First published in Column Eight on the 26.3.92 – the unorthodox spelling of ‘rugby’ was intentional.
Cars park from the bottom of the Glen to the top, making you
wonder why their owners take a car at all. (It’s traditional.) People stand
next to the motorway to get a free but very long-distance view of The Game.
(They can’t hear all the sound effects on television.)
Inside the ground, crowds entangle on the terrace to such an
extent you don’t know if the can you’re drinking is in your own hand. And the
roar of the crowd gives you a headache – if you don’t already have a hangover
from the big binge last night. (If you do, local residents have no objection to
you parking in their garden – it’s traditional.)
Visitors pour into the city and make the place untidy by
acting in ways they’d never think of at home. One youth showing off to his
mates walks backwards into the traffic outside the Southern Cross and tries
sticking his rear end into the passing cars. And that was before The Game.
The Great Game of Rubgy. Worshipped and idolised. For many
people this game is sport’s golden crown. Beside rubgy’s shimmer and sheen, all
else pales.
If I don’t sound enthusiastic about the game, it’s for a
good reason. I’ve discovered that I’m one of a minority of New Zealanders who
have been born without the common Kiwi rubgy gene.
I used to pretend I had it, of course. I tried to play the
game of rubgy at school, but since I couldn’t see the point of dirtying the
clothes my mother had only just washed, or exerting great energy in chasing after
a ball the other side seemed to own, or having my nose bashed every time I found
myself as a hooker in the middle of the scrum – I was always the runt of the
team – I gave it up.
In the end I had to face facts – the gene was missing. Though
I’ve never been able to hold my head up in a crowd of beer-swilling pure-bred
Kiwis insisting on conducting a port-mortem of every move made during the
course of the most recent game, I’ve learned to live with it.
Psychologists my think my disinterest in rubgy was the
result of an unfortunate experience in childhood, when in the ‘fifties I went
to an international rubgy game. (The Lions were involved.) The parent and I walked
down the Glen (as tradition required). We forced our way through the jam-packed
maddening crowds on the terrace, hoping to find a place where we could actually
see the game.
Within the aforesaid crowd were jokers whose delightful
pre-match sport was to make the crowd sw-a-a-ay. Being only knee high to a
grasshopper in those days the notion of being squashed in a crowd of toppling
trees or crushed by rampaging elephants did not appeal.
In panic and horror, and without seeing one iota of the
game, we fought our way out again, along with a number of spectators now
suddenly stricken with sanity.
I’d like to think a bit of brain-washing would fix the
problem, but I know it’s irreparable. The genes don’t fit.
Gene-correct Kiwis do fit in. Unlike me they have a natural fat
layer for protection from the sleet in which one is often required to play
rubgy, and unbreakable ribcages on which to crash land when scoring a try.
They have eyeballs that don’t drop out and hang loose if
trodden on during the course of the game. The bones of their digits don’t snap,
crackle and pop when ground into the material that lies on the surface as
grass, but proves to be thinly-disguised concrete.
They don’t get irritated when so much of our local television
quota is given over to rubgy. (To rubgy and Shortland St, where a nurse
has discovered she has ‘aides.’ She’s fortunate to work in a hospital where
they can still afford ‘em.)
Ah well, they say suffering is good for the soul. I won’t be
crushed into a state of all black gloom, watching others take the lions’ share
of enjoyment. It’ll try and spring bok.
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