Sport
History should not blind us to reality when oncepopular sporting contests have done their dash.
History should not blind us to reality when once-popular sporting contests have done their dash.
Sport’s history and traditions are part of its appeal. They evoke a self-contained, regulated world, whose heroes are in a direct line of descent from the great names of the past, and into which the upheavals, anxieties and horrors of the real world seldom intrude.
The year’s biggest sports event here will be the British and Irish Lions tour. The Lions have been coming to New Zealand since 1888. Despite the hype and high ticket prices we associate with their visits, the Lions are an anachronism: one of the few remaining links to rugby’s amateur era, they are a composite team, hastily thrown together every four years to play on the other side of the world. That said, it seems unlikely the 2017 crop will include anyone as studiously eccentric as English lock David Marques who, throughout the 1959 tour of Australia and New Zealand, never left the team hotel without his bowler hat and brolly.
The biggest event in world sport this month is the Masters golf tournament at the Augusta National club in Georgia, an event that began in 1934 and whose magical setting and traditions
– the winner’s green jacket, the caddies’ white overalls – bestow a timeless quality.
But reverence for tradition can reflect a tendency to live in the past. Until 1983, Masters participants had to use Augusta National caddies, rather than their usual bagmen and, in order to be an Augusta National caddie, you had to be an African-American man, which puts a slightly different complexion on the white overalls. (Augusta didn’t admit African-Americans as members until 1990; women had to wait until 2012.)
Augusta’s co-founder Clifford Roberts supposedly said, “As long as I’m alive, golfers will be white and caddies will be black.” There was an echo of this proclamation in Augusta chairman Billy Payne’s archly dismissive public rebuke of four-time champion and serial adulterer Tiger Woods, upon the latter’s post-disgrace comeback in 2010: “It’s not simply the degree of his conduct that’s so egregious here; it’s the fact that he disappointed all of us and, more importantly, our kids and grandkids.”
Since Payne was speaking on behalf of his members, and since Augusta has been described as “a bastion of power, wealth, privilege, influence and control”, perhaps he could have explained why a self-made black man should be
answerable to rich white kids.
History and tradition have their place, but they can also blind us to reality, and there are a couple of realities that sports administrators ignore at their peril: times change and, if you don’t change with them, you run the risk of irrelevance; and professional sport is a business, operating in the entertainment sector.
The Wellington Sevens have been going since 2000, a reasonable length of time in this day and age and long enough to persuade some that the struggling event is part of the fabric of New Zealand rugby and therefore must be preserved.
That stance ignores the reality that most Kiwi sports fans simply aren’t very interested in sevens. As the uniquely qualified Martin Snedden argues, the Wellington Sevens has “done its dash” because Kiwis by and large don’t “connect” with the game and the on-field product isn’t terribly compelling. It may have been when Christian Cullen and Jonah Lomu were taking part, but those days are gone.
The event thrived for a while because it became fashionable: young people went through a phase in which dressing up and going to the sevens was seen as a cool thing to do. But fashion, by definition, is ephemeral. Now the Wellington Sevens are like karaoke: a fad whose time has passed.
Times change and, if you don’t change with them, you run the risk of irrelevance.