By CHRIS LAIDLAW
Once there was a time when an All Black could get away with just about anything on test night - particularly if New Zealand had won.
It was widely accepted that after such Herculean exertions in the national interest, the freedom of the city could be taken for
granted.
Many were the moments when a very tired and very emotional player would be carefully looked after, not by some overweight goon hired specifically to keep the public at arm's length, but by just about everybody who cheerfully accepted the odd excess as an understandable and forgivable letting off of steam by a committed athlete.
Those were gentler, more tolerant times and it was really rather nice to be an All Black free of the more recent hazards - the constant worry of hidden cameras, sensation-driven journalists and girls who would happily tell all to some witless women's magazine if the price was right, and various other banana skins laid in the path of the contemporary players.
Not any more.
What might have been a case of special treatment by society at large in the good old days is no longer acceptable practise.
Quite the reverse.
These days it is more or less impossible for an All Black to let his hair down.
It seems that that is exactly what Tana Umaga tried to do in Christchurch last Saturday night, but his hair got pulled, with, presumably, his leg, and the whole thing became mildly disorderly.
On the face of it, nothing much to get excited about here.
Unfortunately, one especially nosy onlooker, apparently with the extraordinarily apt name of Parker, got out his video camera, filmed the proceedings and hawked his pathetically unenlightening findings to a television company.
To both his and the television company's discredit, the incident suddenly became the lead item on the television news, and every other news organisation immediately and enthusiastically climbed aboard as well.
Where a couple of decades ago an event of this magnitude would have struggled to raise a line in the newspaper, today the whole nation is invited to wallow in voyeurism.
There is a school of thought that insists that rugby stars are rightful targets whenever they put a foot wrong.
Prominence brings vulnerability and it is not just the careless who end up paying a high price.
There is a fair measure of hypocrisy in this.
On the one hand voices are to be heard everywhere insisting that the All Blacks return to the old virtues of simplicity and accessibility, that they should once again be the ordinary heroes, mixing with ordinary people in all the old ordinary ways.
Having a beer at the pub or nightclub on a Saturday night, for instance.
We demand it. We insist that they be no different from anybody else.
On the other hand, however, because they are now highly paid they are regarded as fair game by the scandal-mongers, the envious, the footy-haters, the gold-diggers and all those who can't stand the sight of taller poppies than themselves.
It is hardly any wonder that the All Blacks' chances of knocking about in the old, ordinary ways are about as good as Helen Clark's.
We can't have it both ways, folks.
Don't expect to see All Blacks hobnobbing downtown much any more.
And be careful about who is to blame for that.
By CHRIS LAIDLAW
Once there was a time when an All Black could get away with just about anything on test night - particularly if New Zealand had won.
It was widely accepted that after such Herculean exertions in the national interest, the freedom of the city could be taken for
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