Sport v Art is not a war we ever asked for

The best (and worst) of the weekend links

I always find these types of columns curious and sometimes even irritating, although this from Lana Hart on Stuff is relatively low on the actual offence scale.

How many times have we watched coverage of an All Blacks practice several days before a test match, even while there’s no mention of an international art exhibition visiting New Zealand or an exciting new director for one of our major performance groups?

How normal is it for on-air reporters to discuss a sporting event days, or even weeks, after it has occurred? It’s old news – couldn’t we talk about something that inspires us in an artistic way?

My questions would be: 

Why even mention sport?

Why not just fight for more coverage for the arts?

Does it really have to be framed as an either/ or proposition? (After all, websites don’t generally have space issues).

Why don’t arts advocates cavil against the amount of space given to business? Or to opinion?

There’s an underlying snobbery to the arts v sports arguments and it might surprise some to learn you can be interested in both.

Would Stuff’s editors be as keen to run a piece bemoaning the fact that arts junkies in Auckland get a lovely council-funded art gallery, a highly functional library, a beautiful concert venue at the town hall, another one at Spark Arena, while poor ‘attention-starved’ sports fans get a choice of watching games at a bunch of mostly trash, unsuitable venues?

I’d hope not. Arts v Sports is not a war we need to have.

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But Council v Golfers might just be.

Bernard Hickey urges the mayor to keep the council’s shares in Auckland Airport… and instead sell the golf courses.

I’m not certain that Hickey is from the Malcolm Gladwell school that suggests golf courses are the worst example of land use in history, but I imagine there’s a few people imagining his face on a ball as they stride the city’s fairways this evening.

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This Jonathan Liew diary in the Guardian sparked a scrap with Piers Morgan in the septic tank of Twitter.

Piers Morgan @piersmorgan

🤣🤣This is the best faux World Cup virtue-signalling so far… woke journo has great time on expenses in Qatar, but keeps reminding himself to point out to his equally woke Guardian readers that he’s riddled with anguished guilt about it all. Hilarious.

The Guardian @guardian

World Cup 2022 diary: every good feeling in Qatar is lined with guilt https://t.co/SuAFwNWbQR

When you have one of sport’s finest columnists on one side and one of it’s gaudiest attention seekers on the other, it should be a knockout victory, especially as I remain deeply suspicious of any person who uses the term “woke” as a pejorative but, damn it, Piers might just have a point here.

Writes Liew:

Every good feeling is lined with guilt. Every moment of enjoyment in a stadium is freighted with the knowledge of its cost. Every misfortune is framed by the fact that actually, we’re the lucky ones. There is no real happiness to be found here, and this is exactly how it was intended.

Clearly thousands upon thousands of fans have been able to separate their enjoyment of football from the sins of the Fifa executive and the organising committee - and I’m not sure that makes them lesser humans.

I probably enjoyed Liew’s response to Morgan’s tweet more than the diary itself.

Jonathan Liew @jonathanliew

@piersmorgan Six years blocked and yet still somehow living rent free. I guess what offends you here is the idea of doubt, equivocation, interior conflict, the idea that multiple things can be true at once. You prefer to see the world in simpler terms. Because you are, at heart, a simple man.

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Have to confess that for a World Cup that supposedly had the greatest group stage ever¹, there is a dearth of quality writing. This on Jude Bellingham, though, is a nice example of a writer picking the obvious angle from a match and doing it very well. From Jonathan Wilson in Sports Illustrated.

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The media scrum, where everybody loses. Joel Carrett/ AAP (via Photosport)

If you skim this lightly ($), it could come across as a media whinge in a bid to get more access to the All Blacks. But it is worth scratching the surface here because there is more than an element of truth to it.

That no one has been able to join the dots and work out that Super Rugby collapsed in popularity not just because of its hubristic expansion plan, but because it had no culture of story-telling and wasn’t building any connection with its fans… is illustrative of the naivety that pervades the game, writes Gregor Paul in the Herald.

Fans want more than live content… They want heroes and villains: a deeper sense of theatre when their team plays that only comes when there is familiarity with the athletes.

They want authenticity, too. To see and read about real people with whom they can relate – speaking honestly and openly, not with the stage-managed soundbites that come when players are taught to be wary and guarded.

Somewhat madly, though, rugby teams pay people money they can ill-afford, not to facilitate this happening as their job titles suggest, but to prevent it.

Even if you do read it through a cynical lens, it doesn’t make it less true. Rugby’s contempt for media that don’t pay for broadcast rights has long been written into the constitution and it’s counterproductive beyond measure.

I ask myself (and now you) the following question: When was the last time you read a great profile of an All Black? It’s a tough question, right up there with, Why do most paintings of Adam and Eve feature belly buttons?

And when I say a great profile, I don’t mean a long interview. They’re dime a dozen. I mean a longform feature that dives into the player’s background, his hopes and insecurities, his wants and needs and leaves you going, “Wow, there’s a long more to that guy than meets the eye.”

What I suspect is they want to tell their stories themselves, a la Drive to Survive, and who knows, maybe they’ll have the wherewithal to pull it off but two things must be obvious.

The unpolished authenticity of the Black Ferns created an immediate connection with the public that must have registered at New Zealand Rugby, and the days of the unknowable All Black must end.

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1. That feels like recency bias to me. After a patchy start, what the group stages had in spades were final-match dramas, particularly in pools E and H, which is great but often mistaken for quality.