Ahead of the British & Irish Lions tour, the Herald's exclusive Book of Rugby series assesses the state of our national game. While elite rugby is humming, today, sports journalist of the year Dylan Cleaver finds that what's happening at lower levels is concerning some.
TOMORROW, CHAPTER FIVE: "The Essay"
The
British & Irish Lions tour is four days from kicking off and will be our biggest rugby event since hosting the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Dylan Cleaver asks where the sport sits in our national consciousness and how is it likely to shift, if at all, in the future.
If rugby is a game for Cape Reinga to the Bluff, then somebody should have told Mate Radich.
The Northland rugby identity and former president of the Mangonui subunion has become disenchanted with the sport in its most northern outpost.
"It's bloody depressing up here. I've been involved in Far North rugby for a very long time and I've never seen it like this. We are in dire straits," he said.
Radich spits out the words like he's clearing phlegm off his chest. He talks of proud subunions that struggle to maintain a single club. Mangonui once had eight clubs, now there are four. In Hokianga the situation is worse, with just one viable club, he says.
It would be cute to write that the north is not just isolated but an isolated case. It would also be false.
In Westport, the hub of the Buller union, Glen Elley works the bar of his Criterion Hotel and muses on the fact that there will be only one game of premier rugby on Saturday.
It is pure mathematics: there are just three premier teams.
"We're in serious trouble at the moment," Elley says. "There are no jobs to encourage the young ones to stay in the region. At school level we're holding our own but they don't go on to the clubs because there are no apprenticeships or work to keep them here. The young are heading to Christchurch and Nelson for jobs."
This is not an easy discussion for Elley. He played for Buller as a raw-boned, nose-to-the-ground flanker for 15 years and coached for a decade. He remains heavily involved in the White Star club, one of the three surviving.
• WATCH: Interview with Mate Radich
In years recent and not so, he has watched clubs disappear. Karamea has folded into Ngakawau, United has gone. Old Boys no longer fields a premier team, nor does Reefton, and the Murchison club has decamped to Nelson Bays.
"It's tough. Way back when I was playing we had eight teams but we had about 1500 people up the hill. Now we'd be lucky to have 500 up there," Elley says of the coal mines that once, quite literally, powered the region. "About 30 apprenticeships have gone from town in the last few years. It's just a numbers game."
Out the back of the pub stands a cinder-block wall. When the youngsters feel the uninhibiting effects of alcohol, they will scratch their names into the cement.
"I could walk out there right now and point to 30 who are no longer in Westport."
They would include two of his boys, who still make the commute back from Christchurch to play. As dire as a three-team competition sounds, it would be worse were it not for the long-distance commuters and steady influx of Fijians who come over to play in the Heartland Championship.
"At White Star, five come from outside the region to play and they're all starters," Elley says.
• WATCH: The Book of Rugby
llapse of the coal industry is primarily responsible for the lack of player numbers, in Bluff it is the vagaries of the fishing season.
Those oysters that you pay through the nose for at downtown eateries didn't shear themselves from the rocks and the blue cod that roam the Fouveaux Strait are not just the darlings of the New Zealand seafood scene, but the currency of Bluff.
"When we get a bit of fine weather we struggle for numbers because the fishermen are better off out on their boats," says Bluff Rugby Club president Shane Pearsey.
Southland, like Northland, is a professional union but Bluff, despite its proximity, sits a world apart from the "glamour" clubs of Invercargill.
"We have a Division III team, a President's Grade team and three junior sides," Pearsey says.
Three years ago the club won the Division I title (effectively the B grade), but a massive overhaul of players has seen its standing drop.
"We're finding it hard with people working shifts," Pearsey says. "That's the biggest problem. Getting people to games and to training because of their work commitments."
Just getting people to games at all is a challenge on the splendidly isolated, sparsely populated East Coast. Administrators there face logistical and socioeconomic challenges few others do but have scored a major victory by tying their identity to the tangata whenua.
A constitutional change has seen them officially adopt the name Ngati Porou East Coast. The union, which is home to a permanent population of around 6000, now has 70,000 who can claim a little ownership of the sky blue jersey.
"It means our merchandise sales are quite successful for a union of this size," says Cushla Tangarae-Manuel, just the second female chief executive of a provincial union (the first, Agnes Walker, was also East Coast).
"You talk about Maori rugby, well 99 per cent of the players here are Maori and I'd say 99 per cent are Ngati Porou so it makes sense. It was a smart move that came out of the Joe McClutchie era when he instilled in the players a sense that they weren't just playing for their province, but for their iwi."
Something has connected: while rugby is just clinging on in many of New Zealand's forgotten corners, some 11 per cent of the East Coast population are registered players.
Playing on the East Coast is something of a spiritual experience, with many Heartland unions - those who play in the amateur Meads and Lochore cups - rating the trip as career highlights.
The players from up north see this and say, 'Bugger this, I might as well go pig hunting'.
"Sometimes our budgets should say we have to cut back on the hospitality but we've made a commitment to our manuhiri [visitors] to make sure they have a feed to remember," Tangarae-Manuel says.
The kai may be epic but this is the definition of rugby on a shoestring. Mere existence on the East Coast, which stretches from Tolaga Bay to Te Kaha, is life on a shoestring. Ngati Porou East Coast RU has three fulltime employees, including Tangarae-Manuel, who perform "about seven roles".
"Every year is a challenge," she says. "All it takes at some clubs is for one family to leave the region and the club can't continue at a certain level. Our isolation can make things difficult. If a mum has a kid playing in Te Araroa in the morning and her husband playing in Tolaga Bay in the afternoon, that's a long day shuttling between games.
"Financially it is a challenge. We're the only union, for example, who pay for all the buses to transport kids to junior rugby. That's the only way many of them can get to rugby."
There is a forgotten-world feel to rugby here. There are nine clubs in the union and most people remain staunchly one-club lifers. You need an excellent reason to change allegiance and even then it's often not good enough.
It's the kind of rugby environment Radich looks on with envy. He dreams of recreating the East Coast model by breaking the Far North subunions away from their Northland mothership. He first proposed the idea in 2004 but was blocked.
"Northland play in the Mitre 10 Cup and they shouldn't. Every year they're last or second-last. They try to rectify this by bringing half the players in from outside the region," he says. "The players from up north see this and say, 'Bugger this, I might as well go pig hunting.'
"Look at the East Coast. That should be our model. Most of our players are Maori. They're such talented footballers, but where's their pathway? I just feel sorry for them. There's no incentive."
In Buller, meanwhile, the rep team are still lauded. Those games at Victoria Square are still a focal point for the community.
"But you can't hide what's going on beneath," says Elley.
"I don't like admitting it, but you can be as strong at heart as anybody but without the players, what can you do?"
• Tomorrow - part five: The British & Irish Lions tour is four days from kicking off and will be our biggest rugby event since hosting the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Dylan Cleaver asks where the sport sits in our national consciousness.
Grande Gallo has won three of four races at the Tauranga track.