Column: Haka in danger of being devalued

By Chris Laidlaw

The monumentally macho television ad by adidas promoting the All Blacks by featuring the haka might make good commercial sense, but it reveals a disturbing trend toward the misrepresentation of this precious ritual.

The ad turns the haka into a blunt instrument of aggression, a declaration of war on the opposition. That makes it something it is not. The haka is not strictly a physical challenge. Its particular dialogue has as much to do with the performer as with the party confronted. It is not a war dance but something rather more subtle than that.

But somehow the subtlety has been lost in the urge to use it as a psychological weapon. There is a growing risk that the currency will be devalued unless we are careful about its exploitation.

There was a time when we would do the haka before a test match almost sheepishly. We did it self-consciously, untutored in its spiritual significance, believing it was a bit of a novelty, something that created a point of difference between the All Blacks and their opponents.

Much has happened since then. The complexion of All Black teams has changed. The Polynesian dimension has grown and the pakeha dominance diminished.

The haka has become a much more powerful statement and it is performed with infinitely more fervour than ever before. But there are risks in that, even if it is sometimes the highlight of the day for some of the spectators.

In recent years we have seen opposing teams deciding to take their own retaliatory action. We have seen unhealthy attempts to confront the All Blacks, eyeball to eyeball, and even to crowd them while it is being done.

That is a direct response to the ferocity of the challenge that the haka has come to express. The way it is performed these days openly invites a physical response. And what precisely are opposing teams supposed to do?

Increasingly, they are making it clear that they are not going to be intimidated or have the initiative taken away from them by simply standing mutely in front of the All Blacks' performance and politely applauding.

Some players, like David Campese, decided to turn their backs on it, not out of any deliberate wish to be culturally offensive, but simply to avoid being caught up in the emotional game-playing that had developed. One can hardly blame him for that. In a way it is better to do that than to engage directly in what could be a very unhealthy confrontation.

Then there is direct subversion, as we saw during the Bledisloe Cup match in Sydney, where the organisers set out to deliberately drown out the performance of the haka by fair means or foul, mostly foul, thus relegating it to the status of an incidental sideshow.

Perhaps the time has come to rethink the whole issue and come up with some guidelines for the use of the haka and some limits to the kind of response that is appropriate from opponents. Nobody will win, least of all the All Blacks, if it becomes the subject of ridicule and contempt.