Faith no more Trust issues over NZ sport’s top awards
The drums are beating for netball’s Silver Ferns to win the Supreme Award at the Halberg Awards on Thursday. Few would begrudge the netballers the big gong. After all, they pipped England and Australia to claim the world title they’d last won in 2003. And, coming off their horror time at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, when they couldn’t beat even Malawi, it was a remarkable turnaround.
I just wish I had more faith in the Halberg voting process.
The 30-strong voting academy, which comprises mainly former sports stars, with a smattering of journalists, votes in secret. Each voter is emailed the list of nominations plus supporting documentation. There is no formal discussion among them.
I was on the voting academy for 15 years, from 1989-2004. The panel, which back then usually comprised 15 members, almost all journalists, used to meet every year and thrash out each category.
That experience emphasised two things to me:
1. Sports stars might know a lot about their own sport, but generally they have little understanding of other sports.
2. If you want an informed, considered vote, it is way better if the panel gets around a table and discusses things.
The Sportsman of the Year Award (so called until it was renamed the Halberg Awards in 1992) was instituted in 1949 by Jack Fairbairn, editor of New Zealand Sportsman magazine.
The awards died in 1960 soon after the magazine folded. Two years later, Sir Murray Halberg, impressed by national awards he’d seen in Canada, revived the awards as a way of fundraising for the Murray Halberg Trust for Crippled Children he had just set up.
For the next 20-odd years, sports editors did the voting by mail, or phone.
Things began to change in the 1980s, and when Dave Currie became executive director of the trust in 1988, he added a new level of professionalism.
The awards have expanded to include such worthy sections as Sportsman, Sportswoman, Coach, Team, Disabled Athlete, Emerging Talent, Sports Moment of the Year (a public vote), Lifetime Achievement and Leadership.
The voting meetings I attended generally contained flashes of humour, but discussion was animated and well informed.
By the early 1990s, there were always four nominations for each category, but in 1992 we could not separate skier Annelise Coberger (our first Winter Olympics medallist), squash’s Susan Devoy (world champion), Lorraine Moller (Olympic marathon bronze medallist), Barbara Kendall (Olympic boardsailing gold medallist) and swimmer Jenny Newstead (four Paralympics gold medals), so all five were named.
One year a famous sportswoman joined the panel and caused a stir by announcing she did not like cricket and would not be voting for the sport. As it turned out, Philippa Baker, world lightweight rowing champion, beat Martin Crowe (who’d scored 299 in a test and helped set a world record) in a very narrow vote for overall winner that year.
I got a glimpse of how focused top sportsmen and women are when, one year, a great rower and a great kayaker sat side by side. Both insisted their sports were the most demanding and the most difficult in which to win world championship medals.
At another meeting, a sports star suggested we consider horses for the sportsman and woman of the year categories. This led to a half-hour discussion that tennis champion Chris Lewis eventually cut short by saying the whole argument was ridiculous and, if we didn’t move on now, he’d be leaving. With that the debate ceased and the matter was never raised again.
In 1998, there was a very tight call made to make world champion rower Rob Waddell the Sportsman of the Year (and eventually Halberg Award winner) ahead of equestrian individual and team world champion Blyth Tait. We debated the place of each sport in the world, the strength of the world championship fields, the back-up performances of Waddell and Tait and so on.
It was galling to have broadcaster Peter Williams then go on air to dismiss the voting panel ‘‘white, middle-aged homophobes’’.
Another broadcaster went on the panel one year, lobbied hard for someone whose career he had followed closely to be coach of the year, and was appalled when he was heavily outvoted. He refused to go on the panel again and was publicly disparaging of its work.
One world champion, in her first year on the panel, opened proceedings by announcing she was not a supporter of ‘‘traditional’’ sports, such as netball and rugby.
Something the panel used to have to watch for was the ‘‘boredom factor’’. In the 1980s and early 90s, Susan Devoy was supreme in world squash, to the point where it seemed some voters seemed to simply want to vote for a new name.
The same thing happened when Val Adams ruled shot putting. I was amazed when Lydia Ko was given the ultimate Halberg Award in 2013 ahead of Adams. At that point, the voters – voting by email – seemed to decide a fresh face was needed and went for Ko, who was an outstanding teenage golfer but had not then won a major or reached the top of the world rankings.
Another area of concern since voting panel meetings were dispensed with is that voters seem too swayed by the publicity a sportsman or woman generates. This works in favour of Aucklanders (where so many of the voters live and where New Zealand television is based).
It’s interesting looking at who has won the top award since 1949. Rugby is our national game, but has produced only six winners: Ron Jarden, Don Clarke, Wilson Whineray and the three World Cup-winning All Black teams.
By comparison, rowing has produced 12 winners and athletics 17. Cricket has had five winners, but no-one since Richard Hadlee 34 years ago.
Some of those who have won would be unknown to many today – Barry Brown (boxing), Philippa Gould (swimming), Mike Ryan (athletics) and Harry Kent (cycling) were all worthy winners, even if not household names.
On the other hand, greats such as Martin Crowe (cricket), Colin Meads (rugby), Jonah Lomu (rugby), Tait (equestrian), Scott Dixon (motorsport) and Wynton Rufer (football) do not figure on the Halberg Award list.
It pays to be an Olympian. Except for 1980, when New Zealand largely boycotted the Moscow Olympics, sending just four competitors, the Halberg Award has gone to an Olympic competitor in every Olympic year.
So we come to this week’s awards. It will be fascinating to see if Lisa Carrington, who has won the overall award once and the Sportswoman section three times, gets a fair go from a panel that does not meet and votes in secret.
Carrington, unbeaten in her specialty K1 200m sprint event since 2011, won two individual gold medals in spectacular fashion at the 2019 world championships, plus a fourth placing in the K4 x 500 – an incredible effort.
But she’s won before. Furthermore, kayaking does not receive anything like the media exposure, especially TV, that netball does.
Without a panel meeting to have some rigorous back and forth discussion, I’m dubious Carrington will receive anything like the consideration the Silver Ferns get.