"New Zealand’s National Sport Through Distinctly American Eyes"

Jon Meoli


In a little under two years time, much of the sporting world will descend on New Zealand for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and in case you haven’t been following along, America’s Eagles are one step away from qualifying. But let’s say the upcoming home and home series with Uruguay is successful and the Americans qualify to represent our region, along with Canada, on the rugby world’s grandest stage. Is anybody going to care?
In many parts of the world, rugby and soccer reign supreme, with perhaps only the truly baffling sport of cricket matching their popularity. Perhaps you can say the rest of the world just doesn’t have the ingenuity that we, as Americans, had when it comes to creating sports. We saw cricket and turned it into baseball, which at its creation didn’t take days to finish a game, though we’re getting closer and closer with every passing season. We saw rugby and created football, which has arguably surpassed baseball as our national past time. But what about the rest of the world? It’s arrogant to think that their sports are inherently worse than ours just because they aren’t shown on ESPN. So what better occasion to see what all the rugby fuss was about than a semester in New Zealand?
We arrived in Auckland right as both the domestic rugby season and the top international tournaments were beginning. Each year, the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national team, plays Australia (the Wallabies) and South Africa (the Springboks) in the Tri Nations Cup. Aside from being extremely lucrative for all involved, this tournament gives an opportunity for the three best teams in the world to play one another, with the winner usually emerging with the world’s number one ranking.
The All Blacks entered the 2009 edition of the Tri Nations as defending champions and top ranked team in the world, so expectations were high in anticipation of the Wallabies’ trip to Auckland’s Eden Park. The opening match of the Tri Nations also marked the beginning of the All Black’s defense of the Bledisloe Cup, which is a separate trophy the team competes for with the Wallabies every year. With so much at stake, our entire group bought tickets in hopes of seeing another passionate chapter of this rivalry written before our eyes.
Visions of an atmosphere akin to that of an English soccer game, complete with drunken hooligans hurling insults at one another in funny accents, filled our heads. We all had a few drinks and were buzzing with more than just anticipation on the walk to Eden Park. The area surrounding the stadium did nothing to dampen our expectations. Streets were closed down for the thousands of supporters who were making their way into the grounds, and there was an air of excitement similar to every other important sporting event I’ve been to. Nothing could have convinced me that I wasn’t in for something special . . . until I actually got inside.
As it turns out, in preparation for the Rugby World Cup, Eden Park was getting a bit of a face lift. But let me clarify the word "face lift". We aren’t talking some new bathrooms and a bigger press box. I mean face lift as Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight style. An entire section of the stadium down one of the sidelines was just concrete and steel, a bare skeleton of what should be there. Now, it’s one thing to have an open end zone at a football stadium, but an entire sideline? It was downright eerie. All of the sound seemed to pour out that side of the stadium. Hmmm, no wonder we hear of bleachers collapsing at these events.
Then again, that would imply there was a ton of sound to begin with. Maybe everyone’s energy was sucked out the giant hole in the stadium along with the sound. Maybe everyone just expected the All Blacks to win, so there wasn’t much to get excited about, but one thing is for sure--I was expecting a little more passion from the fans. I liken it to a dead crowd at Fenway for a Sox-Yankees game. It just seemed unthinkable.
That isn’t to say that it was a complete bust of an evening. If the cost of admission hadn’t been so high, I would be able to say that seeing the Haka alone was worth it. Before each match, the All Blacks gather at midfield and do the Haka, a Maori war dance. Originally, it was done as a showing of solidarity between the whites and the Maori, but in today’s more tolerant society, it is solely an intimidation tactic. If any guys that size stood face to face and beat their chests and chanted with such fury that it sounded like they were right next to me, even in the cheap seats, then I’d surely reconsider playing rugby against them.
While the Haka provided much better pre-game entertainment than anything we’d see America, the quality on the field of play was sloppy and lackluster. In the first half, an Australian player had broken away and was assured of a try (think touchdown, except you actually have to touch the ball down on the ground) before he inexplicably started running sideways and tried to pass to a teammate, who promptly dropped the ball. Additionally, I found that rugby shares a key similarity with basketball in that nothing happens of consequences until there is about five minutes left, at which point it seemed like the All Blacks started to actually try and pulled out the 22-16 victory.
Even though my first rugby experience was a letdown, I remained steadfast in at least trying to figure out why someone else might like it. The next opportunity presented was an Air New Zealand Cup match between Auckland and Canterbury in the deconstructed confines of Eden Park. The Air New Zealand Cup is the domestic rugby league, rugby’s NBA to the All Black’s “Dream Team,” and Auckland v Canterbury is one of the biggest rivalries. The University offered a special deal on tickets (free beer and a free hat) to this match-up of the most popular teams from the North Island (Auckland) and South Island (Canterbury, based in Christchurch). The league games were supposed to be wide open with higher scores and more rowdy fans, but a quick look at scene inside Eden Park proved otherwise. What was left of the stadium was barely a quarter full, and I say what was left because another part of the stadium, this time the end-zone section that we sat in for the All Blacks game, was nothing but rubble, gone that quickly from the previous game.
Those of us who were there had a good time, but again, the rugby was uneventful, with the exception of one very late and very illegal hit on Canterbury’s Dan Carter, who is also the All Blacks’ star player. Bone crunching hits sound that way in the NFL because of their pads, and this hit made a familiar sound, except there weren’t any pads involved. Auckland ended up seeing their spirited comeback fall short, with the final ten minutes exponentially more exciting than the rest of the game once again. However, nobody ever said that rugby was best enjoyed in person.
This became apparent a few weeks later, when I spent a weekend at the University ski lodge. Being the poor college students that we were, there wasn’t a TV in our lodge, but the lodge next door had one and, well, let’s just say they weren’t expecting so many of us when Ollie, our custodian, asked if we wanted to come watch the game. In an atmosphere that was much more “big game” than actually being at the game, about thirty of us, plus the unfortunate people who let us into their lodge, piled into the living room. A funny thing happened. I actually enjoyed it.
Perhaps it was because with the TV commentary, I now had an idea of what was happening, or maybe it was just because that particular game was much better than the previous ones. It seemed like bodies were flying all over the screen and the action was much faster and more open than the slow, methodical ones before it. On top of that, everyone in the room was really into the game. For every chance, missed call, try, and conversion, a collective cheer (or groan) rose from the partisan All Blacks crowd in the room. Once again, the All Blacks won in dramatic fashion, though on the next occasion where I watched a game on TV in a hotel in Rotorua, they weren’t as lucky. But even that game was better on television, again coming down to the last second with South Africa when the aforementioned Dan Carter almost pulled off a miracle kick to win it.
That rugby is better enjoyed on a couch than from the bleachers is no indictment on the sport. The same can be said about rugby’s closest relative, American football. It was the level of play that I was more discouraged about. Part of the reason that Americans tend to ignore soccer and rugby is that we are accustomed to seeing sports played at the absolute highest level. In the four main professional sports leagues--the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB--the players are, by and large the best in the world, but the American soccer league can’t hold a candle to its European counterparts. This is why most Americans tend to pay attention to soccer during the international tournaments, and if they are regular followers, they usually pay more attention to the overseas leagues. Which leads us to rugby. It’s not that I don’t understand the game. I just find it hard to believe that when played at the highest level, a sport can still not engage an outside viewer. Regardless of opinions on the sport, if you sit someone down in front of the TV for a Brazil-Spain soccer game, it would be impossible for them to not to appreciate what he was seeing. The same cannot be said for rugby, because more often than not, the players aren’t doing much at all. It just doesn’t seem like, even at its highest quality, there is anything to appreciate.
So it’s unlikely that anyone will care if the United States makes it over here to play at a (hopefully) rebuilt Eden Park with the rest of the world at the Rugby World Cup. While they might seize the day and take the rugby world by storm, the more likely scenario is that they’ll be outclassed and outplayed by their opponents whose nations have embraced rugby in way their own never has. But if this is going to be the result, maybe it will be better that America isn’t paying attention. We only care about the best.