Ron Palenski. Photo / Otago Daily Times
Ron Palenski has been writing our history for years. Greg Bruce delves into his history.
Our Game: New Zealand Rugby at 150 is a book conceived, produced, titled and released to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first game of rugby here - "The year 2020 marks the 150th
anniversary of the first game of rugby in Nelson," says the book's early publicity - so it's surprising that author Ron Palenski's opening gambit is to prove it wrong.
Palenski, surely this country's most prolific sports historian, starts the book with the story of a match in Wanganui in 1869, a year before the game upon which the book is premised. It's not a difficult claim to corroborate: at least one report about the game shows up in the free online archive Papers Past.
It seems astonishing that a fact so easily disproved has persisted for so long, but if we've learned anything about facts over the last few years, it's that they're flexible. If the creation myth of New Zealand rugby can be so easily destroyed, what else might crumble along with it? Our entire sense of self? Is that a different thing?
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Good historians stand outside time but are self-aware enough to know they are of their time. The golden era of rugby, Palenski says, is determined by your age, by which he means something like: You believe the game was at its peak when you were at yours.
He doesn't love what's happened to the game since professionalism. He says he'd like to see rugby played in the daytime, with more flair and less predictability, a game that's not dominated by plays worked out on whiteboard or computer but by players allowed to think for themselves. He'd like to see brilliant young players have their flair encouraged rather than stifled.
He says we need rugby; or if not rugby, then something that can replace the things it gives us: national identity, pride, the visceral feeling that comes with watching the All Blacks, sheer enjoyment.
But he doesn't think rugby is going away, nor is it even in trouble. At the very top and very bottom of the game, he says, our love for it is still obvious. "You still see on a Saturday morning during April, May, June hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids playing rugby, with parents on the sideline. And then they all go to the clubrooms afterwards. People identify with clubs, which represent their local area, in a way they don't, or can't, with the Super Rugby teams, which he describes as "contrived" and "ersatz". In other words, he doesn't like Super Rugby.
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Palenski, who estimates the number of books he's written at about 50, is a legendary newspaperman, having worked for and led major newsrooms across the country. He has never been a sports reporter but has produced more words on sport than many who are. His doctoral thesis offers the argument that sport in general - and rugby in particular - has played a more important part in the establishment of our national identity than traditionally recognised.
That, he says, is because of our rugby teams' successes, particularly the first New Zealand representative teams on their tours to Britain in 1888 and 1905. Their success, he says, was driven by hard work; the hard work was driven by a desire to prove themselves; the desire to prove themselves was driven by our isolation. We were, he says, trying to show the "mother country" how well we had developed. We were trying to make her proud of us.
"We didn't want to be humiliated," he says. "We didn't really know what we were going into. We didn't really know how good we were. So we worked as hard as we could to be as good as we could be, and it turned out to be better than what they expected. And everything built from that."
He cites the example of Peter Snell at the Rome Olympics in 1960: "He wasn't scared by reputations. He wasn't overawed by being in different countries and strange environments or anything like that. And I think it was partly because he just had that New Zealand condition that you and I have got, that we don't owe anything to anyone and we're just as good as everyone else - but because we're so isolated we have to keep proving it all the time."
But do we all really feel that? Or is that just something we've always heard and repeated about ourselves and would really like to believe? Palenski argues for the former: "Ask yourself why, just in the last eight weeks, we get constant stories particularly on television about how we're better at flattening the curve than any other bugger."
His decision to go to university in late-middle age, after a long and illustrious career in journalism, came after an office conversation with a journalist 30 years his junior: "I said to her one day: 'How come you've got two degrees and I've got nothing?' And she said: 'You could always go and get one.' So I went down to the university and I enrolled and one thing led to another and I ended up with a masters and a doctorate."
This series of events - with its apparent lack of forethought or effort or difficulty - sounds unlikely, but he says it's exactly what happened. There's no reason to doubt him; in many ways, it's the perfect example of the New Zealand condition as he sees it: Someone who wasn't scared by reputations, wasn't overawed by a strange environment, felt he was just as good as anyone else, and just had to prove it.
Our Game: New Zealand Rugby at 150 by Ron Palenski (Upstart Press, $39.99)
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