VISION AND IMAGINATION
A brilliant five-eighths who settled in Auckland caught the imagination of Greg Bruce, even though this man was never an All Blacks regular, but he did win a stack of trophies with almost every team for which he played.
Aplayer like Lee Stensness is sometimes referred to as a fulcrum and the unique quality he possessed is sometimes called vision, but there are two problems with these descriptions: there is no player like Stensness and any attempt to put his qualities into words does a disservice to both him and the English language. What he had could not be reduced to words, nor to any other state that was perceptible to either the leading rugby minds of the era or its two All Blacks coaches.
It was 1993 when he moved from Manawatū to Auckland and reinvented midfield play as then understood. I was 16 and prided myself on two things: spelling and knowing stuff about rugby. I had easily achieved my 10,000 hours watching rugby and at least that much again listening to Murray Deaker. I no longer thought about the game so much as felt it as a physical force. What I’m trying to say is that when Stensness started playing for Auckland, I felt the change long before I could say much about it. Everything fell into place with a click that was almost audible. I had always loved Auckland rugby but with Stensness’ arrival that feeling became something much more like spirituality.
A backline is such a complex system, with so many interdependent parts performing so many tasks at such high speed, with so many variables, it is impossible to say with any confidence how the contribution of any one individual alters the system. Stensness’ great contribution was not so much to alter the system, but to provide a sort of controlling intelligence for it, such that he had a multiplier effect on the talents of the players around him. He was able to process enormous amounts of data: positioning and movement of the other 29 players on the field, effects of weather and referee, field position, game state, relative player fatigue and skills, strengths and weaknesses, and so on – and to process all that data instantly. Playing in the era before rugby was remodelled by big data and statistical optimisation, Stensness WAS big data and statistical optimisation. He was a high-powered computer with a great left foot.
What elevated Stensness above other great computers of the game was his quality of imagination. Someone like Dan Carter could read a game and take the right option and had the skills to execute at a near-perfect level, but he was an efficiency engine, built for winning. Stensness would win you games, of course, as he demonstrated for every team he ever played for, including the All Blacks, but victory is just a step on the road to transcendence. He was less a player and more a prophet of the beautiful game.
His imagination extended far beyond the field. When he received the ball, time stopped, his consciousness departed his body and merged with some higher power, and his decisions became less about efficiency of outcome and more about what it meant to be human. He scanned the environment in high dimensionality and optimised for beauty, truth and meaning. Call it vision if you must: poetry cannot be easily reduced to prose.
The Blues’ backlines of 1996-98 were less a collection of players than a predatory organism capable of infinitely omnidirectional movement and apocalyptic strikepower. They were the only collection of players I have ever seen whose aim seemed to be to render a game of rugby as a story: a series of thematically coherent events, rising to a climax and producing some greater insight. It was impossible to leave Eden Park after a game during those three years and not feel changed on a molecular level. It would be intellectually dishonest to claim that was all because of one player, but I can’t imagine it would have happened without him. He was pure beauty, pure light. He shone through the greyness of my late teens, gave shape to my socially shapeless weekends, suggested a template for better living.
It is unlikely I will ever see a player like him again. The space in the game for artists, poets and prophets has long been
‘What elevated Stensness above other great computers of the game was his quality of imagination.’
shrinking, but the insights and systems now being imposed by the combination of big data and AI will squash it forever. This will be good for the teams who have the money and nous to invest in such systems, and for whatever proportion of their supporters care only about trophies. For the rest of us, it’s a disaster.
In journalism, too, the freedom to express oneself joyfully and meaningfully, unconstrained by the repressive demands of efficiency, is under threat from the combination of big data and AI. It’s already possible to cut and paste an article like this and have CHATGPT summarise it in just a few sentences and seconds. From an efficiency point of view, it’s undoubtedly the right option. But is efficiency the right basis on which to live?
Among the players preferred to Stensness in the years after John Hart dropped him from the All Blacks: Walter Little, Mark Mayerhofler and Alama Ieremia. All good or (in Little’s case) great players, but at best they were the right answers to the wrong question: the 1990s equivalent of an international coach today asking a custom-designed chatbot to interrogate the dataset on the country’s second fives and tell him the highest performing.
It’s impossible to say whether the All Blacks would have won a lot more games had Lee Stensness played more than eight Tests, but what we know for certain is that they didn’t win much after dropping him. Beauty is truth and truth beauty, and I know of nothing more beautiful than that.