The winner on the day

“A nation united,” screamed the headlines, after the Black Caps historic Cricket World Cup semi-final win. There we all were, backing our team, fingers crossed, face-paint applied.

But what about those people that don’t like sport. Or – worse somehow – just don’t care? And given New Zealanders’ abilities in fields like science and film-making, should we still be making such a big deal of sport? 

At its very best, a sporting match is great drama. There are plot twists, narrative flow, heroes and villains. In New Zealand, the villains usually take the form of Australian, South Africans, or English referees.

The heart-pounding semi-final, which New Zealand won in the last two balls – after playing for more than nine hours, through rain and injury – was the perfect example. It was a fairy-tale story – two teams who had never made the final, a great sporting rivalry, and the ecstasy of an extremely close finish.

Think how few places in our lives we get to feel that intense emotion, says Toni Bruce, an associate professor at Auckland University. That’s the lure of sport. “We believe it’s honest competition, we see people striving and giving everything of themselves. And when it comes down to the wire… we just find ourselves caught up in it…and if ‘we’ win, that moment makes us feel part of something bigger that ourselves.”

“There’s something wonderful about trying to pull everybody together into this sense of oneness,” Bruce says. “But in doing that, it actually shuts out a whole lot of people, but we don’t hear about them. They just quietly feel excluded.”

When I say that I don’t like sports, people think it’s blasphemous.

One of those people is Lisa Johnston, 25, who has just left New Zealand for Melbourne. When she told people she was heading across the ditch, people warned “be careful you don’t switch sides”. “No one actually understands that I have zero interest in sport whatsoever.”

“When I say that I don’t like sports, people think it’s, like, blasphemous. I wasn’t into the Cricket World Cup at all and I don’t really like rugby.”

“Sport has been a powerful, dominant force in New Zealand’s cultural identity,” says Otago University’s Professor Steve Jackson.  “Having rugby emerge as a sport through which NZ defined itself, and New Zealand males in particular, it held a very central position, but it certainly has changed. I think people have much more flexibility now.”

Three-quarters of adults take part in some sort of sporting activity each week. (That makes New Zealand amongst the highest in the world, Sport NZ says [PDF Link].) But Toni Bruce’s research tells a slightly different story about how much we actually care about sport. She looked at the responses to the 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups and will repeat it again this year.

One of the questions she asked is “how important is it to you that we win the Rugby World Cup? Of her sample of 267, only 52 per cent said it was important to them personally. But when she asked how important do people think it is to other New Zealanders, 83 per cent thought it was important to other New Zealanders. “So, to me, that 31 per cent gap is the cultural story we tell ourselves about how important rugby is to us,” she says.

“I think in many ways we are a rugby-mad country – or, we believe we are. So I think what tends to happen is that people who don’t like rugby, or don’t care, or are ambivalent, they just stay silent.

“We are a small country, there are not many places in the world where we can be proud and visible, and sport has historically been one of those and continues to be one of those.”

But Lisa Johnston finds that frustrating. “As a country, New Zealand can be quite apathetic towards a lot of political issues, but they’ll spent twenty minutes talking about sports…I find it quite weird because none of my family is very into sports, and none of my friends are very into sport.

“So in my personal life I don’t really see any of that, but when I am at work, or I am online, or I watch TV and it’s just in your face all the time, and you are kind of less of a Kiwi if you don’t support the sports team.”

WATCH: Megan Whelan and Julian Vares visit Southbridge Rugby Club to see how important a club is to a local community. 

Steve Jackson says the value of sport really depends on who you’re asking. Sport does build national cohesion and identity. “And perhaps more recently in terms of what it does to build the New Zealand brand and attract international sporting events and sports tourism.” Think of what having rugby sevens at the Olympics could mean for “the New Zealand brand”.

Others might look at the relationship between physical activity and health, and the way that increasing participation rates increases the overall health of the nation. In fact, Sport New Zealand has just launched a new campaign aimed at keeping those rates high. “We know that things are changing and we can’t assume we will always be a sporty, active nation,” Sport NZ Chief Executive Peter Miskimmin said in a media release last month. “Young people have increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Urbanisation and other societal trends are changing the way Kiwis participate. Technology is changing the way people interact with each other and people are fitting sport into increasingly busy lives.”

And, of course, there are the negatives. We see it in the media particularly, Professor Jackson says, when something negative happens – violence on or off the field, drug taking, or players indulging in too much “celebration” (whether that’s alcohol, or something more sinister.) And then there’s all the politics, “including how much you spend on ‘investing’ in things like the America’s Cup, or the Rugby World Cup.”

“You could kind of see it on Twitter, as a culture, everyone sees the sports teams as something we own collectively as a nation,” Lisa Johnston says. “You can see it especially with, say, the sailing team, because that’s very elitist. You need to have a lot of money to do anything, and it’s kind of like a bunch of rich white dudes in a yacht.”

But sport, and in particular sporting events, do make big money for New Zealand. As one of the hosting cities of the Cricket World Cup, Wellington hosted matches, events, and business delegations from around the world. The city’s deputy mayor, Justin Lester, says the tournament was a phenomenal success.

Lester says it’s hard to tell how much that might have meant for the local economy – estimates range anywhere from 30 to 70 million dollars. But in marketing terms, he says, the impact is massive. Picture all those sweeping shots of Wellington city from the Cake Tin looking out over the harbour being broadcast to billions of people.

A 2011 report from Lincoln University [PDF link] found that the market value of sport and recreation to the New Zealand economy in 2008/09 was estimated to be $5.2 billion, or 2.8 per cent of GDP. That put the sector on a par with the dairy industry’s contribution to the New Zealand economy.

In 2011, the Rugby World Cup contributed to the New Zealand economy, through tourist spending, locals spending more in that time, and contractual arrangements like the broadcast rights. Don’t let that fool you, though. “Economic impacts from sporting mega-events can be even more difficult to forecast, as the benefits are often overstated and the costs understated,” writes Massey University’s Dr Sam Richardson.

Still, there are a lot of sports that would love to have even a fraction of that 30-70 million dollars. One of them is basketball. New Zealand has its own professional team, the New Zealand Breakers, which despite having won four championships in the Australian National Basketball League, is far from breaking even.

The Breakers CEO Richard Clarke says the question of “value” is something the franchise has grappled with. “We started as a club, our owners wanted to make a difference in the community, and the way they do that is by owning a professional basketball team.”

But the time has come to say ‘right, well how valuable actually is this thing, do you want it to be sustainable?

The ANBL has no centralised funding, which means that, unlike other competitions, the Breakers receive nothing from the league, other than some assistance for travel. Clarke says without sponsors and help from owners Paul and Liz Blackwell, the team would not have survived. “But it’s a pretty big thing to put onto Paul and Liz every year, that they have to fund shortfall, and part of our model isn’t commercially driven – that’s the philanthropy part of it – but yes, we’d like to get to the stage where having the professional team isn’t right on Paul and Liz.”

Would Auckland be a poorer city without the Breakers? Clarke hopes so, and points to work that the organisation has done in South Auckland and Northland. “A lot of the research coming through is seeing that the vision of potential in some of those communities doesn’t extend beyond the next couple of streets. So, we’re talking about some of the communities in say, Point England, that have never been into the central city.

“Some of our programmes, such as our Hoop Dreams programme, they get a ticket, they get travel on the trains to the game, and we’re talking about what else we can do.”

The Breakers have been around since 2003, so there’s a generation of Aucklanders who have never known the city without the team. And everyone loves it, Clarke thinks. “But the time has come to say ‘right, well how valuable actually is this thing, do you want it to be sustainable?’”

He says the challenge for basketball is that people aren’t used to going to see it live, or paying for it. “If you want to sit courtside at the [Los Angeles] Lakers, you’re going to be paying $8,000. Here, you’re going to be paying $145. Even in Perth, you’d probably being paying $500. But our model is we still need people to want to come.

“And New Zealand is a unique market, because you only need to lose three games, and people will walk away from it. Or, what we’ve encountered is the more successful you are, they less they come.” Clarke calls it being good enough, but not too good.

Maybe even when the tickets are relatively inexpensive, people still have to budget how many games they can get to. Or it might be New Zealand’s infamous tall poppy syndrome rearing its head.

On the sporting field, we “punch above our weight,” says Justin Lester. We’re brought up generally with backyards and parks, and it’s what kids do. There’s the opportunity to create heroes for kids.”

And that doesn’t just go for kids. Camilla Lees is a doctor, a silver fern, and now plays for the Northern Mystics in the trans-Tasman ANZ Championship. Watching the Black Caps semi-final, and the calm with which the players went about their game was inspirational, she says.

It’s a World Cup year for netball this year too, so the holy trinity of New Zealand sports will all have a shot at proving this country is the best in the world. This year, Lees has taken time out from being a doctor and has changed franchises so she can concentrate on making the World Cup squad.

Between court session, running sessions, and the gym, she trains 3-4 hours a day. And she can see how some people might think that putting a career like medicine on hold to basically exercise full time is a strange life decision.

“It’s a weird thing when you step back and think ‘all we do is throw a ball around this funny little rectangle. But for me it’s been a huge part of my life, and about far more than just the enjoyment. For me it has been about challenging myself and seeing how far I can push myself.”

She has always been “quietly competitive,” she says. Having grown up in the country, in Pukekawa, south of Auckland, with two sisters, netball was “just what you did.” Her friends played, and her mum was the coach. “For us there was no other option. You get kind of shoved into sport at a young age. I think the fact that was mum was into netball, and dad was rugby mad, meant we were surrounded by sport from so young, I think it’s ingrained in you.”

Not everyone dreams of wearing the Silver Fern though – and Lisa Johnston doesn’t understand why (mostly male) sports stars are always on a pedestal. She points to several sports stars tweeting on Election Day, the Tony Veitch’s return to broadcasting after admitting a serious domestic violence charge. 

She says even attending live sport – in this case, an All Whites football game – left her cold. “I really hated the atmosphere – they were doing all these really sexist chants, and the kids were joining in, and it’s just really breeding a culture that’s not very inclusive.”

Steve Jackson says those role models – the All Blacks and the Black Caps – are changing. Athletes are branded commodities, either of their chosen sport or for another commercial brand.

“It’s part of a wider cultural thing that we see with shows like The X factor, and the rest. Rather than just being a performer, you’re supposed to be a star and stand out from the rest. He says as participation patterns change people are looking to sports like rowing and cycling for role models. “Which is not to say the very strong powerful individual that might be represented by an All Black isn’t still there – but there’s a greater range.”

There’s a lot of research that shows that New Zealand nationalism and identity is quite insecure, Auckland University’s Toni Bruce says – a hangover of our colonial past. “In some ways that insecurity is quite healthy, but at the same time, it can lead to quite vicious responses, if people attack one thing that people feel ‘this is what makes me a New Zealander’.”

The point of her research, she says, is to unearth those people – about twenty percent of the population – who have no interest in rugby, and give them a place to be able to say that. Some of the people she has already surveyed have been told they’re “un-New Zealand” or “traitors”, and because of that, they stay silent. “So there’s nowhere that that story that we’re a rugby-mad nation gets disrupted.” Perhaps a little more disruption wouldn’t go amiss.