Home run: Kiwi qualities at their finest
Enter here at your peril. All objectivity is out the window. These are the rantings of a diamond geezer who’s been playing, coaching or writing about softball for 45 years.
So, of course I’m going to plead that the Black Sox should get the recognition such sustained success deserves.
The Black Sox are New Zealand sport’s blue-collar champions – throwbacks to the hazy days of amateur sport. They best reflect the quintessential Kiwi character – battlers from the bottom of the world who don’t need buckets of government cash to beat the best the Japanese, Canadians, Americans and Australians can hurl at them.
The floating sports fan loves the fact the Black Sox can win a world title and go straight back to day jobs, driving diggers and painting houses. That’s why they won the People’s Choice at the Halberg Awards for 2013.
Yet they get only token recognition from Halberg Award judges, funding agencies, civic authorities, corporate sponsors and television moguls. While cricket enjoys inner-city venues, softball is shoved out to the suburban outlands. Two of its leading venues are smack, bang next to sewage treatment plants.
A lot of softball myths persist. Let’s kick the hoariest into touch first. ‘‘Few countries in the world care about softball.’’
Few countries in the world care about rugby union, cricket, rugby league, netball or America’s Cup yachting either, but that doesn’t stop us celebrating when the All Blacks, Kiwis or Silver Ferns win World Cups. Nor should it.
‘‘The Black Sox are New Zealand sport’s blue-collar champions – throwbacks to the hazy days of amateur sport.’’ Tony Smith
Softball doesn’t have the same numbers in New Zealand as rugby, football or netball – and here’s why: It’s a devilishly difficult game to master.
The hand-eye co-ordination of the Black Sox’s best batters is something to behold. Numerous scientific surveys have proven that hitting a softball or baseball hurled at over 120kmh is one of the most difficult feats in the sporting world. Try standing in a batter’s box 14 metres from an elite pitcher and hit a ball rising, dropping or curving across the plate.
The Black Sox do it in a breeze. They are elite athletes. How much better would they be if they, and their main rivals, were full-time pros? But would that detract from the legend of a team that bunked down in a cockroachinfested hostel to win a world championships in South Africa?
The Black Sox aren’t running bottle drives and chook raffles. They get around $250,000 a year from High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPNZ) and a rumoured six-figure sum from principal sponsor Golden Homes. That’s enough for a major North American tour or world series each year, a few domestic training camps and some coaching and sports science support. But the New Zealand Rugby sevens men’s team – which failed to make a final in 2017 – got almost four times as much from HPSNZ ($900,000) despite being part of a multimillion dollar professional sport. Is that fair?
The Black Sox’s home run hero Joel Evans said it best when he returned home this week with the world series trophy. ‘‘It’s not about the money, this is a family sport.’’ Every family strives for external recognition, but it’s what happens within the four walls that counts. Softball, having made a headlong dive into home plate, will dust off its black jersey, cock a snook at the critics and get on with doing what it does best – winning world titles.
‘‘The tournament was held in ‘deadset the middle of nowhere’, Canada, and broadcast to hardly anyone.’’ Liam Hyslop