My Life, My Fight Read online

  When the house was completed and his then small family moved in, he was living the Kiwi dream: three bedrooms on a quarter acre of land. I guess he only planned to have enough children for three bedrooms, but as his family grew and grew, so did his home. Two self-contained units were added out back behind the garage, this time with Dad doing all the work himself. Over time, when the main house got a bit crowded or one of the kids was old enough, they’d move out to one of “the baches,” as they were nicknamed. It was still technically living at home but with the advantage of there being some distance from the rules of the main house.

  Sid’s family of kids kept growing until the morning of 23 July 1993. That’s when my mum, Heilala, was taken into Rotorua Hospital for an emergency cesarean section after doctors became worried about how big her unborn baby was getting. Later that day I was born—Sid’s last child.

  People always ask me what it was like to grow up with so many siblings, but I spent most of my childhood with just Sid (junior), Lisa, and Gabby. Together we were the fantastic four. We were Dad’s last batch of kids and by the time we were going to school most of our older siblings lived in different cities or were starting their own families. My eldest sister, Viv, who was in her thirties when I was born, lived just down the road, and as her kids are about the same age as us four, we grew up together. Technically, her kids are our nieces and nephews, but it felt weird to call them that. Unless we were fighting and trying to get the upper hand by making them call us aunty and uncle, they were just our cousins.

  When I started at Owhata primary school, I joined in the morning routine with my siblings. Every morning, Dad would wake up before us, make a massive pile of toast, brew a big jug of Milo, and then sit down in his chair to watch TV and read the newspaper, which we took turns to fetch from a petrol station just across the road from our house. The petrol station workers knew Dad and us kids and sometimes gave us the paper free. Dad was so tight with his money that he gladly took the freebie even though the paper only cost a dollar. I remember he would sit at the table and drink a lot of black coffee that tasted like tar, and because I wanted to do everything that Dad did, I would drink it too. No wonder my teachers had trouble getting me to stop bouncing off the walls all day.

  At school I got picked on quite a bit. I wasn’t a massive kid, in fact I was quite scrawny, and I always wore the same clothes and walked around barefoot most of the time. My brother Sid, who is four years older than me, was always bigger and tougher than the other kids so if anyone tried to talk crap about him or us, he’d smash them. Gabby and Lisa were just as tall and strong and so were also good to have around as protectors. But I think most of the bullying I experienced was done by older kids who Sid used to pick on and who wanted their revenge on the Adams family.

  One time, I was walking home from school and some older kids started throwing rocks at me. I didn’t know what to do so I just kept walking and let them hit me. Gabby saw me and ran over and we walked home together, getting pelted by stones. When we got home, we cried to Dad, but he just looked at us like we were idiots for not throwing anything back. I thought that was the end of it until a few days later when the same kid had me up against the wall by the pool and Sid ran over and beat him up. I was enjoying the fight until he yelled at me to piss off. I realized Sid wasn’t doing it because he liked me or Gabby, he was doing it because he was our older brother and he had to.

  A lot of the teasing directed at me at school actually came from the adults. I think they found it funny there was such a tall kid in class and thought that meant they could make jokes about all of us kids. One teacher used to crack jokes about me all the time. I hated him. He had taught a number of my older siblings and, given we all admit to being bad students, he probably just hated anyone with Adams as their last name.

  Not all the teachers were bad, though. I’ll always remember Miss Walsh, who taught me in my early days at primary school and knew I had trouble learning at the same pace as everyone else. She was one of the only teachers who managed to be patient with me and actually give me a chance. I don’t know if she was a good teacher for anyone else, but she showed me that it’s okay to ask questions and to admit that you don’t understand something. Even after she left the school she stayed in touch. She would email messages to the new teacher to pass on to me about how she saw my sister Valerie (Val) throwing the shot put on TV and asking if I had read any good books lately. I got embarrassed because other kids would mock me for getting emails from the teacher, so I acted too cool and didn’t reply. But I always appreciated that she went out of her way to make me feel comfortable learning, as that was a big thing, especially at that time in my life.

  It was about then that my parents split up. I must have been six or seven when Mum took me and Gabby to Tonga with her. I guess she wanted to have her kids with her, but Dad wouldn’t let her take all of us so they split us up. I loved it there. It was hot all the time and I had a pet pig that I named Sitiveni, which is the Tongan version of my name. He wasn’t a cute piglet like Babe, either. He was a fully grown pig that I used to ride on around the village. After maybe a couple of months, Gabby and I came back to New Zealand and moved in with Dad. We didn’t see Mum for more than five years after that.

  In Dad’s house, his word was the law. And that law didn’t just apply to his children, it applied to his wife too. No elbows on the table. No eating bread until you’d finished dinner. Always do your chores on time. Whatever Sid said went. As a father he was stern but fair. Everyone wanted to be on Dad’s good side because he was the boss. At 6 11 and with a barrel for a body, it was hard not to be intimidated by him, no matter who you were. By the time I was a teenager, his hair was white and he walked with a limp and a hunch. But that didn’t make him any less imposing. He had a notorious work ethic among his co-workers and was always quick with a joke. But he would be the first one to admit that he wasn’t a great husband. For Sid Adams, being a wife meant staying home, cooking and looking after the kids. He was always the boss in the relationship and he was possessive of his wife. He didn’t like her going out socializing without him or someone else in his family to keep an eye on her. In his view it was the husband’s job to earn money and put food on the table, which he did very well. And it was the wife’s job to cook that food. These ideas sound pretty old-fashioned now, because they are. Remember, the dude was born in 1931.

  Back at home with Dad, Gabby and I settled back into the routine. Because the house had only three bedrooms, the boys shared a room and the girls did too. Sid and I often turned our room into a wrestling ring by pushing our foam mattresses together and using the girls’ mattresses to line the walls. We would use Gabby as our practice dummy for moves until she would get hurt and not want to play anymore. Sid was the best at it because he was the oldest, but he also seemed more naturally gifted than the rest of us. I was unco for my whole childhood. Being taller than other kids meant everyone assumed I was also going to be the toughest. That stopped the bullies from picking on me after a while, even though I wasn’t any tougher, just longer.

  The problem with being a head taller than everyone else is that people think you must be good at sports just because you’re tall. I played a lot of sports as a kid, but I definitely wasn’t good. My position in rugby was lock because that’s where all the tall kids play, but the other teams soon found out that I couldn’t catch the ball to save my life. I remember one game it felt like all the other team did was kick the ball to me, then I’d drop it and they’d score. We lost that game and I gave up hope of being an All Black.

  I played basketball, of course, because you can’t be a six-foot-tall 10-year-old and not play basketball. But I wasn’t even in the top team at primary school. I was put in the B team with the other useless kids. My sister Gabby was the basketball player in the family. She got a scholarship to go and play basketball at a high school across town in Rotorua, which was rare in those days. I knew that three of my older brothers, Warren, Ralph, and Rob, had all been good baske
tball players, but I really only played because it was something to do after school. No one went to training or practiced—we just showed up at games in our muddy clothes and tried not to get hurt.

  I never had a problem with my siblings, but they all seemed to have a problem with me. At least, that’s what it felt like being the youngest and always getting picked on. I used to hear other kids at school talking about going to see their other friends after school and I’d wonder why they didn’t just hang out with their brothers and sisters and their cousins. I thought everyone had a bunch of family members to play with every day, although I don’t know if I’d describe what we did as “play.” It always started out as playing, but because we’re all so competitive it would quickly turn into a fight. When we played backyard cricket, someone would argue that they didn’t get out when they were clearly out, or they wouldn’t give the other person a turn for ages. One time, Sid got angry and broke the bat. Then we used an old metal pole until I threw it in the air and it hit Gabby in the forehead.

  At some point Dad put up a basketball hoop and we started playing basketball. Two-on-two or one-on-one. Being the youngest and scrawniest, I lost every time, even against my sisters. Especially against my sisters. NBA fans like to say I’m tough, but none of my family would agree with them. In my family, I’m the weak youngest one who just happened to grow to be the tallest. Posting up against Lisa and Gabby when I was younger was way rougher than any player I mark in the NBA now. The only comeback I had against them was that if they ever got so pissed off that they wanted to smash me, I could usually run to Dad and then they couldn’t do anything.

  We all knew that Dad had a soft spot for me because I was the youngest, and I took full advantage of it. I could get away with things that no other Adams kid would dream of doing. The downside of that was that Sid, Lisa, and Gabby grew to be independent extremely young and went off to do their own things while I was still choosing to hang around with just Dad. It also meant that some of my much older brothers felt that since Dad wasn’t being as tough on me as he was with them, it was their job to pick up the slack. If I answered back to my dad or didn’t do as I was told, it wasn’t him I had to look out for, it was my brothers.

  Looking back, it’s a small miracle we all ended up as sane, functioning members of society. Dad was over 65 when Mum left and suddenly he was a pensioner solo parent. The caring went both ways, though, because by that time he had a lot of health issues. While he looked after us and kept us out of trouble, we also cared for him. He was a heavy smoker for pretty much his whole life and only quit after I was born. As I grew taller, I noticed his age catching up with him and he started to hunch over when he walked. It almost seemed as if he was shrinking. Before any of us younger lot were born, Dad had been in a car crash with a drunk driver that mangled his lower legs. When I was growing up it was a normal part of the day for local nurses to stop by and change the bandages on his legs. He’d flirt with them because he was always a charmer, even as an old man. I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of them fell in love with him.

  As each of us kids got old enough, we were taught how to change his dressings. Peeling off the bandages would reveal weeping flesh that looked like a shark or crocodile had attacked him. Then we’d have to use medical tissue to wipe away any pus that had oozed out before applying a fresh bandage. I can’t say I enjoyed doing it, but it made me feel like I was being helpful and doing something for my dad that he couldn’t do. We never found out what was actually wrong with his legs or why they never seemed to heal; it was just part of the routine.

  As his legs got worse and his asthma flared up more frequently, Dad started spending more and more time inside. It was strange seeing him like that because he would usually have been outside knocking around in the garage or off in the van running errands. One of my most vivid memories of my dad is him sitting in our rust-bucket van with his massive arm out the window almost touching the ground. I swear he could have unscrewed the front wheel nuts from inside the car if he had wanted to.

  The more Dad’s health deteriorated, the more responsibilities we had to pick up. Sid learned how to drive when he was about 13, and even though he didn’t have a license he’d drive us to basketball or to the supermarket. Lisa has always been the clever one, so she’d write up a shopping list and get the bank card off Dad and we’d all go to do the grocery shopping. It didn’t feel like we were being forced to be adults. At least it didn’t feel like that to me, but I usually just had to tag along and not get in the way. Even though we had access to Dad’s money, we never took advantage of it by buying extra snacks or lollies. Instead we’d wait for Fridays, when we’d be given our allowance.

  Dad would hand a crisp $10 note to Sid or Lisa and we’d all walk to a little block of shops on the corner of our road. Lisa would run into the liquor store, where the lady behind the counter knew all of us. She would split the note into coins and Lisa would give us each our share. It was like a mini hori business meeting. The next 30 minutes was when I would make the most important decisions of my childhood. Chocolates or gummies? Sour or not? Zombie Chews or seashells? We’d browse the pick ’n’ mix counter at the local dairy for way too long before finally emerging holding a white paper bag stuffed with lollies.

  One Friday I thought of a genius plan and waited until the others had walked back home. I bought a bunch of chocolate coins with my allowance and then walked to a different dairy to try to buy more lollies using the chocolate coins as currency. The dairy owner just laughed at me as I sulked off. That’s when I wondered if maybe I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was.

  We certainly weren’t left completely to our own devices. Viv and her kids lived fewer than 10 houses down from our house, and after Mum left, Viv took over a lot of the maternal duties. She had her own job and family to think about, but she always came down every few days to make sure everything was all right. Most of the time that meant just telling us off for not keeping the house tidy, but she usually brought food over or cooked us a feed. Every once in a while, she’d take all of us on a day out to the park or somewhere to give Dad some peace and quiet at home.

  Even though most Adams kids were raised by a single parent, some by Dad, some by their mums, they saw me, Sid, Gabby, and Lisa as being different somehow because of how old and increasingly unwell Dad was. As we got older we started to see more and more of our older siblings, some of whom we didn’t even know were related to us. Most of them stepped up to help in their own way and influenced me in ways I didn’t even realize until recently. While Dad was our rock and our hero, some of the older siblings made sure we were behaving and going to school. It’s a part of my story that the media overlooked when I first started getting their attention. Even though we lived a bit rugged, we were never alone. We always had people looking out for us. And one of those people was my brother Mohi.

  Most of the Adams family met Mohi at my sister Gabby’s seventh birthday party, which means I was six. We never had big birthday parties where we invited all our friends over; we just got the family together and had a feed. Mohi, who was 18 at the time, turned up and was casually introduced to us as our brother.

  Dad was clearly in charge of all his relationships right from the beginning—you can tell just from the names of his children. Fourteen big, brown kids and we’ve all got the whitest names you’ve ever heard. Mohi’s got a Māori name only because Dad didn’t even know he was his kid until Mohi was older.

  I think Viv had invited Mohi after finding out that he was one of Dad’s kids but had been raised by his mum. Viv has always been the one responsible for wrangling all of the different Adams kids together. So there he was, another brother who I never knew existed but who was now part of the family. What my older siblings learned that day, and I found out later, was that Mohi was about 10 years old when he found out our dad was his dad. Dad used to visit his mum and would make sure his grades at school were good, but Mohi always thought he was just a friend. As it turns out, Dad and Mohi’s mum were m
adly in love but were never able to get married. Mohi decided he’d like to meet some of his siblings so he got in touch with Viv and she invited him to our house for a birthday feed.

  He’s the only Adams son who didn’t inherit the height genes from our dad. After Gabby’s party I didn’t see him around much. But what I did see about one morning a week was a bag full of Burger King on the kitchen table. I didn’t even think to wonder how it got there, I just gladly ate the cheeseburgers and Whoppers. The Burger King deliveries continued for a couple of years and were then joined by bakery drop-offs and sometimes a random box of kiwifruit. Mohi worked at Burger King so after work he and his partner Matewai would drive by the house to drop off any leftover burgers. Mohi was still not sure about his relationship with Dad, let alone us, so he made the stops quick and late at night. I guess he saw my dad raising us alone and (correctly) assumed we could probably do with some more food.

  Over the years, Mohi started making more appearances. Viv would invite him and Matewai to different family gatherings and they’d always show up, slowly integrating more into the family unit. It’s tricky with a big family like ours, and one that has different “groups,” because it’s hard to tell how involved everyone wants to be with the other siblings outside their own group. I didn’t really care either way.

  That is, until I was about 10 and I found out that Mohi worked on a farm. There was something about farms that appealed to me even then. The thought of being out in the field putting in hard, physical work without having to write down any answers in a classroom sounded like a dream job. I was starting to really shoot up by then and I wanted to put my size to good use too, especially since I couldn’t seem to play basketball as well as everyone had hoped.