Pamela Wade: Leave all this mindless enthusiasm to the dogs

COMMENT

What a glorious morning it was on Sunday. The day dawned blue and gold, warm sunlight shafting through the tender, fresh green leaves on the trees; roses ramped voluptuously over fence and trellis, tui and blackbirds took time out from filling baby beaks to sing against each other, the breeze was soft and balmy - it was one out of the box, making you glad to be still here.

So it was a surprise, after strolling with the dog through nature's Sunday best, to be met at the dairy with faces longer than Phar Lap's and front-page predictions that the nation's economy would be in for a nosedive because of a ball game the previous night in Sydney.

This seems to me as unlikely as the chaos theorists' claim that the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a hurricane in Herefordshire.

Here we are, perched on the cusp of the greatest orgy of spending of the entire year, and just because of a few incidents of butterfingers and some skewed kicks at a goal, we're meant as a population to be plunged so deeply into gloom and depression that - one exaggeration deserving another - you could drive a 4WD along the aisles of The Warehouse and finish up without a solitary shopper spreadeagled across your bull bars.

Because although it's certain that on past performance, or, more accurately, the lack of it, we're in for interminable media introspection and name-calling, loose talk about self-flagellation, grief and psychological counselling and narrow-eyed stares across the Tasman, it is a fact that there are many of us out here who couldn't care less about the World Cup - win, lose, it's all the same to us.

It's an irritation, either way. We are long-suffering people, endlessly patient and tolerant, necessarily so because we have much to put up with in the way of tedious and predictable workplace conversations, the bumping of real news out of top position in favour of trivial announcements about sore knees, a Beehive's-worth of hot air monopolising talkback radio, the rescheduling of television programmes and, most annoying of all, the blithe assumption that anything remotely connected with the competition is of first importance to us all.

It's not. No way, no how. There are a whole heap of genuine Kiwis in this country for whom rugby is the ultimate yawn and who find it more than slightly embarrassing that it is shamelessly promoted, from the Prime Minister down, as a fine and good obsession.

There is more to life and to New Zealand than a rough and dirty game that brings out the worst in both those who play and those who watch.

There is a place for sport, of course, but that place should not be automatically on the front page or at the front of our minds. It's a diversion, an entertainment like the movies or fishing. The competitive element affords some excitement, but you can get that from being first through an Auckland intersection after the lights have gone green.

There's no need to paint your face with the modern equivalent of woad and become part of a baying mob, sweeping through the streets to fetch up in a stadium for a mass demonstration of mindless enthusiasm. It's not civilised behaviour - it's the sort of thing my dog enjoys.

All dogs do, especially in packs, when there's a bit of a stoush. They'll whip themselves up into a mad frenzy, whirling around in happy confusion, before collapsing into dazed and panting heaps. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, people who want to act like dogs won't be stopped by words, especially from what they will inevitably view as sad, ascetic types who prefer the feline attitude of detached observation.

They cannot understand why not everyone wants to be part of the pack; they are as diametrically opposed to that point of view as dogs are to cats. Both species, though, have equal status on the domestic hearth - so why are rugbyphobes so scorned?

Quite simply, because so many of them are still in the closet, pretending to an interest that they do not really have. They swot up scores before they go to work on Monday so as not to appear ignorant and be excluded at the water-cooler.

They are afraid to hold out against dull lunchtime match analyses because, such is the strength of the assumption that everyone is a rugby fan, they think they are alone. But they're not.

It's time to stand up and be counted, to demand that our rights are not trampled under the boots of 30 thick-necked, sweaty men; time to restore a sense of proportion to what truly is just a game.

The dogs have had their day. It's time to let the cats out of the bag.

* Pamela Wade is an Auckland writer.