Tongans provided highlight of a 10-year ride

How skipper knew when to quit

Ryan Nelsen had a meeting with some of Nike’s top lawyers last year. The former All Whites captain was with the sports apparel giant to discuss their interest in “.basketball”, the top level domain name acquired by Nelsen’s company Roar Domains, in conjunction with basketball’s world governing body Fiba.

The domain extension has been embraced by more than 50 of Fiba’s member nations, including 2004 Olympic champions Argentina, former European champions Slovenia, Australia and New Zealand.

The Breakers were also early adopters, with RJ Hampton one of the first professional players to secure a personalised domain.

So surely Nike, with their massive basketball heritage and huge influence, would be interested?

“They said they were interested in Nike.basketball, Converse.basketball, 23.basketball and some others,” Nelsen told the Herald on Sunday.

“That was great, so I asked what they planned to do with them. They didn’t know, and I said we would need to know.”

The discussion ended in a polite stalemate. Nike wanted to know the price to get the domain names into their portfolio, Nelsen and his company wanted to know the purpose before settling on a fee.

“It’s probably the first time they’ve said ‘we’ll write you a cheque’ and someone has ignored them,” laughed Nelsen. “We might live to regret that.”

It’s a fascinating episode, but also an illustrative tale. It shows the rarefied world Nelsen and business partner Hamish Miller are operating in, since their audacious and hard-won bid for the generic top level domain names (gTLDs) .basketball and .rugby.

They are in ongoing discussions with the NBA and have had successful negotiations with some of the biggest rugby brands, including the Springboks, Wallabies, All Blacks and England, as well as Sanzaar and World Rugby. But they take their stewardship role seriously; they entered partnerships with World

One of my first assignments for the Herald on Sunday was an ITM Cup match between Taranaki and North Harbour. It was October 2010 and a young kid called Beauden Barrett, barely out of high school, had turned plenty of heads since making his debut a few months earlier.

My mission was to find out if he had decided between the Blues and Hurricanes, who were both after his signature.

I waited outside the sheds until almost everyone had gone, before the team manager emerged and said “I’ll just get Beaudy for you, mate”.

The 19-year-old didn’t give much away, but was friendly, engaging and happy to chat, stood in his

Ryan Nelsen and his Queens Park Rangers teammates had plenty of cause to celebrate on January 3, 2013.

Playing at Stamford Bridge, Nelsen’s QPR side put a major dent in Chelsea’s English Premier League title prospects with a 1-0 win.

For a QPR side fighting to stay in the league, it was a milestone victory. But while his teammates celebrated, Nelsen had other things on his mind.

“We were in the battle for relegation, so everyone was having a great time celebrating, and I can remember just sitting there not being bothered,” Nelsen told

Rugby and Fiba, and want to ensure the domain names are used by the sporting community.

“You can have it, but need to use it,” said Nelsen of their approach. “It’s about being part of the community, and if you’re not going to do that, we’ll hold it ourselves, because we are not one of those guys, like all the other ‘domainers’. We will just keep chipping away.”

Other major sporting TLDs (.football, .golf, .tennis etc) mostly ended up in the hands of Wall Streetbacked web companies, largely mass market domain resellers with no allegiance to sporting bodies.

Such companies will generally sell names to any interested bidder, thereby opening the door to domain squatters and speculators. It means there is little online presence of TLDs for those sports, unlike the basketball and rugby sphere.

Three of the five New Zealand Super Rugby teams have opted for .rugby, along with all the Australian sides. In March, New Zealand Rugby switched to www.newzealand. rugby as their primary domain, and provincial.rugby also went live, while there are numerous other national member associations who have made the switch.

The UK’s Pro14 competition recently followed Sanzaar’s lead (changing to pro14.rugby) and the English Rugby Premiership is expected to follow suit.

Michael Burgess

shorts, clutching a beer.

I didn’t cross paths with Barrett again until last year’s ASB Classic, when he was making a sponsor’s appearance. It was impressive that despite his subsequent achievements, fame and celebrity, he seemed pretty much the same guy I had met a decade earlier.

Other big names who I’ve had a lot more to do with, such as Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Shaun Johnson, Simon Mannering, Chris Wood, Laura Langman, Hamish Bond

Newstalk ZB’s Jason Pine.

“This was not me. If anyone knows me, I quite enjoy winning, but that — I just sat there. All I wanted to do was be home with the family, home with kids; I just didn’t care, in a way. It was like a punch to the face

— a real eye opener.”

The club offered Nelsen a twoyear contract extension, but with almost 200 Premier League games for Blackburn, Tottenham and QPR, Nelsen knew it was time to hang up his boots. He took up a management role with Toronto in Major League Soccer, leaving QPR before the end of the season. QPR were relegated, winning just four of 38 games.

It has been far from straightforward. While winning the rights to the two gTLDs was a long and costly battle (they spent an estimated $4 million), that was just the beginning. They had to overcome the stigma built up by domain name speculators.

Former Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney had to purchase Rooney.com from a squatter for a five-figure fee, while an investor wanted to charge New Zealand Basketball a substantial amount for TallBlacks.com (they refused).

“I don’t like that approach,” said Miller. “If a team or athlete has worked their butt off to build up a brand, it seems wrong that a speculator can squat on their domain name and hold them to ransom.”

Miller recounts one of their first meetings with Sanzaar.

“They were wary at first, but you could feel the atmosphere and body language change as we explained our vision. They were a bit fearful that we were just more domainers.

“They couldn’t believe it when we said we’d give them Super.Rugby for and Michael Venus, were exactly the same: Incredibly driven and ambitious, but also humble and grounded.

I’ve reflected on all this recently, as my time at the Herald comes to a halt, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There may be another chapter in the future, if and when sport can get back to normal, but it’s been a great ride.

The other highlight of the job has been witnessing history; the triumph, despair and magic that live sport can provide.

Watching the Warriors trump the Melbourne Storm in 2011 stands out, a near-perfect performance that took them into the grand final.

I was fortunate to be among the

Nelsen, who led the All Whites on their unbeaten run at the 2010 Fifa World Cup, said he had no regrets about ending his playing days.

“You miss the banter and camaraderie . . . you miss it terribly. But I only missed it really terribly when I actually couldn’t do it, like, when I got a bit fatter and at 38, a bit older and grey-haired, now you can’t do it even if you wanted.

“Then you wonder ‘why didn’t I keep playing?’ But I always go back to that game, in the locker room at Stamford Bridge. It wasn’t a low moment but I was just done. It was just the right time. But God, I miss so many things about it.”

free for the first year if they used it as their primary domain, then $75 per year after that. After World Rugby, they were the next major stakeholder to adopt and word of mouth has spread since then.”

At times, Nelsen and Miller, whose friendship goes back almost 20 years, have to pinch themselves.

Their idea started from a conversation about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the global guardian of internet domains, who announced they were increasing the available portfolio of generic top level domain names in 2011.

It was a major step, as since 1996, only .com, .org, .gov, .net, .edu, .mil, .int and .co, as well as the accepted country abbreviations (.nz, .au etc) were available, and it set the tech world buzzing.

Nelsen and Miller saw opportunities in sport and their first target was football. They flew to Zurich twice to present the idea but were eventually told Fifa weren’t interested in a partnership. Cricket was, but the International Cricket Council got cold feet at the eleventh hour, while golf also changed tack after a promising beginning.

It means that plenty of potentially iconic names — Lords.cricket, St Andrews.golf, Brazil.football — are in the hands of unknown speculators.

That’s not the case with rugby and basketball, with both World 90,000 at the Azteca Stadium in 2013, which was a wonderful occasion, even if the All Whites v Mexico playoff was a mismatch.

Venus, Rubin Statham and Marina Erakovic provided some great memories with singles wins at the ASB Classic, while Bond and Eric Murray’s gold at the 2010 rowing world championships on Lake Karapiro was a unique moment.

Other highlights included the Kiwis beating the Kangaroos in 2014 (twice) and 2015, and the All Whites’ World Cup playoff in Peru in 2017.

But probably my favourite occasion didn’t involve a New Zealand team. Mate Ma’a Tonga’s unexpected run through the 2017

Rugby and Fiba keen on the concept since first being approached by Nelsen and Miller in 2010.

“Sometimes I wonder what we have done,” said Miller. “It’s like we saw a couple of ocean liners out in the harbour and decided to swim out and see if we could drag them into port. We almost drowned a couple of times but somehow managed to do it and now the world’s rugby and basketball communities are jumping on board.”

Their venture was ambitious, and they managed to thwart some megafunded operations (one of their competitors for .basketball had another 307 applications for other gTLDs, at US$185,000 each), mainly because they emphasised the partnership with the global governing bodies.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing, and their top down approach, while successful in attracting big stakeholders, hasn’t filtered down to the masses as fast as expected, but they are hopeful that will change.

They have since rebranded to be.rugby and be.basketball, and are about to drive initiatives to increase mass market awareness.

There will be a hit from the Covid19 pandemic but Nelsen says their venture is future-proofed.

“Sometimes we wonder what the hell we got into,” said Nelsen. “It’s definitely a legacy-type thing. As long as the internet doesn’t go away, this won’t be going away. Domain names will always be an integral part of internet infrastructure and we are seeing category specific

domains

Sometimes we wonder what the hell we got into. It’s definitely a legacy-type thing. Ryan Nelsen

rapidly taking hold. We have stuck to our guns and that has been the right play.”

“When you take the time to explain it, people get it,” said Miller. “The Blues rugby franchise is a great example. We suggested that theblues.co.nz could mean different things to different people. Is it, I’m feeling the blues, I’m listening to the blues, or a site for the colour blue? They got it immediately. Their domain blues.rugby clearly defines who they are and what they do. It’s pretty simple.”

Rugby League World Cup reached a crescendo in the semifinals against England.

The match was an intoxicating mix of physical carnage on the field, and beautifully sung hymns off it.

The Pacific team didn’t play well, overhyped and full of mistakes. That was until the last eight minutes, when they scored 18 unanswered points in an amazing comeback.

The Tongan crowd had never stopped cheering for their team, even when 20-0 down, and were now beside themselves with pride and joy, in an explosion of patriotism.

It was a reminder of what sport can do and why it’s been missed so much. Thanks for reading.