Ruby Tui

At the end of the game, she could feel the tears in the crowd. The journey had come to an end. Ruby Tui, a girl inspired by her superhero mum, who could so easily have taken so many wrong turns, was on top of the world.

As she walked up the driveway to yet another event her manager had pointed her towards, Ruby Tui suddenly realised she probably should’ve read the invite. “I turned up and there were all these people in tuxedos with police people everywhere, and I was like ‘what the frick is this?’,” she explains. “I turned around to my sister and said, ‘we’ve got to go home and get changed because this is so flash’. There were all these waiters holding drinks with names I’d never heard of, a brass band was playing as you walked up the path, and then there were other waiters hiding in the bushes to take your empty glass. 

“I was literally like, ‘where am I?’. I asked one of the waiters, and he said, ‘the British High Commissioner’s house’.”

The Wellington reception was in the aftermath of the Black Ferns’ Rugby World Cup win, but it wasn’t full of the rugby fraternity, quite the opposite. “I’m the only rugby player in the room, and the British High Commissioner lady gets up and does the speech and then goes, ‘and I would just like to welcome Ruby Tui’, and all of these important-looking people turn to look at me.”

But perhaps the most telling snippet to take from the story is what happened next. “Then there was this chick, a bit younger than the others, so I thought I’d hang out with her,” continues Ruby. “We were dancing all night, and at the end, I said, ‘oh what do you do?’ And she was the mayor of Wellington! I was partying with the mayor at the British High Commission in the flashiest house I’ve ever seen, and I didn’t even know!”

As the mayor of Wellington, and indeed any of the tuxedoed dignitaries who met her that night will testify, the friendliness of Ruby Tui is disarming. She’s won Rugby World Cups in both sevens and fifteens, she’s won a gold medal at the Olympics, and she was undoubtedly the unofficial face of last year’s showpiece event in New Zealand. And yet it never seems to be about her. 

Even as our conversation begins, she asks, “how was your day?” and genuinely seems to mean it, asking question after question about the life of a person she’s literally just met. Due to its rarity, it’s both unnerving and wonderful in equal measure. “They say the graveyard is the richest place for ideas, so I take communication really seriously,” says Ruby, when we ask about the ease with which she seems to engage everyone. “I think connection in this world is really healing, it’s with us all the time, this way to feel better in life. 

“People are on their phones all the time, but if they take five seconds to ask the cashier, ‘how’s your day?’, it’s really beautiful. And in this day, it’s really rare. I rate connection.”

And it feels genuine too. “I don’t really like fluff stuff, I just want to be real straight away. Life’s too short,” she says. 

It was also due to necessity: her upbringing, that took her from Wellington to Nelson and across to the west coast of the South Island, meant making new friends wasn’t just a handy skill but an essential tool for social survival. “Not only was I between parents, uncles and aunties, but my mum was being forced to move all the time – her partner would literally get us run out of town,” she explains. “I think by the time I was twelve, I’d been to six different schools, so socially I had to kind of figure out how to talk to people pretty quick. 

“My grandad has been this huge cornerstone of my life, he was always a good speaker,” she continues. “I think you are the person you convey in this life; you can be a good person but if you can’t communicate that, then you might be good but the world wouldn’t know.”

She also had no time for pleasantries. “I always found it weird how people were awkward when they first meet,” she says. “So many times as a kid, I remember being in a circle, and everybody would be so awkward, and I’m like, ‘bro, I could be leaving school next week so can we hurry up?’. I always made a joke and everyone was fine. 

“I found that so weird, that we needed an icebreaker,” she continues. “But that was because I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I hated to go home, so I was very much, ‘I don’t have much time here, let’s crack on’. You can sit there and be weird and awkward and sad and cry, or you can have fun.”

Few could have blamed a young Ruby, whose birth parents split when she eight, if she had gone down an alternative path. She not only had a transient nature to her childhood, but also had to deal with the impact of domestic abuse which her stepfather inflicted upon her mum. “Probably the most difficult thing for me as a kid was, without being able to articulate it or understand it at the time, I subconsciously understood that my parents were incapable of being there for me at that time.

“Watching mum suffer, going through what she was going through,” she continues. “I never got tucked in, I never got those little bits of attention that kids love. 

“I never hated mum for it,” she adds, “but always my heart was so heavy and, as a kid, you don’t understand there’s a big world out there, so you just kind of think that’s all your fault; you think that you’re making life worse. 

“But, watching my mum be so... ” she begins, pausing, before continuing, “... imprisoned every day, and feeling so helpless, that was really hard.”

Things took a turn when she was ten. “Mum sought help to get rid of her guy, I never called him stepfather by the way, he was always just mum’s partner,” she explains. “And she found this charity called the Women’s Refuge. That’s a really hard thing to do.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever rang up for counselling or help, but you’ve got to articulate specifics of your abuse and your situation and it’s really difficult.”

What Ruby’s mum Marion Mouat (Ruby takes her surname from father Kovati) did that day, painted her in a new light. “But to me, what mum did that day, wasn’t cartoon superhero, it was a real-life superhero,” she says. “She was working with an FBI agent, and that’s what it felt like, an FBI mission. My mum was a superhuman, and it was so strong for me to see, and it truly changed my life. I knew how I wanted to be treated now to honour my mum and her strength.

“It’s really difficult to get out of abusive situations. It’s a mind thing, you’re imprisoned in every way,” continues Ruby. “I know she tried to get out a few times, but this time was different and I’ll never forget that. I look up to mum so much for that.”

She remembers every detail of the escape. “It’s interesting because mum must have pre-planned it, it’s weird. It was daytime and he [the stepfather] started yelling and then this court car came, I don’t know how she was making these calls, but she found the strength within her to pre-plan the intervention. That’s the definition of courage. It was so amazing.”

They were moved to a secret house within the Women’s Refuge in a different town, which might have seen Ruby witness things she wished she hadn’t, but it was better than before. “There’s nothing like seeing your mum unsafe in your own home. I don’t care for my life, just my mum’s.”

During her turbulent early years, she’d also spend time in Wellington with her father, who also had his own troubles to face. “I love dad, he’s cool, but he’s been through a lot in his life as well,” she says.

Ruby has had to pick through every memory and thought from those early years for her book, Straight Up, a process which also acted as a form of therapy. “I think everyone should write a book,” she says. “It’s so cool, it makes you think about what you are and even if no one buys it, at least my kids and grandkids will know what I’m like in this moment. I never met my maternal grandparents, but I often think ‘what did they think, what did they say?’.”

She brings the conversation back to her dad. “He’s an alcoholic,” she begins, “and he’s very open and acknowledging about that. And I feel people are really harsh on alcoholics – ‘they’re a waste of space’ – it’s the same attitude to homeless people too. But, you know, once upon a time, I was two or three decisions away from going down there too. 

“Because of dad’s sickness,” she continues, “it taught me a lot of empathy, lessons that I’ve not got from anywhere else in my life. So, I’m very grateful for my parents and even their parents going through all their struggles; it motivates me to make sure I do some good in the world.

“I have very strong values about what I believe in, because I’ve seen what happens if you don’t,” she says. “Lots of people talk fluff about this stuff, but I’ve seen below the fluff and how bad it can get. I love people, and I love positivity, but I’m not speaking up about something just because it’s cool.”

Ironically, or rather as a result of, those tumultuous times, Ruby found her way to rugby. “I had a really difficult time when I was nine or ten and I dragged a couple of girls down the rugby field,” she says. “We lived in this tiny town and it was the only sport. I didn’t want to play it – I wanted to play netball – but we had some good training and a game, and the coach was going down the line, and saying to the boys, ‘you can be an All Black’, then he got to me, paused, and said, ‘you can be a Black Fern’.”

For some this would’ve been a compliment, but not Ruby. “I remember thinking, ‘what the frick is a Black Fern?’. The only thing I ever wanted to be was a Silver Fern, so I remember being really angry and pissed off, and hated him for it. But I was quite angry as kid.”

Sport and rugby continued to provide an escape for Ruby throughout her school years. “I was always naturally gifted at sport, and I’m so grateful for that. I feel for people in that situation, that don’t have that outlet.

“The women’s rugby community, or just the rugby community in general, is so cool,” she continues. “There’s a position for everybody, everyone’s so welcoming, club rugby is just so cool. You don’t even know these people, but then you train twice a week, play a game and you’re friends for life. It’s kind of a weird concept but I fell in love with the camaraderie. I had no money, but these women were like, ‘do you need a ride?’, ‘do you need boots?’, ‘do you need a top?’, they were so nice.”

Career-wise, she was eventually driven towards a career behind the cameras. “If I believed in something, if it was something sitting on my heart, I’d always speak up,” she says. “And I loved sport, so I was told I would be good in media.”

She studied communications and media studies at Canterbury, and as she embarked on that course, the 2010 Rugby World Cup rolled around. “That was when I first saw the Black Ferns playing,” she recalls. “You could only watch it on the Rugby Channel – a channel not everyone has – so we’d all go around to one of the rugby girls’ houses and I was buzzing out. 

“I’d just been playing club rugby with these women [four of the squad played for the same side] and now they were on TV. I think that lengthened my thinking, so I made the link from what I was doing on a Tuesday night to the Black Ferns. That’s why I believe in it so much. I saw it, then I believed it. That would never happen in netball, you’d never play club with Silver Ferns.”

Within two years of watching the Black Ferns win what was then a fourth Rugby World Cup, Ruby was part of the sevens set-up. “My first year with New Zealand sevens was 2012 and my annual income was $2,000 and I thought I’d cracked it. I was so happy, I bought two iPhones because I’d never had one before. 

“Honestly,” she insists. “I was so happy, I’ll never forget it, that’s why these days I’m never scared, because I know I can live off $2k.”

And she survived how? “Eating noodles and tins of tuna,” she says. “I was just working. I’ve never been afraid of working, any kind of job, I’d work in the holidays – eighty hours a week. 

“Whereas for me I was used to not having much money, when the money came in [for sevens], the mums and grown-up women who had amazing jobs, couldn’t move [to professionalism] for the amount, because they had children to feed, but I was so poor, it was all good for me. I would just be eating noodles again.”

The work she picked up supplemented her rugby income. “I used to do random shit,” she says. “Bar tendered heaps, waitressed heaps, I had to work under this house smashing up concrete blocks, I did weeding for this lady, picked up dog poo for another lady. 

“But I was quite small, and I had to get stronger, so I went and applied at a saw mill,” explains Ruby. “It was this huge timber place, cutting up huge trees. My mate got me in, but this guy did not want to hire me. You didn’t need a CV to work there, there were lots of criminals and stuff there.

“He looked at me, and he said, ‘you can weed the front garden, get rid of all that bush’, and I swear he thought it’d take me a week, and I thought, ‘I’ll show this guy’, and did it in one afternoon.” 

Before long, she’d virtually cleared the whole region of bush. “He eventually had to let me in to the timber yard, and when he did, I was like, ‘I’m not going to let this guy down’, so I was lifting fifteen-metre planks, putting them all in piles – I would just cream it, I would work faster than any of the guys. It was awesome, I did a couple of summers, and I got ripped, real strong.”

She made her sevens debut in 2013 on the World Series in Guangzhou, when a team-mate rolled her ankle early in the final against England, meaning Ruby’s first taste would be virtually a full game. “I remember thinking ‘am I going to be fit enough to play this whole game?’,” she says. “They had Kat Merchant, Rachael Burford, Emily Scarratt, massive players in the English team, but they didn’t know who I was, so they were not marking me properly. 

“I’ve always had a bit of toe to me, and I had the ball facing Kat Merchant, and I think Gossie [Sarah Goss, now Hirini], was outside of me, and it should’ve been a draw and pass, but she [Merchant] didn’t even look at me, she pushed on to Gossie, so I thought, ‘okay if you’re not going to mark me, then I’m not going to pass’. It was one of those moments, when I felt the flow, when time slowed down, and I sailed through, and they were like ‘who the heck is this?’. I scored a try under the post, and that was the first time I thought, ‘I can do this, I can be a New Zealand Sevens player’.”

A regular for the sevens, she formed part of one of the world’s most formidable sides which would conquer the game at every level. It wasn’t just the players on the field that made the difference. 

“I remember the first time I met our psychologist David Galbraith,” she says. “We were at an army base, and man I felt like we were in this room with super women, and we all wanted the same thing. We were all willing to work our butts off, crazy physically, and keep going through this hard yakka, to be the best team we could ever be. I’d never been in a room like that. There were legends I never thought I’d meet, or didn’t even realise how amazing they were until I met them.

“I wrote a poem about it, I got up and read it, it was, ‘how did I get in this room, from all the rooms I’ve been in, how the frick did I get here?’.

“I felt unstoppable,” she adds. “Everyone was so different, and I was amazed at how you get all these different arse humans with superpowers, with this work ethic that’s out of the world, all in the same room, wanting to do same thing. That’s crazy.

“This was the room I wanted to be in,” she continues. “I liked the feeling. I thought I was the worst in the room, by a long shot: there were legends in the room – and nobody from the west coast.

“But I found the power from being the worst in room,” says Ruby. “If you’re in a room and you’re the worst, you’re going to get the most growth, the most learnings, you are going to excel in your life no matter what. I learnt the beauty of being the worst in the room.”

How bad were you? “I couldn’t even pass left or right mate,” she admits, before adding, “I mean it still looks a little weird, but it gets there.”

The money started to improve as the success continued and the years passed, until it was ‘proper money’. She’d always been driven to help improve the lot of women’s rugby players, if only to help them realise their potential. “I’ll never forget Casey Robertson, she won heaps of World Cups – she would pick these women up by the throat and throw them on the ground, insane,” says Ruby. “She took a couple of us under her wing and we went and stayed with her and I didn’t realise she lived in a farmhouse, in the middle of nowhere. One year she couldn’t get to training because it was snowing. Brutal conditions.

“She went out every day, just picking sheep up and throwing them on the truck. So physical, she would do all this work, and then go and kill people on the rugby field and smoke everyone in training – she’d be the best there.

“I thought, ‘how the frick does this woman do this?’. It was exhausting just watching her work and she wasn’t even tired when we went to training. It made me think, ‘imagine, a Casey Robertson not working 60 hours on a damn farm, imagine what she’d be like?’.”

Ruby effectively completed sevens, but the lessons she learnt about team culture and ethos, and the skills she possessed – on and off the pitch – only came to the fifteens game before the Rugby World Cup. She watched the Black Ferns’ disastrous end-of-year tour while with the sevens. They lost back-to-back Tests against England 43-12 and 56-15, and then followed up with another pair of defeats against the French, losing 38-13 and 29-7. “I just watched it thinking that with everything I’ve learnt, this is the moment to pass it on – the Black Ferns needed everyone and everything. This wasn’t the time to say ‘I know about culture’, or say ‘I’m a good rugby player’, it was time to go and do it and show it. 

“It snapped a lot of people’s heads,” she continues. “It was like when a family member goes down, we all needed to go there now, it was a moment of emotion.”

That included their new coach, the World Cup-winning Wayne Smith. “On his first day, I remember him being like, ‘going to be honest with you girls, two days ago I was on a beach and I was retired, I didn’t know I was going to be here now.’”

He soon realised this was going to be a different kind of challenge. “The first couple of sessions, I’ll never forget his face, and he couldn’t believe we couldn’t do the drills he wanted us to do. He probably wanted to quit after one day.

“But he just brought in a standard that was immediately miles higher,” says Ruby. “I think a lot of players didn’t survive after first camp.” 

And with him, Smith brought serious big-hitters. “He brought in Ted [Sir Graham Henry], who was a mentor to him,” says Ruby. “You had the mentor of a mentor, which was really powerful. And he brought in Crono [Mike Cron, legendary All Blacks scrum guru] who was meant to be one day a week, but he was there every day, and I think they genuinely fell in love with us.”

The influence of World Cup-winning players also helps, not least putting the pressure of a home World Cup into perspective. “DC [Dan Carter] was coaching our kicking, and he said, ‘you think there’s pressure [being the host], but there isn’t because you’re just all with your bros.’ We had everything we needed, we had our families, there was no time difference, everyone speaks not only English, but Kiwi slang, so it was really comfortable. It was the opposite of pressure.”

Thirty-two thousand people sold out Auckland’s Eden Park for the opening game of the Rugby World Cup. But it wasn’t by accident, or even just due to a growing interest in the game, it was driven by the players. “For that first game, I said to our media manager, ‘every single person that requests an interview, put them through, I’ll do it’. We’re doing it all, we’re selling this out. 

“I was doing dozens of interviews, hours long every day, some about the book, so they were emotional too, but I was like, ‘come on Rubes, got to get through this’. 

“Even on the way to the captain’s run in the bus, I was doing chee hoos on the radio.”

Chee hoos? “Yeah, you know how islanders always say ‘chee hoo’? [as a positive hello].”

Ruby told the media manager to push the girls, even those not used to doing interviews. “We’d walk to dinner, and half a dozen really intensive interviews would be going on, all the time, we went hard. “It was crazy, because on my debut game at the beginning of that year, there was one journalist in the press conference, but by the end of the tournament you couldn’t move because there was so much press. It just shows you what can be done if you consciously make the decision to sell out, put on a show.”

The tactic clearly worked. “I was blown away,” she says of the sell-out, “but I wasn’t surprised, I knew the potential was there in our game, I knew characters were there. 

“People talk about personalities in the men’s game, but we will give you that and more in women’s rugby. I know them like the back of my hand, they’re amazing people, funny people, crazy backgrounds, we’ve got all the ingredients.”

The crowd were different to your typical All Blacks audience too. “The amount of kids there, with signs, with face-paint, with red hair,” she says. “And I always think of that coach saying I could be a Black Fern, and me thinking ‘what an idiot, the Black Ferns are nothing’. 

“These kids are the same age, and the girls screaming ‘go Black Ferns’, and singing – they all see it now, their life is going to be different. And it’s not just girls, I have so many young boys coming up to me talking about plays and asking for photos. I don’t even think they know it, but it’s life-changing, for them and for me.”

To win, they had to face their northern hemisphere tormentors. First, France in the semi-final. They won 25-24 with Caroline Drouin missing a last-minute kick that would’ve condemned the Black Ferns to defeat. “She’s a great kicker, and I’ve seen her get great kicks all the time, but when she really missed it, I was like ‘we’re going to win the World Cup’, because that was out the gate, that never happens. Someone is looking out for us, it was like there’s this power beyond us, and we’re going to win this. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know how we were going to top those England mauls, but we were going to win.”

Even in the final when England looked to have taken a stranglehold on the game, her belief never wavered. “At one point we were losing by quite a bit, but I never felt worried, I never saw us losing. Even when they had two lineouts on our five, in a row, I never felt we were not going to win, it wasn’t going to end like this.”

In front of a world-record crowd of 42,579, Ruby eventually found her answer. “So when Joanah [Ngan-Woo] intercepts [England’s attacking line-out] my hands went up, and I was like, ‘ah so that’s how we win’, and I was off to the races, I was happy as.”

The feelings of elation resonated through the stadium. “I try and not let emotion into my game, but I let a switch off, and let it in. It literally feels like it rains on you, a flood of emotion, and I felt everybody’s joy, I knew people were crying in the crowd, I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it.

“It’s extremely difficult to describe in a word, but every Kiwi who watched it, will know exactly what I mean, when I say it was miharo, it means amazing in Maori...”

When we speak, Ruby is weighing up her future, awaiting the announcement of the new Black Ferns coaching team, but whatever she decides to do next, it’ll be to the better of rugby, understanding she now represents professional women’s rugby. She loves her sport, and appreciates it even more so, given her start in life. “I’m a female in a male sport, I’m a brown person in a white person’s industry, I’ve come from domestic violence, I’ve never had much money, and that’s why I love sport. It’s absolutely cool, because at the end of the day, despite all those things, you’re just two humans – and I think that’s really special.” Just like Ruby Tui. 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Getty Images

This extract was taken from issue 21 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.