We’re really starting something

Jeremy Elwood

I’m currently spending my weekends acting as the ground announcer for New Zealand’s newest sporting franchise, the Auckland Tuatara baseball team. Like the Breakers, Warriors and Phoenix in their respective competitions, the Tuatara play in the professional Australian Baseball League and these weekends mark their first home games at McLeod Park in Auckland.

They’ve been great events, both on and off the diamond, which itself has been transformed from a nice enough sports field in West Auckland to a professional-level facility in an incredibly short amount of time. The team is the same, a group of young, talented players from all over the world, including several home-grown stars, who have come together in a matter of weeks to ply their trade against far more established Australian sides. On the opening weekend, that work paid off as they notched their first wins against the threetime reigning champions from Brisbane.

The small group of incredibly dedicated and passionate people who have made all this happen – the team behind the team – have worked towards this moment for nine years. I haven’t been involved for nearly that long, but it still feels great to be even a small part of the beginning of something, to be getting in on the ground floor, as they say. (Strange expression that; I’m not sure where else you can get into most places, but I’ll let it slide.)

New things always start like this. An idea or a dream from one person attracts a handful of others who see its potential. Passion is contagious, so those people attract more people, and slowly an organisation or a movement is born. No matter how many times they are told that their idea is impossible, unnecessary or unwanted, if you give the right people the time and resources, anything can happen.

Of course, if that uniting passion is to harm or destroy, the outcome can be terrible. A team can rapidly turn into a mob with terrifying results. Too often the new things that come into this world are conceived not in dreams, but in nightmares.

So to be a part of something like the Tuatara cheers me right up. To see the stands filling with families and fans, all coming together to watch a brand new team play what is still, for many in New Zealand, a brand new sport makes me smile. To see the look of pride on the faces of the people who have been driving this dream, their dream, for so long as they finally see it come true brings a tear to my eye. And to see the players experiencing the chance to fulfil their own dreams makes me proud to announce their names.

Michele A’Court

It’s exciting to be there at the start of things: sports teams, starts-ups, new relationships, tiny babies. There is something special about having a hand in the creation of something. I bet if I asked you to name the things you have done that you’re most proud of, a fair few things on that list would be about beginnings. I’m nobody’s life coach, but I reckon that’s a great thing to do on this first day of the last month of year: literally make that list of the positive things you’ve put into the world.

There is a memorable line in Johnathan Larson’s award-winning show, Rent – the 1990 rock opera based on Puccini’s La boheme – that goes: ‘‘The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.’’ We won’t stop the world going to hell in a handbasket just with a ceasefire. We have to fill it with new and kinder things.

I like beginnings. I am thrilled, for example, whenever I am properly aware that an idea has just arrived. Back in August, on a Wednesday morning on the stairs between my home and my office, an idea for a new project arrived, fully formed, in my head. It landed so hard I had to sit down for a bit to appreciate the moment before heading back to the office to write it all down.

We are drawn to beginnings and to endings, though our relationship with endings is more complex. Relief that a thing is finished, or sorry for the loss. I have a client who sends me a wall calendar at the end of each year, ready for the next one. His covering letter begins, every time, with the same line: ‘‘Well, I can’t believe another year is over.’’ And you can feel the mix of shock that it went so fast, and relief that the bloody thing is done and dusted.

I am pretty sure we invented the calendar, not just to keep track of days, but to give ourselves this sense of beginnings and endings. Bang the dust off our sandals at the end of the old year, make resolutions to be better in the new one.

I have, of course, not done a tap of work on that project that landed, fully formed into my head, since it arrived because I am in the middle of too many other things. And being in the middle of everything is hard.

I am in the middle of my Christmas preparations. By which I mean I haven’t actually made it to a shop yet and would cheerfully punch the face of the next person who tells me they’ve finished theirs. Will try harder for Christmas 2019.