Good on ya, Baz: We don’t mind good guy
Brendon McCullum coaches the England cricket team against the Black Caps at Lords, and the universal reaction is, “good on you, Baz”.
Could it be that as a nation we’ve matured to the point where we can see that in the world of professional sport, calling a fellow New Zealander a traitor for finding a new paymaster is pathetically narrow-minded?
The contrast with the outrage when, in particular, Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth signed with a Swiss billionaire to lead an America’s Cup challenge against Team New Zealand could hardly be more stark.
It’s true McCullum’s elevation to the job with England has moved one commentator here to claim that “many Kiwis find the question of [McCullum’s] loyalty confronting” and that past actions suggest “McCullum’s loyalty is primarily to himself. The fact he is now prepared to coach against his own country emphasises that fact.”
The truth is that the vast majority of Kiwis don’t care.
My only caveat about the public’s reasonable attitude towards McCullum now is that perhaps it isn’t maturity at all.
They just like the man.
Even casual cricket followers became aware that in October, 2014, four months before the ODI World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, after a scouting visit to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Black Caps had a meeting led by McCullum and coach Mike Hesson that changed the course of our cricket.
As then senior paceman Kyle Mills recalls, they worked out “what a New Zealander who was a cricket fan would like to see us do”.
“We decided we wouldn’t follow the English model, nor the Australian one. We’d try to find a New Zealand way.”
Guided by McCullum and Hesson, they decided they’d aim to play a natural game and be entertaining.
In the field, they would throw everything at the ball.
“If that meant sometimes you’d crash into an advertising hoarding trying to save a four, so be it,” says Mills.
And they’d drop the confrontational, faux bully boy stuff, letting how they played do the talking for them. By the end of the 2015 World Cup, New Zealanders loved the team and McCullum.
So perhaps affection for him, rather than a more adult approach to sport, is the main reason McCullum coaching against New Zealand at the high temple of cricket in London only worries the sort of grouches who used to ring Newstalk ZB and complain about his tattoos.
Coutts, on the other hand, was demonised when after successfully defending the America’s Cup for Team New Zealand in 2000, it was announced he and Brad Butterworth had signed with a Swiss billionaire to challenge New Zealand.
How bitter did that get? An antiCoutts campaign called Black Heart gained such support that at the opening ceremony for the 2003 Cup in Auckland, Coutts, who would eventually helm Alinghi to victory, was surrounded by bodyguards.
We’re seeing some of the same bitterness towards Grant Dalton in the decision to take the America’s Cup to Barcelona in 2024.
“The haters will always hate,” he told a British journalist after the announcement.
Dalton is not a man with easy charm, which is possibly a major reason why there’s such resentment over the move to Spain in 2024, and the fact he has become a wealthy man, selling his Remuera house for $16.55 million in 2018.
The reality is that those involved in running successful America’s Cup campaigns have always made large amounts of money.
But there was never any major disquiet over Sir Peter Blake, a much more convivial public figure, and his Team New Zealand directors collecting $11m from the campaign’s defence budget in 2000.
It’s not as simple as a beauty contest when it comes to feelings about sportspeople, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm if, when potential controversy looms, you’re seen as one of the good guys.