I'm with Anton against silly stuff

By CHRIS RATTUE

If Anton Oliver wants to march up the main drags of New Zealand protesting about bonus points in rugby tests, count me in.

This punter is fully prepared to hand out the leaflets, make the cups of tea, get on the loud hailer, and badger innocent bystanders about the injustice of too much justice.

We'll even form PASS, People Against Silly Stuff. Because rugby's deplorable slide into a place that tries to find winners out of losers is maybe the most destructive force we've ever been pitted against.

To be sure, Oliver made one of the most stupid decisions in the history of All Blacks rugby when he turned down the penalty attempt that could have secured a Tri-Nations bonus point.

But it sort of looked like this. After hours and hours of looking at blackboards in Palmerston North and marching through Colonel Martin's pretend war zones, he tried to rediscover what rugby used to mean to everyone in this country.

It was wrong place, wrong time, Anton. But there are more than a few of us who know what you meant.

We all remember times when, even if it was only for the Hillsborough 10th grade team, you might be beaten, but never broken. Waitemata Black may have handed out another hiding to you, but there was always that one last chance when you could give your opponents a little reminder that there would be another day, and that the scoreboard did not reflect every contest on the field.

The old game is losing its charm. Its integrity is tarnished when teams have to contemplate playing for something other than winning.

Is there any other major sport in the world, apart from that hideously complicated game cricket, that employs these tactics?

Some of the great basketball games we've witnessed from America, including in the NBA finals series, have come down to that last throw at the basket. There was that famous advertisement where Michael Jordan revealed how many last-second attempts he had failed with, and why it made the ones he landed so good. No bonus points there.

When that dinky little putt misses in one of the golf majors, there is no consolation. Those fairway fanatics can end up in a playoff, and all that went before them over 72 holes counts for naught.

Put it this way. Mark O'Meara, with his surprise majors, is probably a much more contented golfing soul than Phil Mickelson, who is usually ranked in the top two or three but can't do the right things at the right times when it comes to the tournaments that place people in history.

It is the cut-throat battle that turns the competitor (and the fans) on, not the thought that x over y times three-tenths of a ninth might have suddenly turned him or her into the 14th best player in the world.

Sitting in the living room the other night watching Murray Mexted interview that great All Blacks lock Peter Whiting was a wonderful reminder of the way it used to be.

Some of us might have the odd poke at Mexted's commentary language, but his series talking to players from the past is one of - maybe the best - rugby thing on the box these days, and that includes a lot of the games.

A sort of "where are they now" with a bit of Mexted's eclectic interviewing technique thrown in.

Whiting was always a bit of an enigma. As a diehard Ponsonby fanatic when I was a kid, it often seemed that "Pole" was not in the lineup as often as he might have been. An injury there, an illness here.

The impression was that the man who could get up in a lineout better than any player in the world had trouble always getting up for the club games, as black and blue as his heart might have been.

He was a big man who was a big game player, and of his era there was no better test forward in the world.

In South Africa in 1976, he was our giant against a team of giants, and despite all sorts of injuries and a vicious stomping, Whiting - who locked the fourth test scrum with Anton Oliver's father, Frank - was maybe the All Blacks star in a team that had as many strengths as weaknesses.

And there was THAT tackle. A large South African unit by the name of Coetzee was pummelled near the corner flag by Whiting, and the second test was won. We were left to marvel and talk about something on the field, without getting the slide rule out and working out some silly bonus points.

It allowed us to enjoy the real taste of victory, or as eventuated in that series, a couple of bitter pills of defeat. They were the good old days.