An esport player competes in the video game Tekken 7 during an esports tournament in Paris, France. Photo / Getty
An esport player competes in the video game Tekken 7 during an esports tournament in Paris, France. Photo / Getty
There is one truism that takes humans longer than it should to figure out: you can't make people like what they don't like. Or vice versa.
This applies as much in sport as it does in music, fashion, politics, anything really. You can try, but you can't make.
So I can sit here, hovering over my keyboard with uncommon intensity, hammering out messages like "cricket is the greatest, most complex, most fascinating sport in the world", and a few of you might even buy it.
Most, however, will shrug and think something like, "yeah, nah".
It's natural to want people to like the same thing as you. Safety in numbers is one of the oldest forms of validation. For sportswriters the need is even more acute. You like to think that the subjects that move you to write are connecting with an audience. There are not many underwater hockey reporters for a reason.
But for a workforce that needs an audience, we can be slow on the uptake.
For years cricket writers baulked at T20 cricket, rejecting the format's aesthetics as gaudy and cheap. Some probably still feel that way. More fool us.
I know rugby writers who would rather use cos lettuce leaves as a burger-bun substitute than report on sevens; there are boxing scribes who cannot stand the vulgarity of the UFC; you suspect, deep inside the sports department of the Tiroler Tageszeitung, there are reporters who believe freestyle skiing marks the beginning of the end of the Winter Olympic empire.
In time even hardened attitudes can soften: T20 has become a tolerated part of the cricket-writing landscape. Rugby reporters grudgingly accept sevens is here to stay, boxing experts have been known to lower themselves to watching other martial sports and even our friends Gunter and Horst from the Tiroler will take in a bit of slopestyle.
BUT, and you can tell by the sudden use of block capitals that a message of great import is coming, COMPUTER GAMES ARE SPORT'S JUMP-THE-SHARK MOMENT.
I refuse to call them esp***s, a title that gives them way too much credit. They are as much sport as are those interminable cooking contests that clog up my terrestrial TV channels.
There is even talk computer games might be destined for the Olympics. What world are we living on here? It's like a wormhole has opened up and I've been weightlessly transported into another dimension: a dimension where an orange man in a bad wig is the leader of the free world, and kids on sofas fueled on potato chips and cola pretending to be soldiers of fortune are poised to become Olympic athletes.
There is a place for computer games. Don't be calling me a killjoy here. Digi Invaders took Levin Intermediate by storm in the early 80s. I played it as much as anybody until my Casio MG880, like everything else at that school, was stolen.
My kids have an Xbox, their friends down the road a PlayStation, or maybe it's the other way around. Either or, they often alternate venues depending on what game is tickling their fantasy at any particular time.
For me, it is an effective, short-term electronic childminder. For them, it's a lot of fun.
But guess what? Club euchre is fun, 1000-piece puzzles are fun, reading is fun, having a natter with friends in a garden bar of a sun-soaked summer evening is fun. Nothing is as much fun as dipping crusty loaf into the delights of a well-made fondue. Should we start recognising these as sports, too?
(In all seriousness, if emmental and gruyere were produced by multinational corporations with extraordinary marketing and sponsorship budgets, fondue would be an Olympic sport already).
The future? Yeah, nah.
It bends my mind that people get any pleasure in watching other people play computer games. I feel like I'm missing a big piece of the evolutionary puzzle here, but thankfully, in the recent Time story referenced above, Mark Cohen, a senior vice president at a computer game league, was there to explain the spectator appeal.
"For esp***s fans, watching someone's fingers move that quickly [on the console] is like watching Usain Bolt run."
Um, no it isn't.
When you watch Bolt run, you're watching him run. You're not watching Bolt pretending to be a warlock, a demogorgon or some other fantastical creature running fast.
Sport, actual sport, has a lot of faults but it also has an authenticity to it that computer games can never simulate.
Sport, real sport, has a vitally important health component. It gets kids outside, exercising, learning things like discipline, teamwork and empathy. Little damage is done to a kid's health by chasing a ball on a field, but you can literally see kids get fat sitting around playing computer games.
Even those truncated versions of the sport, like sevens or T20, that were once denigrated are still the real thing, just a distilled or adapted version.
Es***ts is not the next step along that chain. It is not sport.
Es***ts is a thing, an apparently wildly popular thing, and that thing might be here to stay but just know the goal of that thing is not to foster friendly competition among the nations of the world, or to develop athletes, but to sell millions upon millions of their cheaply assembled, enticingly packaged products.
I can't make you not like that.
But I can at least try.
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Mark Chapman. Photo / Photosport
Going back to my favourite topic – the greatest, most complex, most fascinating sport in the world – this summer has crystallised this thought that has been banging about in the recesses of my mind for some time: T20 is the worst format to blood young talent in.
The trials of Tom Bruce, Glenn Phillips, Ben Wheeler, Tim Seifert, Seth Rance and Mark Chapman are exhibits A through F.
Even apparent success is double-edged. Chapman's 37 not out against England at Hamilton was statistically impressive but the cold truth was he was found wanting when the pressure went white hot and blew a game New Zealand should have won.
You can point to Australia and the way they have developed a seemingly independent T20 operation but it's a fool's comparison. The depth in Australia laps the field on New Zealand and their domestic breeding ground, the Big Bash League, is a completely different cauldron to our Fast Food Super Smash.
You'd like to think most, if not all, of these guys will come again, but hopefully in an environment where they get a chance to develop their skills at a pace and intensity that is more manageable.
THE WEEK IN MEDIA ...
Wyatt Crockett has long been one of my favourite rugby players for reasons that are difficult to explain. I like the fact he was bent like a pin by Italy's Martin Castrogiovanni in just his third test, was considered a liability, but came back to be one of the All Blacks most reliable front-row stalwarts. I like the way he and Andy Ellis were almost inseparable besties, a little and large picture of domestic bliss. I like the way he looked so clumsy and unathletic but was anything but.
I'm not doing a great job of articulating this, so I'll hand it over to him and his wonderful retirement letter.
