How we dropped the ball
Ma¯ ori have been among Aotearoa New Zealand’s highest sports achievers, yet have too often been overlooked or marginalised in a monocultural media environment that failed to support Ma¯ ori athletes when they most needed powerful backing.
Newspapers did the cause of Ma¯ ori sport an egregious disservice in the 20th century through failing to oppose the exclusion of Ma¯ ori from All Black tours to South Africa in 1928, 1949 and 1960. The meek acceptance of the New Zealand Rugby Union’s (NZRU) racist policy stands out as a particular injustice of Stuff’s review of how our newspapers have reported Ma¯ ori sports achievements and issues.
Apart from a brief show of solidarity by The Press (which called for the 1949 tour to be cancelled, but supported the exclusion of Ma¯ ori for the 1960 tour), the majority of editors merely wrung their ink-stained hands as star All Blacks like George Nepia, Jimmy Mill, Johnny Smith, Vince Bevan, Stan (Tiny) Hill and Pat Walsh were denied the chance to represent their country in South Africa due to their Ma¯ ori heritage.
The Dominion argued in 1960 that the New Zealand rugby team should be known as the ‘‘All White All Blacks’’, but it still insisted the tour should go ahead.
By 1960, our newspapers were out of step with public opinion. Almost 160,000 people (from a population of 2.3 million) signed a ‘‘No Maoris No Tour’’ petition that year. While newspapers did report the views of prominent Ma¯ ori, including Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck), Sir A¯ pirana Ngata and Erurera Tirikatene, who opposed the exclusionary policy, they did not campaign against it at a time when newspaper editorials were influential opinion shapers.
Newspapers tended to concur with the NZRU’s patronising patter that it would be unfair to expose Ma¯ ori players to potential vilification by racists in South Africa. ‘‘Seeker’’, a Waikato Times columnist, claimed in 1927 that the Rugby Union had ‘‘shown the truest consideration and honour for the Ma¯ ori players by leaving them at home’’, claiming that had they toured and been ‘‘refused on board a tram by a conductor, the All Blacks in force might have turned the car over’’. Seeker concluded with: ‘‘How fortunate we are in New Zealand to have no race problem!’’.
The lack of support for Ma¯ ori athletes was a glaring stain on our sports coverage. Scan the Papers Past digital newspaper archives and you’ll find scant mention of traditional Ma¯ ori sports.
Sport historians Greg Ryan and Geoff Watson noted in their 2018 book, Sport and the New Zealanders: A History, that Ma¯ ori had their own popular sporting pursuits before colonisation, including teka (a form of darts), tamahekoheke (spear throwing), karo (where participants evaded and parried weapons), wha¯ to¯ to¯ (wrestling), running and swimming events and waka hoehoe racing.
Phil Borell (Nga¯ ti Ranginui/Nga¯ ti Tuwharetoa), a lecturer in Te Ma¯ ori and Ma¯ ori performing arts at Aotahi, the School of Ma¯ ori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury, has a strong research interest in Ma¯ ori sport. He says Ma¯ ori sports ‘‘weren’t considered sports’’ by Pa¯ keha¯ because ‘‘they didn’t have the same structure, rules and rigidity’’ as introduced sports.
Borell says it would have been ‘‘threatening [for Pa¯ keha¯ ] to see it as sport. Look at the colonial project at the time. You can’t give kudos to the people you’re colonising because that’s a threat to your own colonial position, so a lot of things we did were submerged.’’
While Ma¯ ori became involved in popular introduced sports such as rowing, cricket and horse racing, it wasn’t until they began making a 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 a world heavweight boxing title fight by John L Sullivan at New 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 a New 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 the New 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, Ellison was 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 Personal Matters 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 a Ma¯ 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 America when he was studying in America in 1899, but it wasn’t reported here.’’
Multi-talented Nga¯ puhi sportsman Peter Smith wasn’t picked for the Davis Cup team in 1947, despite beating most of his rivals, and doing well in an exhibition match against 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 a Ma¯ ori All 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 Zealand woman), but that was buried in the sixth paragraph of a story angled on Australian men, 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 with Ma¯ 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 sporting media, 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 a whakapapa 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 stories were 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 that wasn’t covered, and nor was the recent New 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 coverage was ‘‘almost non-existent’’ despite it being ‘‘a headline story every day for that whole week’’ in Ma¯ 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 a world cup . . . It’s the biggest stage for Ma¯ 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 that was constructed to limit and homogenise, and reproduce an acceptable and imagined Ma¯ ori masculinity’’. This was based, he wrote, on settlers perceiving themselves ‘‘as superior and normal, and consequently discredited Ma¯ ori and tikanga Ma¯ 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 he was ‘‘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 about Ma¯ 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 about Ma¯ ori [sportspeople] or Ma¯ 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 the media]. I was never one of those people seen as a leader, or captain material . . . It didn’t worry me, 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 five million people in our country, and really our strength is our people, and our diversity and uniqueness.’’