Jesus first

Some say the heart and soul of modern rugby is in its forward play, but 24-year-old Canterbury Rugby lock forward JJ Manning says having a relationship with Jesus Christ is the true heart and soul of his life.

Putting seats out for the Sunday morning service is not what you’d expect of a professional rugby player, but this is an essential role in the temporary post-quake setting of The Salvation Army’s Christchurch City Corps (church). It starkly contrasts with appearing on Sky TV as a lock forward in Canterbury Rugby’s championship ITM Cup team.

JJ (Joshua) Manning volunteered his help a couple of years back. ‘I was once told that everyone in a church family should do something. My Christian faith is number one. Sometimes things in life get hard, but God’s always there.’

With Christmas on the horizon, JJ recalls a special Christmas when he was almost 14. He and his family had travelled up to New Plymouth to be with his uncles and their families. His maternal grandparents, Brian and Doreen Bennetts, were there too. The family enjoyed some great times together, including climbing New Plymouth’s towering Paritutu Rock. This was JJ’s last Christmas with his dad. Chris Manning died just 10 months later.

The Christmas following his father’s death was a very different time—quiet and emotional. Christmas Day 2005 stands out in JJ’s memory for all the wrong reasons. Dad wasn’t there anymore.

JJ’s father was a Christchurch policeman who went out for a run on the morning of the 15th of October 2005. The day was meant to be one of celebration. It was Chris and wife Vikki’s 22nd wedding anniversary, and Brian and Doreen were celebrating their golden wedding anniversary that day too.

Tragically, Chris Manning never returned home, dying suddenly while running. Chris was a fit and active 45-year-old whose passing was a huge shock to his family, friends and police colleagues. He was the son of Salvation Army officers Lieut-Colonels Ron and Mary Manning,

Although JJ remembers the loss of his father as a terrible event, he says God worked in a remarkable way to bring comfort to the family. With so many friends and family in Christchurch to celebrate his grandparents’ wedding anniversary, they were able to draw on one another for strength and support.

Sights set on rugby

From the age of five, JJ played soccer. With poor eyesight, it wasn’t until he got contact lenses at 12 that he was able to play rugby. At the time, JJ was in Year 9 at Middleton Grange School, a Christian school in the Christchurch suburb of Upper Riccarton. JJ was tall for his age and was selected for the Canterbury Rugby age group under-13s team, then the under-14s team, and on up.

JJ still plays with contact lenses. ‘I have to—I’m basically blind without them!’ he says. ‘My genetics didn’t do me too many favours in that respect. I went in for an eye test recently and the optometrist said he hoped I didn’t play any ball sports, as I’d have no chance. He was in shock when I told him what I do. I was quite proud of myself!’

In Year 13, JJ was awarded a sports scholarship to St. Andrews College. Out of the blue, at the end of that year, JJ received a phone call asking if he’d like to play rugby in Japan at Teikyo University in Hachiouji, in the southern area of Tokyo. It was only meant to be for one year, but JJ says it wasn’t difficult to accept an extension at the end of that time. ‘It was just a God-thing and he guided me.’ He remained in Japan for four years.
JJ’s schedule in Japan included a half-day of study and a half-day of rugby, five days each week. This was a big jump in his training regime, as back home he’d trained only for an hour to an hour-and-a-half maximum. He lost a lot of weight early on, due to the extended training regime and his new Japanese  diet.

For study, JJ attended Japanese language classes with a view to obtaining a diploma. He also attended English language classes whenever the teachers wanted him to help out. ‘I was never fluent in Japanese, although eventually conversation was fine. But I struggled with the more formal language. In written Japanese there are four dialects. I learnt to read and write in the katakana and hiragana dialects, but I never managed to master kanji with its 1000 complex Chinese characters.’

At university, 150 rugby students lived in three buildings and spent most of their time together. Each year, JJ shared a room with two other Japanese students. The Teikyo University team played in the National Universities Competition, winning for the first time in JJ’s first year and going on to win the following three years as well. JJ is quick to point out that this success wasn’t because of him. He says the team had been building up to it and it was just good timing on his part to be there at the time.

Although he enjoyed his time in Japan, JJ is happy to be home. ‘We were only given one day off a week and I was often so tired that I just wanted to stay in bed,’ he recalls. ‘Sometimes I’d catch up with my Kiwi mates for dinner, but without knowing the language it took me a while to settle. When I came back to New Zealand three years ago, the pace was much slower—in a good way.’

Christmas in Japan is mainly celebrated by families with very young children. Presents are given, there are Christmas lights, Santa and that kind of thing, but there’s not much that reflects Christianity. While in Japan, JJ used to Skype home for Christmas Day and he’d get a parcel from his mum and the Kiwi chocolate would keep him going for a while. He had a good group of Kiwi friends and some Christmases they gathered together for a hot roast beef feed, in typical Kiwi fashion.

JJ will spend this Christmas Day at his mum’s and he’ll also attend a morning church service at The Salvation Army. With the memory of Christmases in Japan still fresh, he really appreciates spending Christmas at home with family.

Playing rugby at home

JJ will be 25 in January. He’s 1.98m tall and weighs 112kg. He says he’d love to make two metres, but thinks he’s probably stopped growing. When asked if he’d always wanted to play lock, JJ replies, ‘I keep telling people I’m too slow to play anywhere else and not fat enough to be in the front row! I’ve played number 8 and 6 a couple of times. Basketball was a sport I enjoyed at school, but I couldn’t jump very high.’

Currently, JJ plays rugby for the Marist Albion Club in the Christchurch senior competition. He was also selected for the NZ Marist XV in 2014. The first year he was back in New Zealand, JJ played for West Coast in the 2013 Heartland Championship. A couple of players in the Marist Albion team played for West Coast and he was invited by their coach to join them. He travelled over there every Friday afternoon and had a quick run with the team. They would then fly away for the weekend game or play in Greymouth.

In 2014, JJ joined Canterbury Rugby’s wider training group and earned six caps during the ITM Cup season. He also joined the Crusaders for their pre-season training last year. That was a step up, with everyone working hard to prepare for the Super 15 Competition and three All Blacks contesting the locking position. JJ didn’t have a contract, but was happy to have the opportunity to learn as much as he could. He did a half day of training with them and then went back to work in the afternoons.

The competition for places in the Canterbury ITM Cup team is really tough. ‘But that’s good,’ JJ says, ‘because it makes you want to perform better.’ In 2015, he was contracted as a full squad member.

There’s a strong focus on getting the best out of every player. A GPS tracking device is worn to monitor training and to assess individual performance in games. It records how far players have run all over the park along with top speed and average speed. Heart rate monitors are used in pre-season training. ‘If you take it easy at training, they make you do something extra to compensate. There’s no slacking off!’

Many rugby spectators wonder what it’s like in the engine-room of an ITM scrum and how to make sense of scrum collapses and resets. ‘You’re asking the wrong man,’ JJ says. ‘You need to ask the props and the hooker. We just put our heads in and push as hard as we can. A scrum collapse usually happens when someone has a leg lifted off the ground or there’s a loss of bind from one of the props and the balance is upset. Also, teams don’t like going backwards. Referees see different things and that’s just the way it is.’

Locks do the lifting and catching in line-outs. And in professional rugby it’s a long way up! JJ’s been dropped on his back a couple of times, so far without serious injury. He says you’ve got to trust the lifters to bring you down safely. For the ITM Cup, the Canterbury forwards did three or four half-hour line-out sessions each week. Line-outs were changed often in the hope of confusing the opposition, and there’s no way JJ would ever reveal the codes the team uses!

The Canterbury team concentrates on fitness training in the pre-season so it can focus on rugby skills in the playing season. JJ trains four times a week pre-season. Once the season starts, team members do leg-weights and squats before training on Monday mornings, while on Tuesdays they focus on the upper body. Thursdays is a power session, with weights and elastic bands for resistance training.

Coping with non-selection or sitting on the bench as a replacement is a challenge. ‘It’s not fun,’ JJ admits. ‘You put in all the work during the week and you want to be out there playing. But you’ve got to respect the coach’s decision. You talk to him to find out why and see what you need to work on. There’s competition for every position and some guys have had no game time. Once the decision has been made you have to accept it and do what you can to assist in preparing those who will be playing.’  

The team playing the next game is announced in a team meeting at the beginning of the week. JJ had a couple of starting games and a few off the bench this year. He’d have liked more, but says you simply have to take what you can get.

Faith on and off the field

Each Canterbury ITM Cup player has a profile posted on the province’s website. JJ’s profile says that he is ‘active in The Salvation Army and is a diligent, dedicated trainer and a reliable player who is continuing to grow his game at provincial level’.

Being a Christian in professional rugby has its moments, JJ says. ‘There’s some interesting language you have to deal with, and in some teams there’s a drinking culture—although in professional rugby our level of fitness demands that drinking is kept under control.’ He’s always looked up to Brad Thorn as a great model of a Christian sportsman. ‘He did his work on the field but was such a quiet guy off it.’ The two play in the same position.
JJ says, ‘It’s been cool in the Canterbury team this year, with some of the young and older guys starting the week with a prayer group focusing on the team, families, and the people we play for.’

When asked how his father’s sudden death affected him, JJ says, ‘It was weird. My Christian faith was such that even when I was 14 I had a peace. It was hard and I’ve had to work through things on my own that I would have liked to talk to my father about. But God’s been good and he’s always shown up when I needed him.’

JJ has a rich Salvation Army heritage on both sides of the family, giving him plenty of role models to learn from. But JJ reserves his strongest praise for his mother. ‘Mum has a huge passion for helping others,’ he says. ‘She works for The Salvation Army in its Southern Division headquarters as a budgeting consultant. She also does all she can to help keep our local church going. She’s now married to Dean Stevenson and he’s a good guy. He’s a policeman who served with Dad. Over the years, we spent quite a lot of time with him and his kids, so the transition when he and Mum married was quite easy for me.’

This year, JJ has been involved as a volunteer in a life skills course for men run by The Salvation Army’s Christchurch City Community Ministry Centre. ‘I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I just sat in as an extra pair of ears for the guys that were there. It was an incredible experience! What some of the guys had been through was a real eye-opener for me. There’s so much satisfaction in just giving them a bit of hope or showing them another way of doing things. When I talked about my involvement in Canterbury Rugby I don’t think they believed me, so when they saw me on the field they were a bit shocked. They didn’t pick that a quiet guy from The Salvation Army would do such a thing.’

Professional rugby players live with uncertainty. They have goals, but so many of their options are dependent on agents, selectors, coaches, resources, performance and team success. They experience adulation and rejection; resilience and fragility; accomplishment and failure. But JJ, who learnt as a teenager just how uncertain and fragile life can be, is up for the challenge.

The overriding reality for this young man as he determines his future is that God’s guidance will be sought and God’s leading relied upon.

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by Lieut-Col Bill Allott (c) 'War Cry' magazine, Christmas 2015, pp 5-7.
You can read 'War Cry' at your nearest Salvation Army church or centre, or subscribe through Salvationist Resources.