Willy Trolove: Remember when men were men and all played footy

You might have noticed there's a fair bit of rugby on the telly at the moment. Do not adjust your set. This is perfectly normal, especially in winter, when, for various meteorological reasons, most people prefer to be inside where the chances of encountering rain, mud, or drunk British rugby fans are statistically low.

There used to be a time, not so long ago, when male New Zealanders chose to be outside in winter playing rugby rather than inside watching it. It was that golden age when rugby was called footy or football.

After school, after work and in the weekends, every playground and park was thick with striped and muddied swarms. Footy was the closest thing we had to an initiation ceremony, a male rite of passage into adulthood.

The young, the not so young and the decidedly geriatric kicked footballs, tackled opponents and dislocated shoulders. Every one of them wanted to grow up to be an All Black. Even the geriatrics.

Rich and poor, white and brown, pine trees and less impressive conifers all played footy. It was our great egalitarian religion. The whole nation, it was said in a metaphor stretched beyond its sensible boundaries, ate, slept and breathed the game. It united and divided New Zealanders in a way that no other form of organised violence could.

Footy brought us closer to civil war than economics or politics ever did. Barbed wire and barricades went up around football grounds. Brother faced brother. Cow-cockie faced peacenik. Red Squad trooper faced helmeted baseball-bat-wielding kindergarten teacher.

The All Blacks were superheroes. They were real men with real sideburns. They also had real jobs. During the week they dagged sheep, moved pianos and kept criminals off the streets.

On a Saturday afternoon they climbed out of their Holden Kingswoods and into their superhero uniforms. These gave them the special powers they needed to defeat their arch enemies.

The All Blacks ran on to footy fields not much drier than a lake. They threw around a giant melon-shaped pig's bladder until they turned the colour of mud and nobody could tell them apart.

The game was simple then. The money was scarce. The rules were few. The All Blacks had to win. There was a ruck and a maul and everyone knew the difference. The only thing the referee had to do was blow his whistle when the ball went forward, figure out precisely when the half-time oranges should come on, and send off Colin Meads to give the opposition a chance.

Once or twice every decade the British and Irish arrived and tried to show us how to play. And once or twice every decade, the British and Irish trudged home again, battered, bruised and wondering why they had embarked on such a ridiculous crusade.

Those days are gone. Now footy is called rugby, and hardly anyone plays. Boys spend their days inside on the computer playing virtual rugby because mum and dad are terrified of what might happen to them in a real game.

Most rugby fans haven't picked up a football for decades. They file along to their expensive seats at the rugby stadium and pretend they know how the game should be played, even though it has changed so much since the days they pulled on the hooped jerseys.

The International Rugby Board's 2005 rugby rulebook is 176 pages long. Half the rules are baffling, obscure, or, at least, unknown by rugby fans.

Yet this doesn't stop them yelling out "Get your eyes checked, ref" and "You should have passed it you dopey bastard", just like their fathers and grandfathers did before them.

Now, it's all about the money. The great amateur sport has become just one more professional performance. Being an All Black is a job in itself. The fields are always firm, the rock music blares out in the breaks, and the players are paid to dance. The games are at night so that the television audience can watch all that physical exertion in the snuggled comfort of their homes.

And now the Lions are back. They are a professional franchise, a vast touring troupe accompanied by a public relations machine designed to maximise media coverage and ensure that, whatever the outcome, the venture turns a profit. This Lions tour, say the spin doctors and the media men, is rugby at its best. They may be right. But it's not footy. And it never will be again.