Athletes are not tall poppies
These are the days of red poppies and remembrance. We are unlikely to be wearing our usual poppies in these Covid times, but when I look around the spiritual landscape, I see a different poppy field than in years past. There are still the tall poppies waving in the breeze, but these tall poppies are now the nurses and supermarket workers and food bank volunteers and police men and women, and all the rest of the army of humble heroes.
The landscape has changed. There is not a sportsman and woman in sight in the field of tall poppies. And yet it is only a couple of months ago when Israel Adesanya was winning the male athlete-of-the-year at the Halberg Awards and telling us that, well, we didn’t look up to him enough.
I enjoyed Adesanya’s sharp clothes and what he described as his mustard jacket. I enjoyed the speech. It was eloquent, it was unusual and here is a quick reminder of how Adesanya finished his oration.
‘‘I really need to say this New Zealand. We have this culture of tall poppy syndrome which is messed up . . . When you see one of us rising, you want to tear him down, because you feel inadequate, you want to call it humble.
‘‘I am extraordinarily humble . . . If you see one of us shining, whether it be the netball team, the Black Caps, the sailors, pump them up, embrace them, if they win, we win, if I win, you win. Understand that.’’
It was terrific stuff, but it was also poppycock. I don’t want to diminish what Adesanya has achieved and I know it appeals to many people. I was in Rarotonga for his last fight and many of the locals were gathered at a bar, drinking, and joking, and cheering, despite a fragmentary live stream that kept disappearing.
But I am happy to offer the opinion that bashing someone up in a human version of cock fighting is not perhaps a job that truly enriches lives. Of course some will disagree. Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently declared WWE professional wrestling ‘‘an essential service’’. I kid you not.
I am also of the opinion that the accompanying braggadocio of all these combat sports is demeaning. Just recently Adesanya called a rival ‘‘a Catholic school girl because he’s probably been suppressed his whole life’’. Adesanya has tweeted: ‘‘Never let anyone tell me how to think of myself or who I was. I always knew I was the one.’’
That sounds slightly Messianic to me. And there is plenty more in a similar vein from the man who calls himself ‘‘extraordinarily humble’’. So I guess it’s a question of perception. I don’t see Adesanya as a tall poppy. I see him as a blade of grass, the same of the rest of us, with all our multiple human failings.
The same is true of Beauden Barrett. I remember being astonished when he was quoted in Peter Bills’s book The Jersey as saying: ‘‘It’s the Kiwi way. But there is a bit of tall-poppy syndrome in new Zealand I don’t agree with.
‘‘I don’t think that’s healthy – I think you should be encouraged and applauded when you do great things. It just does annoy me when the general public bring people down to earth when really, we should be applauding great achievements.
‘‘I don’t think the All Blacks are revered enough in their own country . . . whereas overseas, you do really appreciate the support you get over there for what the All Blacks achieve.’’
Not revered enough in their own country? Heaven help us. For five years Barrett has been the subject of deafening applause and hero worship in these lands. There has been the odd voice which has articulated specific technical weaknesses and put forward the opinion that Barrett is over-rated as a number 10. But that is largely it. So perhaps the young man needs to get a little bit of perspective.
Perhaps he needs to take a look at Sarah Hunter, the captain of the England women’s rugby team. Hunter is paid peanuts compared to Barrett, under $60,000 a year. Yet she said that she would be willing to take a pay cut to save jobs and help the country, because as thousands were showing her, a ‘‘little sacrifice and selflessness can go a long way’’.
I am afraid I have not seen that collective sacrifice from our top players yet. They have agreed to freezing team assembly and tournament fees and the vast majority of player performance incentives. Er, but you’re not assembling and you’re not playing.
They also agreed to from May 1, freezing 15 per cent of the players’ 2020 base retainers for those paid more than $50,000 per year, with this rising to 30 per cent in September.
Don’t be fooled. Unlike so many others, including employers at New Zealand Rugby and the All Blacks coach, the players have not agreed to a cut and the freeze comes a month later than the management, coaches and workers. The players have just put part of their salary on ice, which gives them the right to thaw it and claim it back in a year’s time. This is the problem with collective bargaining. When you have 18 agents dealing with multiple vested interests, good intentions get frozen.
There will be players who are desperately unhappy that they are not taking a 20 per cent cut or more. They will look across the ditch and see Aussie senior pro Michael Hooper setting an example by taking a cut to over 60 per cent of his salary.
But that’s not what our All Blacks are doing. They are part of a collective that is looking bad right now.
Admittedly, it’s nothing like as bad as the sordid world of the English Premier League where Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil is refusing to take a cut to his salary of over $NZ700,000 per week. Ozil’s agent, aka Doctor Faustus, then cautioned us that ‘‘pressure on an individual player to agree changes’’ is ‘‘very dangerous’’. He warned the clubs that their behaviour could be illegal and to be ‘‘very, very careful’’. What world do these people live in? Well happily their swamp is nowhere near the sunny field of tall poppies where the true heroes live. We thank those people who have been looking after us for the past month, whilst putting their own health at risk. That’s what being ‘‘very, very careful’’ really looks like. That is what is ‘‘very dangerous’’ really looks like.
So I think you have a choice to make. When sport starts up again, what are you going to do? Are you going to watch the overpaid ‘stars’, so many of whom have let us down in these times? Or are you going to stop subsidising their ridiculous wages and go down the road and support your local club and community?
A doctor friend of mine from university, who now works in Auckland, posted a few weeks ago that he was ‘‘f . . . ing terrified’’ but he had taken the hippocratic oath, so he would be out on the frontline when needed. That’s a tall poppy. That’s the Anzac spirit. We salute you, Simon, and all the rest of the humble heroes.
Essie Davis never had any doubts about returning to the role of Phryne Fisher, who resurfaces in Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, the movie sequel to the popular Australian series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.
‘‘It’s a joy to come back to her,’’ Davis says, speaking by phone from Tasmania. ‘‘I would never say never to Phryne in any series or film, but it has got to be a story that’s worth telling. There’s no point repeating stories just because they’re successful.’’
The original series, adapted from the books of Kelly Greenwood about a stylish detective who fights for the underdog, ended its three-season run in 2015 with a hint of things to come – if the producers could manage it.
‘‘When we made the original Miss Fisher, we didn’t want it to end. No-one did. But Essie moved to London with her family and it was going to become increasingly difficult to bring her back to Australia,’’