Posts by Richard Wain
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Good post Hadyn.
I've been on both sides without ever really understanding the disconnect myself, the gap between sport people and not-sport people – until recently. I've always played sports: football since age 5, with just a few years off in my teens, when I tired of the team aspect and concentrated on BMX racing instead, before heading back to football via a social league at Uni. I now play as often as I can, up to four times a week, both indoor and outdoor. I’ve played basketball, netball and touch rugby as well. I’m 1.94m and 100 kilos: basically an athletic build I suppose and sport is just a great way to feel alive on the planet really.
Yet I never watched rugby (just once as a youth, though I did vaguely watch cricket) until it went pro in the ’90s and improved immensely as a spectacle (now regressing again, sadly - the Super 14 is looking very average).
And that metamorphosis into something watchable, even beautiful, kind of shortcircuited a mental blindspot I'd developed towards rugby up to that point. Until then I could just about write someone off if they were into the code… instead of the brute forward power and kicking game it had become, the sport maximised its potential and became, as the great D.F. Wallace wrote in his piece on the Fed, "a prime venue for the expression of human beauty". Well, at times anyway. (Wallace's Infinite Jest is my favourite sports novel, hilarious and a massively addictive, inventive page-turner: read it).
Heck, I'd go so far as to say rugby's coming of age as a more open, crowd-pleasing game helped bring the country together and heal those rifts from the '81 Springbok Tour. Certainly it gave me something to talk to taxi drivers about (cricket for the majority of them of course)!
Sport, and especially the beautiful game, has served me well as a way of seeing the world too: I’ve played football with teenagers in London and with Latinos, Africans, Eastern Europeans and just about everyone else here in NZ. It’s a language. Who was it said if it wasn’t for sport we’d have more wars?
I’m now a part time sports reporter in my working life and follow all sorts of different sports, an eye-opener for me personally that I can only thank rugby for. And I love Mex, he’s bloody funny. Aussie league commentators are the best though.
Sport is sport, it’s like music: there’s no good or bad sporting code (genre), just good and bad games (songs). I also work in music and I’ve been constantly amazed at the number of top musicians and industry folk who are as into their sports as they are their music: for instance I play indoor and the odd sevens game with a top muso who’s a football rather than music buddy of mine and is well into his NBA basketball too, while the editor of the best music rag in NZ runs a darned cool sports blog (deadball.co.nz) too.
Then again there’s always the blank stare and polite conversation-changing when you mention sport with other folk, which is fine of course: I just reckon there’s no point ruling out such an amazing part of our modern world - the incredible physicality that top level sport brings to the viewer, Wallace’s “kinetic beauty” - without considering its potential as a hat-tip to what humans are capable of.
RIP David Foster Wallace. -
Hmm, reckon you may have a point there... and IIRC it was Prime who had the replays last time I noticed and they of course are owned by Sky, so have little incentive to run it closer to the game... but TV3 also tried it and bailed out...
Not sure what the answer is on that one - aside from just getting in Sky - I don't have a house or wife so can probably afford it ;-)... I did without it for a while for complicated reasons that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with Rupert's Down Under monopoly and found Prime not very good for replays (but better than nothing).
I imagine the reason interest in rugby, for example, has waned is there's just too much of it. But conversely, there's a heck of a lot of football on the telly and I still sat down and watched something like 12-15 games over the Xmas period... OK enough now, people are laughing...
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Whining about not having Sky is just lame people... either get it or don't moan. Oh heck, moan if you like... but it's still lame.
Sports make big money off TV coverage... that's why they're all there on pay TV. Your small contribution (and it doesn't cost much IMHO - I get all I need for $63 or something a month) merely helps pay the players' salaries. (Of course you can argue they get paid too much, true in many cases, but hey, that's capitalism. Only the worst system, apart from all the others...)
It's a lot cheaper than sitting in the pub! That's why I got it initially, that and the fact TV reception was so terrible round my place.
And anybody who was watching the tennis today on TV1 will know why free to air just can't cut it. Not the ad breaks so much (ESPN, sheesh!) but cutting to... The News? Just when the action's getting good? WTF? Ditto Maori TV's delayed and sporadic coverage of the Breakers...
Worst thing about pay TV? I'm with Haydn on this one: RIP afternoon rugby. Does anyone in the UK really watch our games anyway? Poor reason for scheduling night games in Dunedin, ever...
Replays on free to air, sure, why not? Because nobody watches it, that's why... At least that's what the last lot who gave up on screening rugby replays said... (can't remember which free to air it was)... I guess live's the deal and that's owned by Murdoch around here. Sad but true.
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She sure is the best looking striker ever produced by NZ...
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It was 16-12 at the break in the loigue actually... also you ignored the amazing win by the under-20 women at the football world cup in Chile, not only beating the Latin Americans at the competition they're hosting, but knocking them out!
So let's see... the Kiwis are world champs, the All Blacks are rolling towards another Grand Slam, the Breakers are top (well 2nd on points diff but ahead on head to head over the Dragons, who they humiliated on Thursday at home), the under-20 women won only the third game ever at any world cup at any level for NZ... even the friggin' Phoenix won (should've been just one red card but hey, play the ref)... too bad Jacob Oram's injured or the Black Caps could maybe have made it six out of six, but I'm always just amazed NZ has a cricket team that can even compete, let alone win sometimes... -
I know nothing of Ms Kaye and little about Ms Tizard, aside from her family name and an interview I did with her for a radio music thing a few years back when she blathered unusable platitudes.
However while the latter seems like a nice enough lady, I wasn't sad to see the former elected in my backyard (Ponsonby). Strikes me I can't recall anything Jude did apart from appear at arty gatherings.
I'm never voting either party myself until student loans are history, having been screwed over by both the Nats and Labour during my own tertiary career.
Hey, I know how to hold a grudge! And, why vote for a major party under MMP anyway?
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The plural of mouse isn't mice in computer land...
In fact I believe it's mouses.
I quite like that, for some reason.
A Pedant
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Jeez I'm impressed by how much thought some of youse has put into this... I was just talking to myself before (as you do) and we all reckoned that everybody's racist really, it's merely a matter of over-riding those dull reptilian urges and realising everybody's people too, being a better perp and not a dick.
If you can't laugh at concentration camps/slavery/*add your own terrible thing you shouldn't laugh at here*, what CAN you laugh at?
Surely humour is meant to be awful, in the glad-that's-not-happening-to-me way of things... remember, tragedy is only half the wheel, comedy is tragedy averted or overcome and we all get to laugh.
But there's still no excuse for David Brent. That guy's just painful. Brilliant of course. But if I need to be uncomfortable, I'll go to a political rally, or a knitting circle, or a dDub gig or something.
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I'll tell ya what's funny... a researcher named Finding.
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Well it's possible but I'm running a new Macbook with large memory (mine's not so good, can't recall how many gigs) and it was well late at night on a decent broadband connection...