Tommy Wilson: Walking away with mana intact

John Campbell and his team outside the TV3 studios in Auckland after saying farewell.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a Fifa-man.

The beautiful game of soccer has been kicked fair and square in the goolies.

The sad part of all this is that the beautiful game has been blind-sided and like all acts of greed the invoice for putting profit before people will have to be paid by the next generation.

We see it more and more, not just financially but environmentally, where again it is the next generation who will be invoiced for the short-sighted profit-before-people thinking of those who are prepared to poison our waterways, our whenua and our harbours with oil and chemicals.

Is there a difference?

Greed knows no boundaries, nor is it beholden to any race or religion. It is, as a mate said, like smoking a joint: "The harder you suck the higher you get."

On the other side of the coin from this is a man of much less means but a lot more mana.

Johno the journo - aka Captain Kakite, Mr Marvellous - John Campbell, can hold his head high and look back in later life when it is time to tell his tamariki and his mokopuna what it was like to walk out rather than be walked over.

As a fellow believer in the taiaha of knowledge being the answer to everything, when it is presented with honesty, humility and a tinge of hard caseness, Campbell for my two bobs' worth of what's good about walking away with your mana intact, has taught TV on both sides of the screen a huge lesson.

What that lesson is will be learned when his loss is measured by the popcorn programmes that replace him.

Perhaps the beautiful game will learn the same lessons?

Perhaps we can all take a piece of the problem on board when it comes to greed and the price we are prepared to pay for our own personal profit.

Ka kite and goodbye.

Ka kite and good luck, John Campbell.

-broblack@xtra.co.nz

Tommy Wilson is a best-selling author and local writer.