RUGBY HYSTERIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 97, 15 July 1927, Page 10

RUGBY HYSTERIA

FOOTBALL IN CHARGE GAME A POPULAR CRAZE QUEST OF THE SHIELD BY H. MAKARINI An Auckland commercial traveller who has built up a business connection in the Wairarapa made a special trip to Masterton last week-end. Not a football follower, he did not know the shield match was on, and consequently was amazed to find that business simply could not be conducted, on account of the feverish interest in the game. At his hotel, the first thing the girl said to him was not “Will you take porridge?” but “do you think it will be fine?” His ingenuous reply was, “What for?” at which she turned on him a look of withering scorn. THE GREAT LEVELLER From Cape Palliser to the Mahia, the East Coast was affected, last weekend, by Rugby hysteria. Under the spell of the Ranfurly Shield the Hawke’s Bay and Wairarapa communities, ordinarily graded by an aristocracy of land and wool which exists, to the same degree, nowhere else in New Zealand, were levelled by a common interest. What the shield has done in Hawke’s Bay is evidence of its democratic influence. Conservative squatters concerned only with their hares and hounds at one time lifted a slightly contemptuous eyebrow when Rugby football was mentioned. * Now they desert their hunters. From the broad acres of Porangahau and the homesteads of many a sheltered station, all through the province, they answer the lure of Rugby football. Thus the shield has done a great deal of good for the game of Rugby, and that consideration makes incon-

spicuous certain elements which are not so gratifying 1 . Not all the fervent supporters and Rugby followers accumulated in Hawke’s Bay during the hectic shield years can be considered permanent. Some are business men. at and away from the Rugby field, and their appreciation of the courage and finesse and physical endurance of the Bay’s great Rugby side is measured only by the length of Monday's banking slip. Hosing these people when the hectic shield period is over, the Bay may realise that much of its contemporary Rugby fervour is artificial, and that reaction is inevitable. ENDURING REMINDERS But a handsome bank balance to the credit of the Rugby Union, and magnificent twin stands erected on McLean Park, Napier, will be enduring monuments of the shield era, even when the trophy has gone. Pride in his footballers is the Bay citizen’s most salient characteristic. The trouble comes when outsiders purposely distort that entirely commendable quality, interpreting it as narrowness and pettiness. Even the newspapers jealously guard the Rugby pride of the province. But that is perhaps just as well, for in the past certain city critics have betrayed shocking prejudice against the Bay, and it would be regrettable if so fine a Rugby side did not have some ‘friendly organisation to chronicle its deeds. Just lately there may have been room for suspicion that shield covetousness is being carried a little too far. Passing over the training camps, which are pardonable indulgences for country players, and do much to raise Rugby standards, one comes to certain incidents last Saturday. REFEREE ATTACKED Undoubtedly there was rough play —though to exaggerate it into -“slaughterhouse tactics” is simply ridiculous, but an incident after the match, when the teams and others were at dinner, cannot be dismissed so lightly. This occurrence was a public denunciation of the referee, Mr. H. J. McKenzie, by a prominent Wairarapa player, who exhibited a regrettable lack of taste. His chief ground for complaint was that the referee had spoilt one of the finest games ever played by ordering off the finest forward in New Zealand, Maurice Brownlie. Brownlie, an idol among both Hawke’s Bay and crowds, had earlier been the object of sympathetic demonstrations, but in this incident his champion might have remembered that Mr. McKenzie followed only his sense of duty under particularly trying circumstances, and that the players as a whole, if not the two players chiefly concerned, were undoubtedly to blame. The incident when spectators threatened J. Donald, Wairarapa skipper, must be unparalleled in a Rugby match of such importance. Donald had downed Blake, allegedly with unnecessary violence, and was at once confronted by two excited spectators, who sprinted out from the crowd, and would have made a massed attack had not a lanky policeman dragged them back from the field. COMIC INCIDENTALS Such incidents can well be forgotten in the host of comic side-issues which the match raised. Hawke’s Bay’s black and white goat—an animal marked almost providentially in startling pigments—is probably the first of its breed to have travelled in an ordinary railway carriage. Hawke’s Bay supporters carried it all the way from Waipukurau, and led it on to the ground in a harness of black and white ribbon. Between the ranges and the sea, from Palliser Bay to Poverty Bay. the earth almost quaked when the Bay followers stamped their delight as the team came through to victory, and from then on, in hamlets near and far, there were delirious scenes, tin-can-ning, speeches and bibulous celebrations. Rugby hysteria had the populace in its grip, and undoubtedly there are elements of danger in that absorbing fever. But who, on the contrary, would prefer that Rugby should languish in obscurity?