One Year Enough for a Lifetime of Memories

Joe Nasson

Tom Copeland and I only played one season with the U19’s under coach Gary French, but the time with the Petone Rugby Club really left its mark.

We keep in touch with a few our teammates and recently saw Richard Mead who still plays for Petone Senior 3’s. He came to visit us here in the UK.

John ‘Bart’ Bartosh was our manager. I’m not sure what he did, he was supposed to keep us on the straight and narrow.

We borrowed his car for a road trip with a lad called Daniel Dewes who we played with in the U19’s. We went up to Palmerston North to visit a girl Tom and I met in Sydney on the way over. We didn’t get any action.

We still keep in touch with Bart and Tucky who worked with him.

We trained hard and had some great games. Never managed to beat Upper Hutt though.

We had one training session with some bloke called Andy Leslie. He gave us a beasting in the sawdust pit. We phoned home and couldn’t believe we had just been trained by an All Black Legend!

Game days were special. We tried to stay fresh although Jackson’s Bar on a Friday night was a real temptation. After a hard days work at Turners Auctions with Jeff (I think that’s his first name) Schroder it was hard to cycle past.

After the games we played drinking games and listened to the Aftermatch speeches in the clubrooms. We were always well oiled before going to Bedrocks in Lower Hutt.

We would take our turn to clean the clubrooms and would get roped into cleaning with the other teams when we went to pick up our bags.

We did start to leave our bags there deliberately so we could help drink the free beer.

Grant O'Halloran made us stand on a table and sing the English national anthem naked one Sunday morning when his team were on clean-up duty and we had just popped in to pick our bags up from the night before.

One of our teammates was Dan Farani. We didn’t quite match his potential. He was playing international rugby with Samoa when our rugby careers at York RUFC were fading. He was a bit special even then but Frenchy thought he was lazy.

When we were in NZ we got tattoos in Petone as a momento of our stay.

We are planning a group trip with our burgeoning families to visit in 2010 for PRFC’s 125th Anniversary.

See you all then!

Memoirs archive