THIS Saturday will witness one of the most intense rivalries in international sport when the New Zealand All Blacks play the touring British & Irish Lions at the famous Eden Park stadium in Auckland in the first of a three-test rugby series.
The only other rivalry in sporting history that surpasses this is between the All Blacks and the South African Springboks – the two dominant rugby playing nations over the last century and a bit. The Black shirts of New Zealand would claim the ascendancy, but the frontier men of the South African bushveld would beg to differ, although the reality skews towards the Antipodeans. The statistics show that since the start of test rugby in the late 19th century, the All Blacks have amassed a win percentage of 77 per cent compared with the Springboks’ 64 per cent.
Why is a nation of only 4.5 million people living in a small land mass with a relatively decent gross domestic product so consistently globally dominant in a sport at almost every level? To put this dominance in perspective, Malaysia, for instance, has a population of over six times higher than that of New Zealand, and with no disrespect to past and present generations of Malaysian sports people, has made little impact on the sporting landscape.
Malaysia has had the occasional international success in badminton, squash and even diving over the last few decades, but in terms of team sports has been spectacularly ordinary even at regional level. Similarly, South Africa’s population is now 53 million and that of Australia 23 million and rising.
Social anthropologists have tried to come up with a cornucopia of reasons why a small nation has been so consistently dominant in a single sport for most of the 20th century and beyond. They mistakenly include Jamaica in sprinting, Kenya in middle distance running and Ethiopia in long distance events in this category, but their dominance has been intermittent over the years and linked to the emergence of one or two exceptional athletes in a particular era – Abebe Bikila and Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, Usain Bolt of Jamaica, Kip Keino of Kenya etc.
It remains to be seen whether Jamaica would continue to dominate sprinting once Bolt retires later this year. In the middle and long distances, the dominance of Kenya and Ethiopia have long been mitigated by athletes from North Africa and the diaspora through the likes of Somali Brit, Mo Farah, the double Olympic champion in London and Rio.
I must profess that I am no nearer to a socio-scientific explanation as to the dominance of the All Blacks but as a lifelong student of sports culture and policy, especially rugby union and cricket, another sport in which New Zealand has recently excelled in, I look to the historical development of All Black rugby and to what extent socio-political and economic factors have determined its evolution.
Is there a specific “rugby gene”? Not really because the evolutionary time span for such a gene to develop would be much longer. Australia, the Pacific Islands and South Africa and more recently Argentina are all strong southern hemisphere rugby playing nations, but they lack the dominance and consistency of the All Blacks.
Is it ethnicity and its unique blend (the eugenicists call it miscegenation) despite the fact that New Zealand does have its fair share of racial and tribal issues? The largely White Anglo Saxon colonial settlers seem to have overcome their vagaries and prejudices to force an inclusive culture with the native Maoris at least as far as modern rugby is concerned. It would be inconceivable to countenance an All Black team of today without a healthy dose of Maoris and mixed race New Zealanders.
Not so in South Africa, where wearing the iconic green and gold Springbok jersey in test rugby was the exclusive privilege of Whites, until of course the collapse of Apartheid in 1993, The mythology of White supremacy in Apartheid South Africa was that Black Africans and Brown Cape Malays and Indians were not interested in this aggressive contact sport and therefore not culturally suited to it. The evolution of post-Apartheid Springbok history emphatically debunks such eugenic tosh.
But there is one sordid affair in All Black rugby history, which I am currently researching, which will forever remain a stain and has been conveniently airbrushed from the annals of the game. In 1928, the New Zealand Rugby Union intentionally omitted to choose a number of Maori players including the legendary George Nepia, arguably the greatest fullback ever to play the game, in Maurice Brownlie’s All Blacks touring team to South Africa.
Welcome to the first institutionalized episode of racism in sport, for Nepia and his co-Maoris were uniquely excluded on racial grounds at the request of the then White Union of South Africa prime minister James Hertzog.
That set an ugly precedent of racial exclusion in touring teams from the White Commonwealth countries to South Africa well into the late 20th century when a globally-reviled but rugby-proud Apartheid regime finally started to allow Maori players such as Sid and Ken Going, Waka Nathan and Bryn Williams to be included in an All Blacks team .
In New Zealand like in South Africa, rugby is above all about passion and aggression, and national pride, which is instilled from the cradle to the grave. Like the Jesuits it is a question of "Give us a child until he is seven and we have him for life." Not surprisingly, New Zealand has the most socially-engaged rugby offering in history where the first ball toddlers come into contact with is the oval one and this hand-holding proaction continues throughout their lives whether they reach the pinnacle of donning the famous black jersey or simply playing at school, youth or provincial levels.
Those who are the most committed prevail because New Zealanders unlike any other nation absolutely hate losing at rugby. This commitment is also manifested in the war cry unique to All Blacks rugby – the Haka – the symbolic traditional Maori ancestral dance that throws down the challenge and strikes fear in any aspiring opposition.
As for Eden Park on Saturday, the omens are not well for the Lions for history is on the side of the All Blacks. Since the advent of the Lions tours to New Zealand in 1888, co-captained by Bob Seddon and Andrew Stoddart, it took the Brits and Irish a staggering 83 years to win their first rugby test series in New Zealand in 1971 when John Dawes’ exceptional team triumphed 2-1 in the series. This compared to Phillip Nel’s visiting Springboks who in 1937 became the first foreign team to beat the All Blacks in a home test series.
This is the coveted prize and national pride at stake at Eden Park on Saturday!
MUSHTAK PARKER is an independent London-based economist and writer. He can be reached via mushtakparker@yahoo.co.uk