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle crazy; I learned from a talking Giraffe about the wonders of puberty; Mike Tyson lost to "Buster" Douglas; New Kids on the Block were the hottest thing out and even then at that tender age I couldn't figure out why. However, the most seminal moment in that pivotal year came when I was invited by my sometimes friends to participate in a lunch time game of rugby league, I had no idea what they were talking about.

During the first few moments Lee received the ball, and perhaps keenly aware of my inexperience, ran directly towards me. Encouraged by the others to smash him, I responded by picking the poor boy up and power slamming him into the turf. The others were impressed informing me that I had "dumped" Lee. In later years "dumped" would take on other definitions with greater impact than this initial tackle, but for that small troop of prepubescent boys only one type of dumping mattered and somehow, inexplicably I was good at it.