Really, I don’t have anything against tennis, basketball, volleyball, or any other ‘game’ for that matter. In fact since I live over the road from a thriving tennis club and social centre, and since my son Andrew developed a taste – not to mention a nice little side-line in coaching his fellow teens – for Basketball, I at least finally know the basics of both.
Let’s get real though, that’s all they are, ‘games.’ And as writing great Ernest Hemingway once said; “There are only three ‘sports,’ bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are ‘games.’”
These days bullfighting, motor racing and mountainairing might seem an odd – even contradictory – mix. But what Hemingway ‘meant’ was that they were the only ‘sporting activities’ where dying doing it was part of the equation and, no doubt for some more ghoulish of fans, the appeal.
Of course, everyone who dons a helmet and race suit today owes a debt of gratitude to the likes of Sir John Young ‘Jackie’ Stewart for his tireless work in changing the attitude of the circuit owners and promotors from one of the cynical manipulation of impressionable young men happy to look death in the face and hold its stare, to actively looking out for them and their best interests.
Despite that, every time you or I or any one of the hundreds of thousands of ‘racing drivers’ around the world dons a helmet and straps themselves into a competition car we could well, er, not make it home that night.
How many tennis, basketball or volley ball players can say that about their ‘games.’
One of the things that still blows me away when I think about it is – considering how fast many of us go, usually with at least half a dozen other drivers of similar desire, ability and skill bombing along literally millimetres away – why there are not more accidents and with them, more deaths.
You probably can’t do it so easily today, but seven or eight years ago when I was editing Kiwi Rider motorcycle magazine most Fridays the track was open I’d be out at Pukekohe Park Raceway testing a sportsbike of one description or another. The reason was simple. At the time bikes like Suzuki’s GSX-R1000 and Yamaha’s YZF-R1 could break the speed limit in first (yep) gear and on a long enough straight top out at an indicated 285-295km/h.
That, as I’m sure you will agree, is seriously fast, not to mention seriously scary and it’s only now as I think back to those days that I ponder what didn’t but could have, gone wrong.
Other local bike journos used to write up bikes like this after a quick rip up the Riverhead Rd (the past the local High School, eh old mate?) but bar being a dumb way to lose your licence and potentially your life, a road – silly enough as it sounds – is no place for a bike like GSX-R, YZF-R1 or Ducati 916/996.
Most, as I tried to explain to a bemused cop one night, don’t even start to feel properly balanced till you are doing over 100 km/h and it is really only at 140-180km/h speeds (which you can use pretty much legally in Germany and Spain) that they start to work dynamically.
So yeah, though I’m primarily just a bloke who writes about stuff, I’d like to think that when it comes to subjects like speed and the desire some of us have to go to push the envelope, I actually do (or at least have had) some skin the game, er, sport! But I digress.
What I really want to talk about today is Auckland’s ASB (Tennis) Classic, and how we in the motorsport world could take a leaf out of the book they use to publicise their ‘game.’
If, for instance, you live in Auckland you are bombarded by pre-event PR BS from Labour Weekend onwards. What second rate tennis hack is considering coming to Auckland than waiting a week for the proper Australian Open is usually the upshot of it. Mainly because, let’s see, New Zealand hasn’t produced a genuine you-beaut world class player since Chris Lewis; the venue is small, pokey and impossible to find an affordable park near, and the last time Serena Williams played here she acted like a spoiled brat and left in a huff.
Also it usually rains like six bastards when the tournament is on because that’s what it does in Auckland between Christmas and New Year. And because it is an open air venue they have to stop play when it rains.
Yet, yet, yet, year in year out the bloody NZ Herald newspaper and the two old war horse free-to-air TV channels give the thing blanket coverage, brushing aside the rain delays, rubbish play by some of the ‘top seeds’ and general piss poor crowd attendance as if THEY were the paid event PRs.
In my humble opinion the ‘real story’ at all these so-called and usually self-titled major stick and ball sporting events, is ‘where have all the people who used to flock sheep-like to them gone?’ Check out any coverage of cricket, national level rugby (whatever it is called these days), tennis etc etc on TV and when the camera swings to follow a ball that’s been bit by a stick thing or passed from one player to another, check out all the empty seats at the stadiums.
And mull on the fact that the biggest single-day attendance plus three-day total of any ‘sport’ in this country is at the annual (of the last few years ITM-sponsored) Virgin Australia Supercars meeting……at Pukekohe Park Raceway!
Even taking into account today’s real-world counting of tickets and dollars (compared with some of the fantasy world stuff produced under the previous Supercar Inc administration) you are getting close to 30,000 people rocking up to the track each day to check out the racing….yet I don’t seem to remember The Herald or Stuff saying much about that in print or on their news web sites……..something to do perhaps with the fact that as far as I am aware, neither had a staff journo at the meeting last year…………………..
Unlike at the rugby or league where both outlets appear to think they should send their reporting staff….
What got me thinking – and now writing about – the parlous state of the way the national media covers ‘our’ sport however, was not the Supercar round at Puke, it was the recent TRS round at Hampton Downs.
While I wasn’t there to cover the meeting as such (my job was to bang the drum for the SAS Autoparts MSC NZ F5000 Tasman Cup Revival Series support class) I couldn’t help but get caught up in the atmosphere as the ‘big race,’ for the NZ Motor Cup approached.
At the tennis, the basketball and the bloody rugby this would have all been carefully choreographed with radio station ‘personalities’ (an oxymoron if ever there was one) having worked ‘the crowd’ into a lather of artificial WWF-like anticipation.
Because there was no real crowd to speak of, and because the announcers chatted away amiably about this and that without letting the racing disturb their reverie, the buzz about the pits was 100% organic. I loved it and got completely caught up in the tension as first Marcus Armstrong, then Lucas Auer, Liam Lawson and finally Artem Petrov (pictured) all put their poker faces on to play the ultimate high stakes game of who’s going to be quickest in qualifying.
When the session finally ended I was like a kid on TV doing one of those ‘Yes!” right arm pumps. And by the time the last lap board came out and I knew it was going to be Marcus (a kid I’ve reported on in karts since he was in Cadets) I don’t mind admitting I had a tear in my eye.
As, no doubt, did young Liam Lawson (another karter-turned-racing driver I have had the privilege to report on as he made his way through the various age-based karting categories) as he pondered what might have been had hard arse DTM ace Lucas Auer been more accommodating of his youthful impetuosity in trying not only to go, but stay around the outside through and out of Turn 1.
So there you go. The Hampton Downs round of TRS had it all…speed, action, drama, intrigue and excitement, all played out like a proper ‘sport; should be, by our youngest and best, in a crucible in which there is the ever-present prospect of life-threatening danger. Yet there were probably more people stopped for gas and some Maccas at nearby Mercer over the day than there were at the track.
Or at a ‘game’ of tennis at the closest courts.
Which in my view is more than a shame, it’s a national bloody travesty.
DJMCD
And apart from Teretonga the public attendance at all TRS meetings was the same, despite the fact this season saw two of NZ’s brightest future hopes battle it out right to the last. Armstrong with decent backing and Euro experience, Lawson with sometimes slightly impetuous bravery gave us the best series in its 15 year history. Who is to blame for non-attendance, the promoters or the perennial total lack of interest from “mainstream” media?