Public Address | Field Theory

One in a billion | Dec 22, 2009 13:02

I was intending to write something about gay athletes for a long time but there never seemed to be a catalyst for it. Now Welsh rugby international Gareth Thomas has provided that.

Thomas admitted to living a lie for most of his life, including marrying his wife in 2002 (they split in 2006). Rugby players aren't poofs and all that I suppose. The story naturally says how accepting his fellow teammates are and how he's still good friends with his wife. It must help that he retired two years ago.

Still it seems that his teammates and coaches knew and supported him at the time. Though "support" seemed to also mean helping Thomas hide that he was gay to the rest of the world. There was talk amongst media at the 2007 World Cup that after the tournament one of the Welsh players would be "outed", a story that was quickly quashed.

Former NBA player John Amaechi, who came out in 2007 after he retired, rightfully says that the problem now becomes that Thomas is not seen as some great Welsh rugby hero, but as "that guy who was gay".

The sports world is obviously one of the toughest work environments for someone to be homosexual. For women the claims are of increased testosterone and cabals, for men it's increased femininity and weakness. Note the difference in these two articles: on the Daily Mail's sports page; on the Daily Mail's (sigh) Femail page. Same article, but the pictures on the sports page show Thomas as a blood-soaked, tackle-breaking, manly man.

There is still also the problem of homophobic sports-people and coaches. Stories of coaches setting players against teammates in general are sadly common (though hopefully declining), and knowing a kid is gay can be worse. So Thomas' revelation and the fact that his teammates knew before he went public, can only be a positive thing.

Oddly though I think that Thomas' case, a gay sportsman at international level in a physical sport like rugby, is a rare one. Is say this because of something I've actually been asked many times: which All Blacks were gay? To be honest it's normally in the form of a statement like "Player X was totally gay" or "I bet there were heaps of gay All Blacks". It's a bet I'm willing to take not because I think that a gay athlete could never be good enough for the All Blacks, but because the probability of such an event is quite low.

Consider the current squad. I've had some people tell me that anywhere from one in ten to one in four people are gay so at least one All Black must be. This works if the All Blacks are a demographically consistent subset of the population. They aren't. It also works if that ratio is correct. It isn't.

An estimate from a gay travel site suggests there are "100,622 gay and lesbian people between 16-64 years living in New Zealand" (with no reference). According to Sex in Australia: The Australian study of health and relationships, from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (and filtered through Wikipedia):

The largest and most thorough survey in Australia to date was conducted by telephone interview with 19,307 respondents between the ages of 16 and 59 in 2001/2002. The study found that 97.4% of men identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay and 0.9% as bisexual. For women 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian and 1.4% as bisexual. Nevertheless, 8.6% of men and 15.1% of women reported either feelings of attraction to the same gender or some sexual experience with the same gender. Half the men and two thirds of the women who had same-sex sexual experience regarded themselves as heterosexual rather than homosexual

So the number of bisexuals is, probably unsurprisingly, high, but the percentage of gay men is quite low. Note: I really wanted StatsNZ data here but they don't collect information on sexuality and have no plans to.

This means that the proportion of gay men who are also rugby players will be even smaller. The first capped All Black was in 1884, 125 years later and we've had caps for 1,100 All Blacks. At any given time the All Blacks account for much less than one percent of the population. So these are very small chances to start with.

And given the number of rugby players in the country compared to the number who are selected for the All Blacks, you can reduce the chances again. While Thomas is the case against this argument, I would say that any young gay man coming through the ranks of provincial and professional rugby to get to the All Blacks would have to get through some intense bigotry to get there and remain there.

Does this mean that Thomas being a gay rugby international is one in a billion? Possibly. If you look across sports as a whole, the number of athletes who are gay is probably representative of the general population and they aren't all clustered in one or two sports… unless those cabal rumours were true.

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Stripped to the bone in under 30 seconds | Dec 17, 2009 14:34

Christmas is a time of insatiable need, where consumers turn into frenzied piranhas, skeletonising the ox carcass of consumable goods. I do not see myself as anything but piranha #47 happily attacking the flesh, or at the very least pointing out to my piranha family the bits I'd quite like to have if they wouldn't mind getting it for me.

I believe my analogy died somewhere in there.

Beyond the cool stuff that teases me with enticing winks from Uncrate, Threadless, Sneaker Freaker and various cool gadget blogs, there are the one off that people send me or that I happen across. These are usually sports related, more specifically, uniform related.

Pretty Pretty Pretty sent me some very cool tshirts via twitter. The Novel-T World series has the uniforms for a baseball team of literary characters. Naturally the captain is Ahab who pitches to the catcher Moby Dick.

After that I discovered that the pun wasn't exclusive. Novel Tees make tshirts for businesses that only exist in fiction such as High Fidelity's Championship Vinyl.

There's an interesting category of sports shirt that shows your support but also conveys your sense of annoyance at recent changes to said team. For example the shirt that's been on my wishlist for a while is this Meats shirt (for those who don't know it's a facsimile of the NY Mets).

Then there is the very famous shirt that arose from the creation of CitiField: a stadium that was built to house the Mets after the old Shea stadium was demolished and is named after bailout-requiring company CitiBank. "I'm calling it Shea". The New Zealand equivalent would be "I'm calling it Lancaster Park". The shirt has been seen on national television and has numerous spin offs for other corporate-whored-out stadia.

I'm not even going to get to beautiful sneakers.

Something that strikes me about these alternate versions, is that the style of sports uniforms (especially baseball) resonates as actual fashion. But they are always used in a way to convey support.

If I were to say that to you in person I wouldn't look confident. I said before that I find the hordes of people in Yankees caps ridiculous. Worse is the sudden surge in Pittsburgh Pirates caps, where you just want to ask the idiots: "do you know what the hell you're wearing?" In a similar category people wearing mismatching sports team's apparel.

Pffft, kids these days.

I was thinking about all of this as I was jostled about in what would become the mosh pit at Pearl Jam's Auckland concert.

As you can see from Lisa's brilliant photograph above, Eddie Vedder is wearing a Walter Payton throwback (Chicago Bears); a fact I geekily mentioned to my partner who was much more interested in Mr Vedder at the time. But Eddie's shirt while having the correct "GSH" (George Hallas' initials) on the sleeve was missing the name and number on the back. So it wasn't an actual jersey it was just a cool t-shirt.

And Pearl Jam seem to like the look. For their concerts this year every tour stop had its own unique t-shirt based on a local sports team. Seattle had this amazing Seahawks shirt:

That's the back, the front had a larger version of the altered Seahawk logo. And while 21 was the date they played (September 21) it's also a pun on the usual Seahawk fan's jersey with 12 on the back (in Seattle the famously loud fans are the 12th man).

For the record at the Auckland concert it was a version of the Auckland Blues jersey. The concert was held at Mt Smart, possibly for irony.

By the way any of the above links are purchasable and can be sent to me c/o Public Address. Go Team Piranha!

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The NPC Manifesto | Dec 14, 2009 14:11

1. Everyone has an idea
2. Nobody likes anybody else's idea
3. The group must come to a decision

Given these three conditions it seems inevitable that whatever that final decision was, that it was going to be a complete cock-up. An anonymous fly on the wall has informed me that the meeting was "frosty as fuck" and several unions' CEOs may have had some unrepeatable words with each other while the NZRU were out of the room.

This is the environment we're in. Everything is about the dollar and the only competition that's seen as bringing in that money to the unions is the NPC (in whatever form it takes).

The only way rugby unions can survive is with the sponsorship dollars that comes from nationally televised games and the larger crowds. And because of that, suddenly every team has a right to be in the top division.

Teams that have struggled recently to compete both financially and on the field suddenly decide that they can win if they go to court instead of sucking it up and really competing in the second division. This action basically kills off any idea of promotion/relegation, an idea that it seemed everyone liked (until it was their team being relegated).

So now we have a system where everybody wins and so (naturally) everybody actually loses. No wonder Canterbury's red shirts do so well, it's COMMUNISM!

I see only one way out of this: make Dan Vettori the head of the NZRU. The boy is a born multi-tasker.

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Skate Highway One | Dec 07, 2009 22:49

If you were watching rugby for the first time you'd think that it was a strange game where the players just flop over the ball until someone passes it or the ref blows his whistle. Football would be easier to pick up, until someone was offside. And roller derby looks like a bunch of girls in frilly panties skating fast and hitting each other. And some terrible sports reporters might think just that.

The 174-88 score line of Skate Highway One suggests something different.

New Zealand's first intercity bout featured Auckland's Pirate City All Scars [sic] and Wellington's Richter City All Stars. Richter City had agile jammers with amazing acceleration. The Pirates came with solid and well-drilled interplay between their blockers… and agile jammers with amazing acceleration. Guess who won.

Richter City's blocking has been progressing over the season but their accomplishments were for nought compared to the combinations the Pirate's skaters had built up over the years. Channels would open up for Pirate's jammers and skaters like Fia Fasi Oi ("Do you want a hiding?" in Samoan) would be through the pack before the third turn.

Pirate City also had a clear game plan that they executed straight away: get the lead jammer position, score points, stop the jam (the first jammer through the pack without cheating is the lead jammer and can call off the jam at any time). This meant that the score went up in small increments to start as the teams felt each other out. But one thing was clear for Richter City, scoring points was going to be difficult if they didn't have that lead position.

The Pirates were so ruthless they would kill the jam even if they hadn't scored themselves. The home team was so strangled by this tactic that it was fourth jam before Richter City got points on the board. The Pirates combo of Little Miss Evil, Spar Kill, and Fia Fasi Oi (easily the MVP) were racking up points like it was pinball, while Pieces of Hate and Lucy in Disguise controlled the pack.

That's not to say they had it all their own way. Richter City clawed back some of the Pirate's lead. Punk Panther especially stood out scoring some big points off power-play jams (where the opposition jammer is in the penalty box) and MEOW and Tuff Bikkies were blocking stand outs, described later by the opposition as "downright annoying". Suffer Jet had her sneaky shoulders in the mix too.

And the crowd of over 1,200 didn't quit either. When Richter got their first lead jammer the stadium shook with energy. Visiting MC Mic Riot told me later that the reaction blew him away. This wasn't some sad sack rugby crowd who would leave if their team got behind. They were there to stay and scream until the end.

The Wellington skaters kept a sense of humour too. Even forty points down Bikkies couldn't help a cheeky wave to a Pirate being sent to the box. And MEOW started dancing with Scheisse Minelli between jams. Again cementing the fact that while the hits are big, everyone's friends in reality. Even the "bad guys". The crowd had great pleasure in booing Skate the Muss (with a tasteful "cook me some eggs" t-shirt) when she was sent to the penalty box.

I really want to emphasise how impressive the level of skating was all around. Even though the score was a blow out the two teams were skating amazingly. Fia Fasi Oi was incredible and I don't think I saw her fall over once. In fact I remember seeing her get hit, spin regain control by skating sideways and the carry on at full speed.

Perky Nah Nah gets the medal for heart. She took a skate to the thigh in an early tangle and got up and kept skating (I touched the bruise after the bout and it was an impressive lump). Then in the second half she took a painful tumble and as she was getting up another skater couldn't get out of the way and kneed her in the head. Helmets, mouthguards, and knee pads: not just for show.

And all of this is the just the start of the intercity bouts. There are two leagues in Taranaki, a league in Christchurch, a league in Hamilton and a Northland league (with rumours of a Tauranga league starting up). By next year it could be a full national tournament. And you'll want to be there for that, though you may want to view the after party from a safe distance.

Here are the photos from Mike and Jed (as always copyright is all theirs). I suggest going to their galleries because they have some amazing shots there.