When gangs do battle on the sports field - Jarrod Gilbert

OPINION

The gang-related melee and subsequent shooting around a rugby game in Hastings last weekend was a shocking event, but it was not unusual in history. The gangs have at numerous times turned sports fields into battlegrounds.

The fact that footie “away” games bring a gang team into opposition territory is the fuel for the violence. Sometimes the spark that ignites it is mind-blowingly trivial, other times murderous.

In Christchurch in 1985, a league team from Shirley with Mongrel Mob players and another from Woolston with Black Power players, met at MacFarlane Park to compete in the Senior B competition. The on-field clash was overshadowed when spectators on both sides began attacking one another with weapons drawn from jackets and cars including a pitchfork, softball bats and firearms. The match referee, understandably, showed little interest in arbitration at that point and instead showed a clean pair of heels. A gang member involved told me, “Suddenly the ref was the quickest guy on the field. He didn’t blow his whistle or anything — he was off!”

What sparked the violence? A gang member on each side had the nickname of Spider, and both thought the other was undeserving of the moniker. Petty doesn’t begin to describe it.

While nobody was seriously injured in that instance, other cases have had far worse outcomes.

In 1986, a Paora rugby team linked to Black Power travelled to play in front of a 1000-strong crowd at Te Teko, a town claimed by the Mongrel Mob. After the match, local Mongrel Mob members blocked in a Black Power car, emerged from behind a corrugated iron fence, and began a ferocious attack. At least two firearms — a shotgun and a .22 rifle — were used. Three Black Power members were hit, as was a 12-year-old girl who received a shotgun pellet to the shoulder.

Perhaps the most notorious incident linked to sport, however, was the premeditated attack on Black Power’s Max Shannon, by members of the Highway 61. Tensions between Shannon and the 61s had been simmering for some time, when the 61s decided to end the matter once and for all. Shannon was a keen league player, and as he finished training at his Woolston club in August 2000, a stolen car pulled up alongside him and numerous shots were fired from the vehicle. He died the following day.

As is the case with the gangs, though, the high-profile criminal events dominate the narrative, but there’s always more to the tales. Gangs and gang communities have long been intertwined with contact sports, particularly league. League clubs have most often been well served by the connection, although they have had to take certain actions to ameliorate specific concerns. A Ponsonby team filled with King Cobras was banned from the Auckland Rugby League competition for two seasons when a baseball bat was brought on to the field during an altercation. Numerous clubs banned regalia in an effort to ensure that warring factions within the same footie club concentrated on uniting around the shared rugby jersey rather than different gang patches.

The gangs, too, have been well served by a commitment to sport. In his excellent book on the history of league, Ryan Bodman cites Black Power’s Denis O’Reilly as saying sport brought discipline to the players. And King Cobra member Nari Felix Meleisea said that the commitment to the game kept his boys off the booze — or at least moderated it.

Gangs and gang communities have long been intertwined with contact sports, particularly rugby league. Photo / 123RF

Indeed, if we are looking to keep kids out of gangs, sports teams can certainly be one of the answers. A sense of fraternity and mateship, physicality and engaging in a common activity are some of the most significant allures of gang membership, and therefore team sports provide a viable alternative. Being in a sports club also introduces teenagers and young men to prosocial peers, something that many kids do not ordinarily enjoy.

Graham Lowe, the famous Kiwi league coach, has developed a programme that runs in New Zealand prisons based on the discipline and physical fitness that sport provides in an effort to turn people’s lives around.

It’s also important to keep in mind that there have been, and continue to be, scores of occasions where teams with gang members play each other without incident. It is the minority of problems that gain all of the coverage.

Consequently, when a gang decides to take its beef to the sporting fields, as occurred most recently in Hastings, the only scoreboard winner is the Government, whose drive against gangs is understandably cheered on because of these senseless acts of public violence.

Dr Jarrod Gilbert is a sociologist at the University of Canterbury and the author of Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand.