SPORTRITE - Confused? It could be just a matter of perspective

with Tim Eves
It is all getting a bit too confusing.
There might be sound reasons why Nick Willis runs the 1500 metres in 3m 34.16s in Beijing, a time a full five seconds quicker than John Walker ran to win a gold medal at Montreal in 1976, and gets a bronze surging over the finish line a full articulated truck length behind the gold medal winner, but it still makes you pause for a moment and go, hmmmmmmm.
Using what could be loosely termed as "bush mathematics", if Willis was in Montreal in 1976, he would have been waving to his Mum Usain Bolt-style about 50-metres the better, just as Walker was starting his famous gold medal kick on the home straight. As it happens, in 1976 the genetic equation that created Willis was still in two parts, standing at either end of the disco hall.
The comparisons are infantile anyway. The confusing bit? Just how can human beings run that fast? It is easy to sit there in front of the newly acquired plasma television (very nice it is too) and berate Adrian Blincoe for disappearing off the screen in a 5000-metre heat, even though it was on widescreen format, but then the Olympics does that.
Even the most expensive widescreen, plasma, HD, pixel, HDMI television with wide-angle viewing, high-speed motion response, ice-maker and beer cooler installed, doesn't give you the one thing that matters when you see human beings that are basically lungs with legs attached running in the Bird's Nest: perspective.
Come to think of it, perspective is the one item noted for being scarce round these parts recently.
On the eve of a rugby spectacle at Okara Park, one that has been weighted with significance far beyond the final score in the aftermath of a 28-page email attachment that was downloaded from a website called Allblacks.com, people are generally behaving like cats on a hot tin roof.
Now we have never seen cats on a hot tin roof, but when the report we will now loosely label "The death knell of Northland rugby" went public, we got a picture of what cats do when confronted with hot tin.
The confusing bit? That there are people revelling in the impending demise of the Northland Rugby Union simply because it is rugby union.
Some are people involved in schemes trying to promote Northland talent, who regularly espouse the need for Northland to start developing our own more urgently. But they are trying hard not to applaud the news of Northland rugby's slide from favour.
But in the midst of the melee we happened across an interesting piece of prose that leapt off the page. It is what might be called a "mission statement" of a small Italian community that was set up, as it happens, as a drug rehabilitation centre:
Sport above all means respect for yourself and others. It implies the capacity to recognise your own limits and to learn to go beyond them through work and commitment. It is an encounter with others, a way of relating to them that goes beyond differences or discrimination. It is friendship and solidarity. Sport is the proposal and the practice of principles and values that have an extremely important preventive role regarding the problems of youth and, at the same time, it is an instrument for the recovery of all young people who need activity and paths to re-socialisation and social re-insertion.
We cannot explain why, but that paragraph has some resonance tonight, just before a Northland rugby crowd (expected to be rather large) makes a stand with a minute of protest noise at Okara Park. Or maybe we are just confused.