Click a picture to enhance it. Blue text = a clickable linRight from the shoulderI've just today finished reading Straight Up by Ruby Tui and it's such a startling, right-from-the-shoulder book that I've scrapped what I'd researched to write about this week. Instead I'll talk about this book and the life it reveals. You don't like Rugby so you don't want to read about a rugby star? Well don't worry, this is not about rugby – though of course it is. Ruby Tui is a crack rugby Sevens player and (after the book was written) a member of the 15 a side 2021 World Cup winning Black Ferns. Yet, this book is really about honesty and truth and love and forthright determination. Do read it. Well organised, the book clearly shows the skilled hand of ghost writer, Margie Thomson. Part One: Love focuses on childhood. Part Two: Greatitude is about what happened after Ruby found rugby and Part Three: Communication is hard-earned life advice for the reader. What a messRuby's Tui's early years were difficult – more than difficult. Samoan father, alcoholic. Palagi mother of Scots and Irish descent, easily abused. Separation. But all the way through Ruby tells us that she loved her parents and that she got love from them. 'Despite of' love? At the end of each chapter in black type there is a little epigram – Ruby's Training Bag. This one says: 'My family may not be perfect but the love between us is deep and real.' Agony and traumaLove, yes, but but agony and trauma were there as well. Read Chapter 8 in which Ruby retells the horrible story, when aged 11, of having sat for hours in a car outside a house, before being called in by her father to help Meredith, a woman he's been with, who has clearly become desperately drug ill. "Dad. Dad, let's call the ambulance.' "Nah, Nah, Nah, it's fine" Ruby pleads with her father and eventually he lets her do it but Meredith dies despite the ambulance officers' best effort. Crack! It's traumatic for Ruby. How could it not be? It leads her to despair and a suicide attempt. Ruby's Training Bag says: If you hit a dead end, you can always do a U-turn out of it. Falling in love - with RugbyBy way of two miserable locations on the West Coast, but happy secondary school days in Greymouth, Ruby eventually arrives at Canterbury University, living in a residence that overlooked a rugby field. Invited one day by a student friend to join a practice, Ruby found herself training with top players, including Black Ferns. Starstruck, that was soon the end of her attachment to netball, her previous number one sport. And it was the beginning of a new addiction. 'I fell in love with rugby – the culture around it.' Quickly, indeed in her first full season, Tui was selected for the Canterbury team, even while studying, and working two jobs – money was sparse. SevensThen came the opportunity to be part of the Sevens revival and that game became Tui's. The Sevens community was tight. The training was intense and included army boot camps – tough and arduous. In the national Sevens team members became so in tune with each other that communication during a game was intuitive. Sevens became much like the happy refuge Samoan side of her family which was such a saving grace in her childhood. Success but trials and tribulations tooSevens sucesses, failures and reflections about them, fill the latter part of the book but the section that really shocked me was Chapter 26, Mump in the road. The Commonwealth Games 2018 is the setting. '....2018 was the first year ever that women's sevens was included. It was a huge moment.' '....but then I woke up one morning 10 days into our training camp, and I felt a lump in my throat.' 'The Commonwealth team doctor came out to assess me...She felt the lump, which was getting big by this stage and she took the stethoscope out of her ears and put it around her neck. She sat back and looked at me. "I'm pretty sure you have the mumps," she said.' Then the story turns grim. Ruby is isolated in her room, is totally miserable but pretends when asked, that she is okay. She is so desperate to play! Symptoms get worse. She can't see, she can't walk but still when someone bangs on the door to check she says "I'm good. " Then she can't move. Finally someone bangs on the locked-from-the-inside door, gets no reponse and runs to get a key. Ambulance, hospital. Still Ruby wants to play. Pulls the drips out and tries to join the team. In the end. No use. Flown home and joins squad members who didn’t travel, to watch on TV the team win. Stubborn and determined to the nth degree. That's Ruby Tui. But she was stupid and is now honest about it. That's also Ruby Tui. Final triumphIn the book the final triumph is winning the Sevens gold medal in an empty stadium at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. It's not just a rugby triumph though. For Ruby Tui it’s a life triumph. 'I lie down on the grass and feel my whole body against the earth, the grass between my fingers, the huge volume of the stadium's great emptiness and the weight of gold on my chest. This is the moment.' □ John McInnes Friday 3 February 2023 Publication details Straight Up by Ruby Tui; Allen & Unwin; Auckland, New Zealand; 2022 ISBN 978 1 99100 614 1 eISBN 978 1 76118 541 0 ##########
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