Each day was filled with song, fun and laughter

WHEN I hit the last year of High School, my coach at St Peter’s College, the legendary Eric Kohlhase said I wasn’t tall enough to continue playing No.8 but that I’d make a really good front rower, and that set me on the path for higher honours.

- GRAHAM DEWES

I wasn’t a big prop, I was probably too light, and it’s funny at the World Cup just gone, Joji Rinakama, who was our Pastor, reminded me on my debut I weighed 103 kilos. When I was playing club rugby in Auckland and doing quite well, all my Fijian friends joked why don’t you go back home and try and make the Fiji team and at that time, we had legends like Joeli Veitayaki, Bill Cavubati … some of the heaviest front rows in the world, big scrummaging fellas. Eventually, I got my playing weight up to 118kgs but I always had a seed of doubt that I wasn’t heavy enough.

I still felt that way in 2007, the year I made my Test debut. It was only a few months before the World Cup kicked off so I was what you would call a bolter. In a way, I think it was my mobility and physicality around the field that got me selected in the first place rather than my setpiece game.

Back in New Zealand, where our family moved to from Suva in 1989, a couple of years after the military coup, I’d been playing Premier club rugby for Auckland Marist and provincially for Thames Valley in the NZ Heartland competition. But it was while playing for a New Zealand-based Fijian team at a sevens tournament in Fiji that I caught the eye of Flying Fijians coach Ilivasi Tabua.