I blame it on the Romans
I’ve long had my suspicions about Ancient Rome. They don’t quite go back to the time I sat, transfixed, in a classroom at the age of eleven or so and listened to a recitation of ‘How Horatius Saved the Bridge’ an extract from something called ‘The Lays of Ancient Rome’ by some epic poet, ‘Macaulay’ I think was his name. In later years I might have visualised British comedian Frankie Howerd, leering into the lens of a TV camera and insisting that he ‘knew most of them’. No matter, the deeds of Horatius held a class spell-bound; the more surprising because the children in the class, by and large, didn’t have any rapport, to speak of, with the ‘raconteur’.
Then, more recently, along came another British comedian, Terry Jones, who, in the spirit of the currently popular ‘debunking’ genre, was at pains to point out that at the time of Rome’s downfall, the real ‘Barbarians’ were those within the city walls, and the blokes hammering on the gates, mere ‘pussy-cats’ by comparison.
One of the unfortunate blights upon Roman life, was the place of the ‘Colosseum’ and in particular, the goings-on in its central portion, the ‘Arena’. Tiring eventually of the noble sporting contests of the infinitely more civilised Greeks, the Romans had inflated the ‘bums-on-seats’ statistics by adding a few embellishments of their own. Gladiatorial combat was one, but not enough blood was being spilt as there was invariably, one ‘winner’ for each pairing of combatants, so the promoters cast around Roman Society for a persecuted minority for which no-one had much time. Lepers lived where they had been driven and too far out of town to be practical, but a small community of Christians, seemed ripe for expolitation. So, new entertainments were devised which culminated in the unedifying spectacle of Romans raising the rafters, while a pride of lions took off to different parts of the arena, to masticate, in isolation, the limbs which had not long before, been torn from the corpses and sometimes living bodies, of the unfortunate participants. If the Emperor of the day could divert his gaze from the face of his current ‘amore’ (and, likely, her mother as well), he gave an occasional ‘thumbs-up’ and some lucky sod was ‘spared’, presumably to fattened-up and ‘trotted out again, next week’. Only one bloke, Androcles, bucked the trend. For the rest, the career-path was, depressingly ‘one-way’.
Several years ago, I asked a well-placed TV executive at a public meeting, why we had so much TV Rugby compared to other sport, (Netball was not telecast at that time). When I asked if it might have had its origins in the Roman Arena, she admitted a possible connection, the ‘confrontational’ aspects of the sport, tending to appeal to many.
So, Rugby satisfies the needs of the ‘adversarial’, the combat-deprived, those who like a bit of ‘stoush’. Rugby Union hasn’t quite descended to the depths plumbed by its cousin, Rugby League, but in this age when TV ‘entertainment’ routinely plumbs new depths of violence, salaciousness, stupidity and voyeurism, you can bet your life that someone’s going to see dollar signs in upping-the-ante sooner or later. True, although a ‘spear-tackle’ can do huge damage to the human frame, (think ‘spinal-cord’), a week or so under ‘observation’ is not all that bad; nothing, at all, compared with the Roman alternative; ‘players’ ‘bits-and-pieces’ heading off in different directions.
All of which begs the question, have we changed all that much since the times of the Ancient Romans? Sadly, I have to contend, no; we seem to have dropped-the-ball, to use a Rugby analogy, somewhere along the way.
Much has been made of the ‘en-nobling’ aspects of Rugby, the numbers of professional people, such as lawyers, doctors, scholars and others who have kicked the pigskin bag around a field. This tends to reflect Rugby’s origins, the character-building benefits of the ‘playing-fields of Eton’ and such like, (for those whose ‘Papa’s’ could afford to send them there). ‘Boarding School will be good for our Peregrine. He’s always been awkward around other boys’; sometimes, it must be said, the outcomes were unintended, which led to the analogy of ‘batting for the other side’. I am afraid I find any link between ‘Rhodes’, or any other scholars and the intellectual capacities of many of the game’s present-day exponents, to be elusive, to say the least.
We could point to the ‘flip-side’, drunken brawls outside nightspots, intimidatory behaviour in public and frequent court-appearances on a range of charges. There is also the ‘ugly’ side, exemplified by the invitation I once received to a celebratory party for a win by a minor Dunedin side in a local competition. Amongst the incentives on offer to make the invitation more enticing was, ‘as much booze as you can drink’ and ‘we’ve got a girl ‘laid-on’, it’s ‘Xxxx’s’ sister, ( a team-member), so she’s ‘all-right’, (probably meaning STD-free), ‘In fact, she’s a ‘good-sport’. The opportunity, extended to me, by a workmate, was one I refused. I guess I was perceived to be a ‘wuss’, as the invitation was never made again. I often speculated on what ‘entertainment’ the team might have contrived, to celebrate a ‘loss’.
The Brits have a different reason for their ‘soccer’. Apart from the fact that Club loyalty, (brand identification), is positively tribal, if not downright ‘feral’, soccer has been the traditional ‘escape’ for people trapped in jobs they loathe, associations with people they hate, relationships gone-sour and life’s grinding monotony. Not all are affected that way, of course, but ‘the working-man’s game’ provided an hour of relief from ill-rewarded work in grimy, noisy factories, feeding into presses and other machinery, steel blanks to be drawn into shape, lathe-turning components, assembly processes which wouldn’t taxe the intellegence of a chimp. Once-a-week attendance at ‘the beautiful game’, the explosion of exultation to be released upon the scoring of a goal, (with its down-side, commiseration at a failed attempt); these things, plus getting legless in the pub afterwards and, possibly, dragging one of the opposition’s supporters up a deserted alley for a good ‘knuckling’ on the way home, all added to the piquancy of the experience. The ‘engine’ driving our appetite for ever more tackiness’, increased spectacle and gratuitous violence, has been TV. With each passing year the ‘ante’ is ratcheted-upwards as our need for ‘spectacle’, sensation and other traits which do us no credit, becomes insatiable; until, in the end, we stand to become carbon-copies of the Romans. It’s all-pervasive, reaches into our living-rooms and is corrosive of the ‘good’ which remains in us. Did you know, that Soccer was the first sport ever to be contrived specifically for a ‘targeted’ demographic, the blue-collar working- man? (Thank the BBC for that snippet of useless information).
After-all, what’s a match today without a bit of ‘biffo’, the ‘claret’ flowing from a nasty head or face wound or bone-jarring collisions which tend to return to haunt the exponents, health-wise, in later life? Lecture me until doomsday about the noblility’ of it all. It matters not, someone has found that there’s money in it, so it’s with us, for good.
Much is made of the Stadium design’s ‘overlays’ to allow other sports and events to take place. For ‘Overlays’ read, ‘We’ve provided a bare minimum of everything’. The means to host these activities will be available, but their hire-charge is an expense ‘on-the-top’. Was that what we were being promised in the heady days of the first flush of novelty, and the ‘presentations’, (significantly, the time when the first, and still-disputed ‘poll’, was taken)? Protestations of the project’s promoters to the contrary, the grim reality is a horse of an entirely different colour. Of course, we stand to find this out, only when the project has been driven beyond the ‘point-of-no-return’ which, for me, is the anticipated February signing of the first construction-contracts. Will default on the part of the city, contraction of the finance market, unforeseen difficulties, ‘nasties’ when the time comes to excavate the foundations, (given that it is to be built on reclaimed ground of notorious instability which, itself overlays the ‘plug’ of a hopefully, extinct volcano), have the worst of all results, millions of our ‘hard-earned’ litigated out-of-reach by disgruntled contractors for breach-of-contract. How far is it, really, down to the ‘basalt’ which once spilled from the volcano’s crater while the pyrotechnic bits obligingly blasted out Otago Harbour for us? It was no minor blast; the ‘Pyramids’ at Victory Beach ‘way down the far side of the Peninsula, were a ‘vent’. Others might well have surfaced near Blackhead or the ‘Organ-Pipes’ on the slopes of Mt Cargill; all are composed of basalt. The likelihood of another eruption, within any significant time-frame, seems remote; the spectre of enactment of the second scenario, default on legally-binding contracts, stands to haunt the city through, at least the duration of construction and possibly beyond. Is it really worth that, added to the other risks we already know about, or have foreseen?
We are told that ‘it is all in the hands of experts’. The obvious instance of the ‘Titanic’ aside, this fills me with deep foreboding, especially when it comes to the knowledge that many of those ‘experts’ are rumoured to wear multiple ‘hats’. I confidently expect that one or more, the Stadium construction behind them, will suddenly metamorphose into ‘Catering-hire’ experts, ‘Electronic Scoreboard Hire’ experts, ‘Labour-Contracting’ experts, (after all, those 5000 temporary seats are not going to come out of, and back into, those containers all on their ‘Pat-Malone’, are they). The CST chairman cites a lack of stalls and food and beverage facilities at Carisbrook, being a huge ‘minus’. It evidently enhances the ‘experience’, no-end, to have to head for your seat through rows of stalls touting the ‘strip’ appropriate to the current season, (you wouldn’t want to be seen dead in last year’s garb, would you), ‘memorabilia’; presumably, Rugby publications, and so-on.
The popular buzz-word is ‘vibrant’. An image is being created of a city positively pulsating with energy. This is a favourite piece of Cr Michael Guest’s jargon, he is on record as saying the city centre is in need of ‘sexing-up’. Apart from the images this conjures up, there is the unfortunate aspect that with average disposable incomes likely to be on the downside of ‘the point-of-inflexion’ for the foreseeable future, (differential-calculus taught me that), the amount of ‘lucre’ available to fuel this ‘vibrancy’ would seem to be finite. To put it another way, If the ‘earth-moves’ for you in the Octagon, it’s not likely to do so, with equal intensity, down in Awatea St, This seems to me to indicate a city divided and without a central ‘focus’, the urban-planner’s nightmare.
But, the eternally optimistic will claim, ‘Build the Stadium and they will come’. Will they indeed? That fails to take-into-account the new breed of Rugby enthusiast, those who might well prefer to fly into Momona at 11am and ‘out’ again after an afternoon game. An evening match, assures only a single night’s accommodation. With nightspots now catering for all-night shindigs, it would be entirely possible to be picked up directly from one of those by taxi, hideously hung-over or not, and deposited at the airport in time to check-in for an early-morning flight home. The world over, there exist sports facilities which foundered on exactly the same presumption, ‘Build the facilties and they will come’. They didn’t fulfil expectations at Athens in 2004, and the city still has misgivings about the Olympics’ much heralded return to the place of its origins. At Beijing, where money was no object, trained ‘seat-fillers’ had to be bussed in to give an illusion of full stadia. It has an aura of ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’, about it all.
Where do our Mayor and Councillors stand, in all this? My guess is ‘divided’, in fact, I know it to be so; the intriguing question is bound to be, in what proportions? Three, so-far in clearly-stated opposition, an unknown number ‘for’, and an uncertain coterie of ‘wait-and-sees’, or prevaricators; but how many? Does the CST already have the ‘inside-running’ with direct access to the inner circle of influence? I suspect so. What will facilitate this project from here on-in? Influence undoubtedly, plus, I suspect, a craving for re-election the next-time around. Power and authority are a heady ‘mix’, irresistible to many. Would anything quite as petty as ‘self-image’ foist upon us something which so many of us do not want, but will be expected to shell-out for on the drip-feed? The composition of the current council was seized upon, by opportunists, as a glowing endorsement of the Awatea St proposal, but that was not the single issue, by any means, on which the campaigns were contested. The residents of Opoho, no doubt, had their own issues with the ‘Lovelock Avenue’ proposal; after-all, we all have our various viewpoints on how our rates should be spent. One of ours, is the state of the footpath right outside our front fence. Forty-three years, to our certain knowledge of ‘patches-on-patches’ with no renewal. The roadway itself, likewise. Perhaps if ‘experts’ are to be employed, let them first be directed to the Council’s range of ‘core’ responsibilities and leave the frivolities to be financed by the only ‘winners’ in all this, the business and hospitality communities and professional Rugby, a ‘business’ venture, in case we need to be reminded.
I think an interesting situation will develop when the Edgar Centre and Stadium begin to overlap with respect to sporting events? A paucity of ‘events’, quite possible in view of the need to ‘save-face’ with respect for justification for the Stadium, might well see unfair competition, simply to divert a plausible array of ‘occasions’ to the Stadium to satisfy the paying punters that it was all worthwhile. It’s all in the lap of the Gods. Will its development as an all-purpose sporting venue requiring ‘overlays’ for everything, (not to mention the labour-costs of conversion from one format to another), kill every projected event stone-dead on the basis of costly ‘extras’ to be shelled-out for, when promoters budgeted only for ‘Stadium-Hire’? In short, will it price itself off-the-market? Will waning interest in professional Rugby, (the most recent Netball International against Australia drew a significantly larger TV audience, than the heavily-promoted ‘Bledisloe’ final), be its downfall. The Stadium wouldn’t be much of a drawcard even if the likes of Irene, Temepara, Casey and Maria were all featured; the punters would be too remote from the action. We have a genuine asset in the shape of the Edgar Centre, purpose-designed for ‘Court-based’ sports and not trying to be things it isn’t. Let’s keep it that way.
My pet premonition, the one which sees me ponder frequently in the ‘small-hours’ of interrupted sleep, is that the City Councillors will give this project the ‘Green-light’ for no better reason than the fact that retraction from the enthusiastic stance they took, early-on when the project had quite a different complexion, will involve backing-down, or loss-of- face. Confidently expect that high-pressure lobbying of individual councillors will take place, with everyone glancing over his, or her, shoulders to see what reaction they elicit from their peers. That would be an unfortunate outcome, with something the city isn’t united behind, and for which only a hypothetical ‘need’ has ever been projected, foisted upon it for no better reasons than face-saving, deflated egos and punctured vanities.
Did they have the same problems in Ancient Rome?
Ian Smith
September 2008
