Howwe dropped the ball
mark in boxing and rugby that they began to attract regular attention from the colonial press. Former wrestler Herbert Augustus Slade (Nga¯puhi) became the first Ma¯ori athlete to garner global recognition when he was knocked out in the third round of aworld heavweight boxing title fight by John L Sullivan atnew York’s Madison Square Garden in 1883.
Slade, hyped by US boxing promoters as the Ma¯ori Mauler or the South Seas Savage, pocketed US$4000 (NZ$150,000 today). His title tilt made headline news in New Zealand (some six weeks after the fight) with the same report carried by various papers. It described Slade as ‘‘the Maori’’ (although The Otago Witness chose to insert the word ‘‘half-caste’’).
Sports reporting snubs
Thomas Ellison proved one of the stars of an ambitious 1888-89 rugby tour through New Zealand, Britain and Australia by anew Zealand Natives squad. Educated at Te Aute College, he became an interpreter in the Native Land Court and one of the first Ma¯ori lawyers. It was he who recommended thenew Zealand Rugby Union adopt a black uniform with a silver fern motif.
The Wellington forward became, in effect, the first All Blacks captain, leading the first officially sanctioned New Zealand team to Australia in 1893. He later wrote a seminal book, The Art of Rugby. He died in October 1904 after contracting tuberculosis.
At 37, Ellisonwas a high achiever in both professional and sporting circles, yet his death was all but ignored by The Evening Post, Wellington’s afternoon daily. It consigned his passing to the 19th – and final – item of a Personalmatters column.
The question remains: would his tragic loss have drawn more coverage, outside his native province, Otago, had he been Pa¯keha¯?
It took until the great George Nepia, the ever-present fullback from the 1924 Invincibles, for ama¯ori sports star to become a genuine household name. Nepia blazed across the nation’s newspapers with his every move, including his switch to rugby league in Britain. But Dick Garratt, the Ma¯ori Sports Awards (Te Tohu Taakaro O Aotearoa) executive director, says even Nepia wasn’t ‘‘recognised till later in life. He was probably more recognised overseas than here’’.
Garratt is also president of the Aotearoa Ma¯ori Tennis Association and cites a couple of examples from his own code. ‘‘Sir Maui Pomare won the Universities Tennis Championship of Americawhen he was studying in America in 1899, but it wasn’t reported here.’’
Multi-talented Nga¯puhi sportsman Peter Smithwasn’t picked for the Davis Cup team in 1947, despite beatingmost of his rivals, and doing well in an exhibitionmatch against ¯ A two touring American Davis Cuppers. His exclusion was a case ‘‘of the colour bar raising its head again’’, Garratt says, and not widely reported.
Garratt feels the media should also have given greater prominence to Hoani Jack Macdonald (Rangita¯ne), one of Aotearoa’s greatest all-round sports stars in the 1930s. He was ama¯oriall Black from 1926 to 1935 and won gold and silver medals in rowing at the 1930 Empire Games. He and fellow Marlburian Lawrence Jackson (also known as Lawrence Woodgate) were the first Ma¯ori Olympians in the rowing eight at Los Angeles in 1932. Macdonald joined Nepia in rugby league in England from 1935 to 1939. Perhaps only his hometown Marlborough Express recognised the extent of Macdonald’s greatness. Garratt is helping write a book on the career of Ruia Morrison, who blazed a trail for female tennis players in New Zealand in the 1950s. He thinks she got more media respect overseas than at home. She made the fourth round (quarterfinals) at Wimbledon in 1957 (still the highest placing by a New Zealandwoman), but that was buried in the sixth paragraph of a story angled on Australianmen, in a New Zealand Press Association report published by our dailies.
Recognising Ma¯ori sports achievement
In recent decades, there has been extensive coverage of sporting achievement by Ma¯ori but it has tended to be noted without a specific Ma¯ori context.
A notable exception was a Taranaki Daily News report after golfer Michael Campbell returned to Hawera’s Taiporohenui Marae with the 2005 US Open trophy. Campbell had played the final round at Pinehurst, North Carolina, proudly sporting his own clothing brand bordered withma¯ori motifs. The Daily News noted how Campbell paid homage to his tı¯puna at Taiporohenui.
‘‘When I holed that final putt, the image that has gone around the world, I looked towards the heavens and I thanked my ancestors for giving me the strength to pull through. We are one together, Nga¯ti Ruanui and Nga¯ti Rauru. I felt so proud to be Ma¯ori.’’
Borell says there is ‘‘a dearth of conversation around identity’’ in the sportingmedia, noting reports in the general media ‘‘don’t necessarily celebrate someone’s iwi affiliation, yet for Ma¯ori media outlets, it’s of paramount importance’’.
‘‘[For the media], they are All Blacks before anything else. There’s a hierarchy of identity there that is quite telling.’’
For example, UFC stars Kai Kara-france and Brad Riddell have Ma¯ori ethnicity, ‘‘but I don’t believe I’ve seen them identified as Ma¯ori athletes. Their identity is connected back to City Kick Boxing, their gym in Auckland.
‘‘Think of [canoeist] Lisa Carrington. She’s won numerous Ma¯ori sports awards, she’s winning Halbergs, Olympic gold medals . . . but how often do we speak of her as a Ma¯ori athlete? We don’t necessarily see that.’’
Last May, Stuff published a passionate plea by former All Blacks prop Bill Bush, urging NZ Rugby ‘‘not to forget the Ma¯ori All Blacks’’ but, too often, coverage of a national team with awhakapapa stretching back to 1888-89 has been almost an afterthought. Papers Past, an archive that dates from 1839 to 1950, has thousands of references to the ‘‘Maori All Blacks’’ rugby team.
Yet that description fell out of media favour during the second half of the 20th century, with a general, persistent feeling there could only be one All Blacks team. That prevailed until recently, despite New Zealand Rugby officially rebranding the team the Ma¯ori All Blacks from 2012.
The 2010 Ma¯ori Sport and Ma¯ori In Sport study by Massey University professor Tim Mccreanor and a team of researchers found Pa¯keha¯ media coverage ‘‘presents Ma¯ori participation and achievement as limited and aberrant’’ and ‘‘Ma¯ori in sport’’ articles ‘‘subsumed Ma¯ori within monocultural sporting codes’’.
While that study is 10 years old, Borell did a ‘‘quick search on Stuff’’ in November to see how many specifically Ma¯ori sports storieswere published now. ‘‘Very little came up,’’ he says. ‘‘I looked at various codes, and there was a report on the Taranaki Wha¯nui rugby league tournament, but at the same time there’s a Rotorua national Ma¯ori rugby league tournament every year, and thatwasn’t covered, and nor was the recentnew Zealand Ma¯ori Residents game against the NZRL Residents.’’
Borell says Te Matatini, the kapa haka national tournament held every two years, is ‘‘one of the pinnacles of Ma¯ori sporting performance’’, yet general media coveragewas ‘‘almost non-existent’’ despite it being ‘‘a headline story every day for that whole week’’ inma¯ori media outlets.
‘‘It attracts global audiences because it’s the pinnacle of indigenous performance. Yet we don’t celebrate it as sport here. But haka is sport for Ma¯ori . . . and because it attracts people from Australia, it’s like aworld cup . . . It’s the biggest stage forma¯ori sport that we have, yet there’s very little media coverage.’’
Ma¯ori masculinity
Another issue that concerns Ma¯ori sports researchers is the longestablished trend for media to define Ma¯ori sports people by their physicality. Waikato University Professor Brendan Hokowhitu highlighted the issue in his 2004 study, Tackling Ma¯ori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport.
Hokowhitu aimed to ‘‘deconstruct one of the dominant discourses surrounding Ma¯ori men, a discourse thatwas constructed to limit and homogenise, and reproduce an acceptable and imaginedma¯ori masculinity’’. This was based, he wrote, on settlers perceiving themselves ‘‘as superior and normal, and consequently discredited Ma¯ori and tikangama¯ori’’. It led to Ma¯ori being praised for ‘‘physical prowess’’ and a ‘‘warrior-like nature’’, while limiting ‘‘ta¯ne access to privileges enjoyed by Pa¯keha¯ men’’.
Hokowhitu said the ‘‘dominant discourse, through many institutions, perversely limits Ma¯ori men, and many Ma¯ori swallow these constructs’’.
Our search shows colonial newspapers perpetuated such stereotypes. The New Zealand Times’
obituary of rugby star Jack Taiaroa in 1904 said hewas ‘‘the greatest’’ player of the groundbreaking 1884 tour, ‘‘an india-rubber man, nuggety, strong, fast, and, with all the cunning of his race, he was a rugby proposition that could only be tackled successfully with an axe’’.
Borell says the practice continues today, citing the way ‘‘the physicality of Ma¯ori players is still discussed by [television rugby] commentators, who talk aboutma¯ori being ‘big, strong, fast’, and Pa¯keha¯ players as ‘agile, wily, clever’.’’ Highlighting physicality ‘‘tarnishes [Ma¯ori and Pasifika] athletes’’, with the media rarely ‘‘celebrating how hard they work. Ma¯ori and Pasifika kids have to work harder than their Pa¯keha¯ counterparts, for a number of reasons, including socio-economic factors’’.
Dame Noeline Taurua, coach of the world champion Silver Ferns netball team, is the daughter of late Nga¯puhi leader Kingi Taurua. She asked herself, ‘‘What have I read, specifically aboutma¯ori [sportspeople] orma¯ori sport . . . and to be honest, I couldn’t remember anything specifically.’’
As a Silver Ferns player in the 1990s, Taurua ‘‘wasn’t one of those put forward to speak [to themedia]. I was never one of those people seen as a leader, or captain material . . . It didn’t worryme, to be honest, I was quite happy just being in the background.’’
She believes many Ma¯ori athletes ‘‘will take a back foot and won’t necessarily put themselves in the front, unless you are told to . . . I think that’s ingrained in us’’.
Taurua thinks it’s vital for media coverage to reflect sport’s diversity, and it’s ‘‘really important’’ to have Ma¯ori sporting role models, which is a ‘‘challenge and a function not only of the media, but sporting organisations also. We all have a part to play.
‘‘We’ve only got fivemillion people in our country, and really our strength is our people, and our diversity and uniqueness.’’