Critics stunned by Richie’s salary
The first US reviews of the Richie McCaw doco Chasing Great comment on how small the former All Black captain’s salary was.
The film has been released on selected screens in the US a year and a half after it came out in New Zealand.
The reviewers’ observations are interesting - Film Journal‘s Frank Lovece was astounded at how little McCaw earned compared to top US athletes.
‘‘One of the more interesting aspects o is how much less even top rugby players make than their American football counterparts,’’ he writes. ‘‘One newspaper account says the NZ$750,000-a-year McCaw and one other player each earned around 2010 made them the country’s highest-paid rugby pros. We see a little of McCaw’s house, and while it’s certainly upscale, it’s no blinged-out McMansion.’’
Lovece also notes how McCaw ‘‘would be the classic AllAmerican boy were he not New Zealand born-and-bred’’, and explains that the All Blacks is not a racist team name, comparing it to the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
He says the film’s universal story of overcoming odds through determination and hard work, combined with the ‘‘surprising elegance of the rugby-match sequences, in which the famously brutal sport achieves a weird grace of almost basketball-like ballhandling,’’ mean Chasing Great might be a hit with an audience interested in a ‘‘sports documentary about something beyond the usual sports’’.
Ben Kenigsberg is more scathing in the New York Times, describing it as ‘‘too fawning’’.
‘‘Michelle Walshe and Justin Pemberton’s profile takes a soft, superficial approach. It makes a rote instalment of ESPN’s 30 for 30 look like Pulitzer-worthy muckraking,’’ he writes.
‘‘Chasing Great mostly hops from one triumph to another, reminding us that Mr McCaw remained an ordinary guy despite his success ....
‘‘Too little time is spent on strategy, Mr McCaw’s style of captaining or his apparent skill for tiptoeing up to the edge of the rules.’’