what the community needs now … is shirtlessness

Some days are … unexpected. You start out driving around lost in your ridiculous (borrowed) beige Mitsubishi Sigma station wagon, and before you know it you’re holding a microphone up to a shirtless Sam Burgess and trying to look at his eyes while he’s talking instead of his pecs.

Thursday afternoon the boys from the All-Stars and the Indigenous team all headed to White Water World to hang out with some special kids at a One Community function, and for reasons we don’t wanna question we were allowed to interview the players and cover it for nrl.com. Thank you, universe!

If there’s anything more adorable than footy players living it up with mobs of school children on giant waterslides … we haven’t seen it. Robbie Farah had barely made it in the gates before he had his shirt off and had hit the waterslide in his Teamm8 boardies. Luke Bailey spent the ride yelling out ‘we’re gonna flip! we’re gonna flip!’, and Josh Morris got out of his giant inflatable raft by executing an amazing face-plant into the pool. It was magical.

All the boys were paired up, which meant Nate Myles and Anthony Watmough were paired up to wrangle and entertain a group of kids together. All we can say is that – together – those two radiate mischief, especially when they’re squishing Kiki on either side to cover her in water. We love Watmough’s personalised mike check, too. It goes something like: WET…WATMOUGH…CHECK 1-2 …WET … into the microphone. So good.

George Rose took out fashions on the field with his awesome headdress: an soaking wet indigenous team shirt tied into a do-rag. Also, props to Georgie for rocking the full chest hair rug when everyone else had gone the trim. Represent, Burt Reynolds!

Did we mention the shirtlessness?

For one thing, yes shirtless Sam Burgess is exactly as much of a dreamboat as you’d expect.

Clearly we are not the kind of people who think ahead. If we did, we woulda realised that to go on waterslides, yes, people tend to get their gear off. But somehow our booze and TV-addled brains didn’t manage to put 2 and 2 together to get ‘shirtless Matt Cooper’. GOOD GOD. They should put a warning on that. Not only shirtless, but SOAKING WET.

Kiki was midway through recording to camera when her mouth just opened like one of those rotating clowns at the Easter Show, she fell completely silent for about 5 seconds, then yelled CRAP when she realised she’d blown her take. It was all totally Hot Bitch Cooper’s fault for walking past, pausing and watching her and, you know … existing. How are we meant to stay professional under those kind of circumstances? We’re seriously considering filing some kind of shirtless incapacitation claim.

We’ve never seen as many happy kids though. Swishing around in plastic rafts with Sam Thaiday! Wrestling with Wendell in the wave pool! Saying creepy things about getting to touch Jonathon Thurston (that bit was kinda weird, not gonna lie).

We’re not really what you’d describe as ‘shy’ but spotting Wayne Bennett almost made us silent. Mid conversation with our cameramen we grabbed each other and yelled IT’S UNCLE WAYNE! We stood there for a good 5 minutes, clutching each other while Sassy pointed and Kiki announced “it’s like being 3 metres away from GOD!”. Needless to say our cameramen were … confused.

We kept spotting players we wanted to interview but couldn’t grab because they happened to be having a discussion with the great Benny. Rule number 1 of fight club: you do not interrupt Uncle Wayne.

You can however, interrupt the Australian captain Cam Smith and halfback Jonathan Thurston purely to get to Gordon Tallis to ask him for an interview. That’s totally fine.

As far as we’re concerned hosting community events at water parks is the greatest idea ever. We like to think it was another one from Preston Campbell’s Big Books of Awesome Ideas. First he comes up with the Indigenous showcase game – which we’re already in love with – then he busts out shirtless Thursday on the Gold Coast.

Thumbs up, Pres!

Stay tuned for the video, we’ll link you when it’s up x