The Book of Rugby, Pt V: Crouch, hold, re-engage

The Herald is running a series looking at rugby and its place in our national psyche - The Book of Rugby. While rugby at the top level - the All Blacks and Super Rugby - is humming ahead of the British & Irish Lions tour, what is happening at lower levels is a cause of concern for some.

Chapter 5. The Essay

"There were times of closeness, father and son, brother and weary brother, waking very early on cold mornings, huddling together under a blanket in front of a wireless waiting for it ... wait for it, wait for it! - and for a whole generation god was only twice as high as the posts." - excerpt from the monologue, "Foreskin's Lament", Greg McGee (1981).

The Hurricanes are defending Super Rugby champions. They play an exciting brand of footy driven by one of the most transcendant talents to have strapped on boots, Beauden Barrett.

These days they rarely lose at home. These days they regularly play in front of banks of empty yellow seats.

The series

• Chapter 1: National religion
• Chapter 2: Different class
• Chapter 3: The product
• Chapter 4: Four corners

Rugby still dominates this country's sporting discourse but the fact that possibly the best team on the planet below test level can only partially fill a 35,000-seat stadium is as good an indication as any that the sport can no longer take its lofty status for granted.

Over the course of this project looking at where rugby sits in the national conciousness in 2017, more than 30 people were interviewed about their relationship with rugby and where they felt the game was positioned for 21st-century lives.

The responses portrayed a sport still immensely popular; still a source of great national pride; and still with the ability to regularly move New Zealanders in a way other sports do only rarely. But they also highlighted a sport that has an increasingly and perhaps surprisingly tenuous grip on the community.

Whether by accident or design, it is the All Blacks rather than the sport that has become the obsession. In the past 20 years, rugby has bent and twisted to the demands of professionalism and pay-television (the two forces are inextricably linked) to a point where we have elevated high-performance pathways while the grassroots wither.

Mt Albert Grammar coach Geoff Moon is deeply concerned at the drop in club players emerging from high schools. Photo / Jason Oxenham

"The altruism that is a core value of amateur participation is being challenged by social change, particularly in relation to the number of volunteers involved in supporting many sporting codes," says NZ Amateur Sport Association chairman Gordon Noble-Campbell.

"Increasingly, these people are opting to participate in sport informally, which is challenging for traditional sporting clubs which rely on financial members."

We can see this too, with the gentlest scratching of the surface. The list of rugby clubs that have either died or been folded into others is long and growing longer. Rural communities that were once united around their dairy factory and rugby club now have neither.

The successful roll-out of Rippa Rugby programmes in primary schools has allowed rugby to finesse its participation rates but New Zealand Rugby know that they are only meaningful if they can keep the kids involved through high school and into clubs.

Which is the reason why there has been such a heavy emphasis on school rugby in this series. It is one of the jewels in the crown of New Zealand rugby, lower case, but it is also the time New Zealand Rugby, upper case, has the least influence. We have learned, beyond dispute, that college rugby is both greasing the wheels of the professional game here by spitting out talent at a rate that makes the rest of the world envious, but it is also "acting as a disincentive for many to continue as amateur participants", according to Noble-Campbell.

One thing everyone agrees with is that rugby players who disengage during school are almost impossible to get back to clubs when they pass through the gates for the final time. (As this was being written, an email dropped from Paul Spoonley, pro vice-chancellor at Massey University, saying there had been a 29 per cent drop-off in partcipation rates in rugby in Auckland schools in the past two years. "A key explanation is that at the high decile public schools, 20-40 per cent of the students are now Asian," Spoonley wrote.)

"We have to think about how rugby is pitched to our youth and to the community at large. If we don't get it right and just take it for granted that people will be come engaged, we risk it becoming a marginal sport in 15-20 years," says Rob Nichol, the Players' Association CEO.

It is not scaremongering. Nichol loves the sport and has an almost evangelical belief that it can be a force for good. The emphasis on the All Blacks and on high-performance sport, however, means "we risk losing sight of the reason 99 per cent of kids play sport", which is to have fun with your mates.

"Rugby is an incredible educational and personal growth opportunity for young people," Nichol says. "You have the opportunity to learn the art of teamwork, development work ethic and time management skills, self-identity and confidence and resilience, not to mention the health and wellbeing elements of playing sport."

• WATCH: The Book of Rugby

Nichol says schools need to revert to a scenario where education underpins the sporting programmes within schools. That requires people with the formal qualifications of teachers to be involved, not just coaches who are on a professional pathway themselves.

These teachers should be reporting back to students and to parents on how they are developing in respect of those attributes sport is there to provide, to demonstrate that rugby adds value well beyond the concept of winning or some form of high-performance pathway.

"In a sense, this is just rugby being true to the values it has been built upon," Nichol says. "We need principals to take a leadership role in this and re-position their sporting, and particularly their rugby, programmes within this framework."

Geoff Moon would agree. The Mt Albert Grammar coach is a big proponent of classroom first, fields second. While MAGS has produced a steady stream of players who've gone on to professional contracts Moon is convinced that the overall quality of players they are producing now has dropped. What worries him more, is the number of old-fashioned club players that schools are delivering has dropped.

Is it any wonder, then, that several of those interviewed for this project highlighted schools as the key battleground for NZ Rugby in their bid to retain the hearts and minds of New Zealanders?

Wayne Shelford was an uncompromising sort of No 8 with an uncomplicated view on the sport he felt compelled to play when he saw the pride Jim Maniapoto, the husband of one of his teachers in Rotorua, took in representing New Zealand Maori.

"He was at school quite often and we looked up to him, literally. It was like wow, there was this big, huge man. We wanted to play rugby because Matua Jim was at our school and we knew he was a Maori All Black and we knew he was a kingpin for the Bay of Plenty team."

Despite the branding changing to Maori All Blacks, Shelford is convinced the commitment to Maori rugby has declined. While that is sad, he said it was indicative of what he saw as a decline in commitment to anything below professional rugby.

"When they went professional back in 1996, the NPC should not have ever gone pro," Shelford stated. "It allowed these guys to get a false sense of how much they were worth and where they could play their rugby. If they didn't get picked up by a Super side in three years, they were gone. We were losing 21-year-olds... not just from the NPC, but losing them from a club as well."

Head coach Geoff Moon and his boys. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Shelford said he believed the NZR's main focus was the All Blacks "and they don't give a shit about the rest. The All Blacks are the only team that makes money. Well of course they're going to make money; they play 15 times a year and they win.

"I just get frustrated. All the work we do at grassroots level is voluntary. We're hanging in there purely to survive. Professional rugby has killed the middle tier."

And yet professionalism has brought a lot of good.

It has enabled rugby to first stem and then reverse the tide of playing leaving for league.

It has created a "meritocracy", says playwright and former All Black triallist Greg McGee, that never existed during the amateur days, contrary to popular opinion.

He recalled being buttonholed by Charlie Saxton at the urinal during an aftermatch function and was told he was a haircut away from being in serious consideration for the All Blacks. He rubbed the popular Saxton's bald pate and declared him "just jealous", but he never did get that haircut and he never did make the All Blacks.

"New Zealand is now a far more diverse, more challenging place and I think rugby reflects that. Both the country and the sport are probably more healthy because of it," McGee says.

If there is one aspect of the "old" game he misses, perhaps, it's the range of personalities it produced, even if some of the more unpleasant ones would become the inspiration for some of his savoury fictional characters.

Ex-Black Fern Louisa Wall. Photo / Mark Mitchell

"While the professional game is more inclusive and more of a meritocracy because it's all about money, you do wonder if the same breadth of character is allowed to flourish. It's not an era I would like to be a sports journalist in. You see them on TV and go, 'Bloody hell, are they all seeing the same media trainer?'

"Perhaps it's an inevitable product of the professional game."

McGee might have unwittingly stumbled upon the billion-dollar question: what are the "inevitable products" of the professional game?

Because professional rugby is so new in comparison to many of its team sport counterparts, we're perhaps only just now beginning to comprehend the cost-benefits.

Professional rugby has paid its best players well. It has created an international marketplace for New Zealand talent and intellectual property. It has created a television product that is more entertaining and athletic than what it was in the past.

It has created genuine educational and career pathways for talented kids from families that might not otherwise have access to that kind of social mobility. It has, in the words of MP and ex-Black Fern Louisa Wall, forced administrators to press home messages of diversity and inclusion to align the sport to the ideals of its sponsors. It has, in an incidental way, provided a microcosm of how different ethnicities can work seamlessly towards a common goal.

But perhaps it has created a disconnect, too. Rugby is top-heavy and middle-weak, according to Shelford. More than one person referenced American football and wondered if New Zealand was headed down a similar pathway: where the amateur game effectively ended at school and you were either professional or retired.

I seriously do think rugby is the glue that binds us all together.

Ex-Black Fern Louisa Wall

Or perhaps trends are cyclical, and the game's grassroots will go strong again as people tire of their apps, their Netflix and YouTube, and realise there was a reason we used to love standing huddled under brollies on the sidelines of fields far flung: because, as historian Keith Sinclair wrote, "rugby stimulated national pride and national feeling".

Wall knows what he means.

"You cannot go to any community in New Zealand and not be near a rugby field. There's barely a school that doesn't play rugby. You can go anywhere in New Zealand and if you understand what's going on in the local competition, you can have a conversation," she says.

"I seriously do think rugby is the glue that binds us all together."

When Charles Monro brought an oval ball back to Nelson and introduced locals to a game he'd played in London, something just clicked.
Much of it was timing. Despite the popular belief that association football was all-encompassing in the UK, in the mid-1880s more rugby clubs were forming than soccer.

"Meanwhile in New Zealand the gold boom was happening and a huge number of British settlers were arriving, the population was increasing at a staggering rate and the people were bringing with them the rugby game" says director of the New Zealand Rugby Museum Steven Berg. "Football clubs started appearing in New Zealand and so popular was rugby that the early clubs didn't need to explain the type of football. Some of New Zealand's oldest rugby clubs still call themselves football clubs and don't bother with the word rugby."

The popularity was boosted by the fact Maori immediately fell in love with the game, perhaps because it resembled their own running game, ki-o-rahi.

It has been a love affair that has endured two world wars, the rise of counter-culture, rapid urbanisation, 1981 and professionalism. It has even survived 24 years without the World Cup.

Yes, rugby's dominance (and though it has improved mightily in this regard in recent times, its arrogance) creates antipathy. Much like a driver of a Toyota Wish smirks when he passes a late-model Mercedes broken down at the side of the motorway, there will always be those who revel in rugby's misfortunes.

But at its core, rugby has been good to New Zealand. The fact that we have historically played it better than every other country is possibly less important than the fact that, in the words of former captain Graham Mourie it had such a "deep-seated impact in shaping the lifestyle and thought patterns of the inhabitants". In rural areas in particular, the rugby clubrooms were a gathering place where people who lived isolated lives could talk through their hopes and concerns, where their sons and daughters had their 21sts, where wedding receptions were celebrated and wakes were observed.

In many respects rugby clubs were a living, breathing Facebook. Perhaps that's what needs to be marketed again.

Perhaps Mt Albert Grammar coach Geoff Moon says it best: "What I love about rugby is you chuck a ball into the middle of a field and everybody is even. The kid whose dad is an Otara bus driver is equal to the kid whose dad is a high court judge. On the field, it doesn't matter how many storeys you have on your house."

And while this is true, the next chapter of the book of rugby threatens to be the most complicated, as administrators try to retain this everyman appeal while continuing to strive to produce the Greatest Team the World Has Ever Seen.