The All Blacks

I caught my first full-length All Blacks match last night, during which the All Blacks beat the living hell out of Samoa 101-14 (in football scores, this would be like beating someone 73-3). Amy joined me for a pint down at the local pub to watch the match, which really touched my heart as this was our date night for the week. I am a lucky man.

Rugby happens to be the national sport of New Zealand. Now that I live here I realize that this makes perfect sense because people are of the hardy sort down here. Don't believe me? Last week I ran into two deer hunters while tramping in the Otaki Gorge. They had just finished hiking (oops, that's tramping) seven hours back from their hunting spot. I thought about this for a minute, then asked how they had planned to extricate the deer if they got one. They said, simply, "On our backs."

Seven hours through the mountains with 50 pounds of deer carcass on your back, for fun.

Right.

Anyway, there are a few different professional rugby leagues here. The All Blacks are New Zealand's national team and they are the highest ranking rubgy team in the world, which is pretty amazing given that there are only around 4 million people in this country. They are composed of the best players from all of the professional teams in NZ, so they're a bit like the rugby equivalent of the American Redeem Team (our handpicked olympic basketball team). Ergo, they have a winning record against every other rugby team in the world.

These guys are really impressive to watch. They are very fast, very strong, and very aggressive. They also perform a pregame haka which will make your hair stand on end; it makes the Hawaii football team's imitation look like a preschooler's tantrum. Check out this link to see what I mean (highly recommended if you are male, liked Braveheart, etc.).


Next week there's a huge test match against Australia and I'm not missing that one. Perhaps Amy and I will have to have two date nights, one of which doesn't involve rugby...