Like tobacco, booze adverts will become a thing of the past
The truth is that young New Zealanders just aren’t drinking like they used to.
The divorce between sport and alcohol funding is inevitable. But, like a lot of divorces, it won’t happen without lawyers, time, heat, outrage, and wild statements.
Exactly that happened when tobacco and sport were split up by Parliament, in a rare all party consensus, in 1995.
As hard as it might be to believe now, the tobacco industry, the good people who brought you lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, once had its nicotine stained fingers deep in the sporting pie in New Zealand.
The January men’s tennis tournament in Auckland was the Benson and Hedges tournament. Rothmans sponsored everything from softball to junior cricket.
In 1991 Parliament passed the ‘‘World Cup Cricket amendment’’ to make sure the New Zealand section of the ‘92 Benson and Hedges world cup could go ahead unimpeded. The Winfield Cup squeezed out an extra six months naming rights here to the end of ‘95 to allow the Warriors to join the Australian league competition.
Probably the most bizarre union of all came in the mid-1960s when a troupe of sporting legends, coach Arthur Lydiard, triple Olympic champion Peter Snell, All Black Don Clarke, and cricket’s Bert Sutcliffe all worked full time for Rothmans.
One of their major roles, clad in the sponsor’s uniform, was to go to schools up and down the country, preaching the benefits of playing sport. As a schoolboy I saw them at Waihi College, so can vouch for the fact they didn’t say one word about cigarettes. The subliminal message only occurred to me in later years: Smoking was part of normal life.
Banning tobacco sponsorship would be a long, fraught process through the 1980s.
The basic argument for being allowed to keep tobacco cash, one we’re likely to hear as the debate heats up over alcohol sponsorship, is that some sports would be dead in the water without the money.
What happened back then with tobacco means there’s a blueprint for any future government that decides to ban alcohol sponsorship.
First, give plenty of notice, as Helen Clark did in the late 1980s about tobacco bans, and secondly, when the ban does come in, consider tax payer funding for a limited time while sports find new private sponsors.
Smokefree was the banner used to cover government funding in the 1990s.
As it happens, there’s been a gradual parting of the ways between alcohol and sport in New Zealand anyway, with no better example than what’s happened with rugby.
Beer once virtually ruled the rugby world. After the 1987 World Cup victory, the magnificent celebration dinner at the then Regent hotel, delayed until after the Bledisloe Cup victory in Sydney, was hosted, not by the NZRU, but by Steinlager.
From 1994 to 1998 the only commercial branding on the All Black jersey was the Steinlager logo.
It seemed a logical fit. After all, for decades beer and rugby here had been a perfect case of ‘‘Hand, I’d like you to meet Glove.’’
There are occasional, dramatic, exceptions, but by and large, starting at the top with the All Blacks, heavy drinking is no longer part of the culture.
The sea change was sudden, and huge, and, time has proved, permanent.
The catalysts was a 40-26 thrashing by the Springboks in 2004, after which the All Blacks had a mock court session that involved such heavy drinking some there actually blacked out.
At rugby club level, anecdotal evidence suggests the involvement of liquor companies has waned considerably from the heady days of the 1990s when beer firms actively competed for pouring rights at clubs.
Why? Because, as one veteran club administrator in Auckland said to me last year, ‘‘the young buggers now don’t drink like they used to.’’
It seems possible that, just as the idea of allowing smoking in public places, much less promoting cigarettes on the back of sport, seems as weird and wrong today as child labour, it may be that after the uproar likely if banning alcohol sponsorship gets serious, we’ll look back and realise that sport and booze wasn’t really such a natural fit anyway.