Prime Minister Christopher Luxon talks with Ben Stokes on day 2 of the practice match between the Prime Ministers XI and England. Photo / Photosport
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon talks with Ben Stokes on day 2 of the practice match between the Prime Ministers XI and England. Photo / Photosport
Opinion by Steve Deane
THREE KEY FACTS
A guide to sports viewing based on political affiliations, suggesting which sports to avoid or enjoy
Athletes are increasingly expressing political views, challenging the idea of sports' political neutrality
Rugby union and golf are highlighted as contentious for various political groups, while the likes of basketball are deemed safer for Te Pāti Māori voters
All Blacks hijacking your haka. UFC fighters kissing Donald Trump’s octagon. Footballers dribbling about freeing Palestine.
With uppity athletes increasingly emboldened to behave like human beings, the fanciful notion of sporting political neutrality has gone from pipe dream to pipe bomb – with adeeply triggering expression of social conscience or political leaning only ever a goal celebration or sunken putt away.
But don’t panic – we’re here to help. We’ve prepared a handy guide to sports viewing based on your political affiliation, so you can safely tune in without losing your mind.
In strictly neutral alphabetical order:
Act voters
Avoid
Rugby Union: For starters, the game’s rammed to the gills with rules it pretentiously calls laws. The sporting definition of big government, it’s not your libertarian bag at all. And then there’s the haka thing. Avoid at all costs.
Cricket: Sadly the game’s been ruined for you by the DRS. How can it take a third umpire, TV crew and 18-strong graphics team sitting in a caravan in the carpark to decide if Kane Williamson should be fired LBW after missing a straight one? Madness. Sack the lot of them.
Rugby league: No. Just no.
Association football (soccer): Another sport run by a bloated, inefficient, overreaching global governing body. The only real positive is the vast number of millionaires produced by the sport who pay little or no tax thanks to being domiciled in the Virgin Islands.
Lap it up
Baseball: America’s pastime might seem like a team game but it’s really about individuals racking up impressive personal stats so they can abandon their teammates and fans and join the LA Dodgers on a massive contract. You’re down with this.
Golf: Like baseball but without the Latin Americans. Ticks plenty of boxes.
Sweet spot
Breakdancing: An individual sport where the ability to manipulate the system to gain attention and exert an influence considerably beyond the merits of your talent, ability and popularity. Swipe right, you’ve found a perfect match. Raygun is your spirit animal.
Rugby union: Like Owen Wilson’s famous line in Zoolander about Sting, you love the fact that TJ Perenara defended Te Tiriti while leading the haka, but you sure as shit weren’t watching. And you’d never previously heard of TJ Perenara.
Men’s Cricket: How many cows have to die to have their hides made into cricket balls? And what about those poor English willow trees being hacked down and shipped to India to be made into cricket sticks in a sweatshop in Bengaluru? Disgraceful.
Men’s Rugby League: mindless thuggery.
Golf: hell no. A monument to excessive fertiliser use and the displacement of the citizenry from the commons for the entertainment of the elites. Pure evil.
Irish golfer Peter Lawrie putts on the 15th hole during round 4 of the Bluechip New Zealand Golf Open at Gulf Harbour Country Club in 2006. Photo / Photosport
Motor sport. Christ no. You’d be less triggered watching documentaries about the revitalisation of the whaling industry.
Sport climbing: A fun activity ruined by an over-emphasis on competition. Surely we can all just get to the top in our own time and be happy to celebrate that as an achievement?
Hacky Sack: Thank goodness for that – a game for all. Unfortunately shamefully under-covered by the global sports broadcasting cabal, making viewing challenging.
Labour voters
Avoid
Golf: Severe trigger warning here. Be prepared for your eyes to be assaulted by overfed Americans doing the Trump jiggle every time they make a putt. Cancerous.
Association Football (soccer): The game of the proletariat for most of the planet, football is a curiously upper middle-class game in Aotearoa. Best leave it for the Tobys, Finns and Oscars.
Mixed martial arts / UFC: Like golf, only with more choking and knees to the head and that class traitor Joe Rogan crapping on inanely. As Trumpy as sport can get. Avoid.
Motorsport: What kind of society glories in souped-up, noise-polluting vehicles with preposterous carbon footprints being driven in circles when you can’t even catch a bus from Island Bay to Lambton Quay to earn a below living wage from a shift in a glue factory? Deeply triggering.
Lap it up
Rugby union: Forget about the private school boy rah rah nonsense. With a history rooted in worker exploitation (aka amateurism) that now boasts a depressed wage structure and restrictive working conditions that limit where employees can work, what they can wear and even what they can eat, professional rugby union is fertile ground for a Labour Party incursion. Welcome to the revolution, comrades.
Rugby league: Potentially some troubling parallels here with a sport that generally plays second fiddle in terms of national significance but raises up once a decade full of piss and vinegar (mainly piss) promising generational change only to eat itself from the inside and fail spectacularly. Still, undeniably the game of the working people. And beneficiaries.
National voters
Avoid
Rugby union: Boomers – your game has abandoned you. Finding this out when someone translated TJ’s haka for you was bloody tough. But the signs were there. First you were asked to support Sonny-Bill Williams. Then you were asked to take women’s rugby seriously. And now you’ve had your haka hijacked by the Māoris. It’s all too much. Time to move on.
Rugby league: Statehouse rugby? As if.
Yachting: Too right-wing, even for you.
Lap it up
Association football (soccer): Just like his beloved Crusaders, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon traces his love affair with Auckland FC back to his formative years as a Howick College student in the mid-1980s. When he’s not at his Botany electorate office grinding away for his constituents, the PM will likely be found at the home end of Mt Smart Stadium singing along with the Black Knights ultras. Get around him you Nats.
Cricket: Generally a safe space – but check the line-ups to make sure James Neesham isn’t playing if you want to be totally sure you won’t be exposed to free thinking.
Sweet spot
Golf: Your happy place. People who look like you, think like you and dress like you. What more can you ask for?
NZ First voters
Avoid
Rugby Union: Given the unlikelihood of Laurie Mains being reinstated as All Blacks coach and the Crusaders recommitting to Andy Haden’s “three darkies only” selection criteria, rugby is likely to remain a highly risky place for you. Sadly, the societal takeover of craft beer means you’ve now lost two of the three pillars of your existence. At least you still have racing (see below).
The X Games: A celebration and glorification of new-fangled “sports” that launched around the same time you retired in 1995. Harmless – but just not for you.
Anything sponsored by Red Bull*:
*An energy drink that markets itself to young people by brand association with cool and daring “sports”. Think Mark Todd and Bell Tea.
Lap it up
Amateur boxing: admirably corrupt.
Professional boxing: admirably corrupt – with the prospect of massive personal enrichment through ingratiating oneself with the Saudi royal family.
Tennis: A game of endless back and forth, verbal spats and outright tantrums must surely resonate. Appointment viewing whenever Novak Djokovic is playing.
Sweet spot
Horse racing: Thanks to the patron saint of horse racing and cigarettes, Winston Peters, the sport of Kings and RSAs will likely survive at least until you are dead. But not long after.
Te Pāti Māori voters
Avoid
Golf*, association football**, cricket***, rugby union****, rugby league*****: tools of the colonisers one and all.
* with the exception of re-runs of Michael Campbell’s 2005 US Open victory.
** with the exception of Winston Reid’s 2010 World Cup goal for the, um, All Whites.
*** with the exception of Adam Parore’s career.
**** with the exception of every game featuring a haka or Māori players.
***** with the exception of pretty much every game ever played in New Zealand or by New Zealand.
Lap it up
Basketball: Unlike NFL, baseball and ice hockey, political outbursts in basketball will typically be left-leaning in nature and pro-minorities – so fairly safe ground for TPM voters. But beware of straying into those other codes, particularly the NFL, where Trump dancing in the endzone is fine but taking a knee to protest police brutality attracts a lifetime ban.
Pro kabaddi: The second most-watched sports league in India behind the IPL, pro kabaddi is arguably the most successful indigenous sports league in the world, eclipsing even dog sled racing. No idea what it’s all about, but it seems inoffensive enough.
Sweet spot
Sprint kayak: The pride of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Te Whakatōhea and Rongomaiwahine, Dame Lisa Carrington’s eight Olympic gold medal-winning performances make up quite the viewing-on-demand playlist. Fun fact: Dame Lisa has a degree in politics and Māori studies. Interesting...
