SPORTRITE - Your glory days are always better than any others'

With Tim Eves
Funny how the older you get, the better you were.
Especially if the only record of your own unremarkable achievements are carefully edited highlights of the personal diary and some random newspaper clippings that mention words like `raw-boned' or `reliable'.
For the record, `raw-boned' is journo-speak for `skinny'.
Being a `reliable athlete' is a double-edged sword.
It means you can be relied on to either win a game or, conversely, lose it.
It can also mean you can be relied on to turn up, which is always better than not turning up at all - we suppose. Not that it matters in this particular conversation.
Today's tirade has been spawned by two different conversations, one with the mayor of Whangarei, Stan Semenoff, and another with a barber who mutilated my hair yesterday.
The barber had a very simple game plan for the cutting of said hair. The first tactic was to distract the client with idle chit chat and the second to carve off chunks of the furry stuff with random blows sheep shearing style.
It was the chit chat that was the most worrying, though.
He recalled with great detail his own days as a club rugby player, days when "it was real tough stuff, you know, real physical rugby, not like the stuff today". He wondered why anyone bothered to play club sport, let alone club rugby, these days.
Club rugby, he reckoned, was not worth the grass it was played on. With the payout the way it is, he might have a point.
Mayor Semenoff was even more enlightening. He reckoned rugby was "a sunset sport" and that the best Northland could hope for now was to become a "feeder province" to the rest of the country.
Nobody watched it, nobody cared and hardly anyone who played it was any good, at least not like it used to be in his day and certainly not half as good as he was.
That may partially explain Semenoff's stance on that prolonged headache called the Northland Events Centre at Okara Park.
What the barber and the mayor need to do is to crawl out of bed tomorrow morning sometime before noon and wander down to Kensington Park in Whangarei, or Arnold Rae Park in Kaitaia, or maybe even Lindvart Park in Kaikohe.
There they will be greeted with the sight of about 2000 hyped up children and 4000 stressed parents partaking in the Saturday morning ritual of sport, some of it even being rugby.
They are playing for clubs too, by the way.
They are all there too, the doctors and the gang members, the nurses and the mechanics, the housewives and the police detectives ...and their kids. Everyone is mangled up in a melting pot of the community, laughing and cheering, yelling and gossiping.
They don't seem to care if what they are watching is as good as it used to be, but all of them hope that, if their children keep playing until they are grown-ups - or close to it - there will be some senior club sport to be part of.
The barber, and probably more importantly the mayor, might consider this before they toss club sport in this province into the garbage bin.
It is hard to explain why some people in these parts have a growing hostility to physical activity, but not impossible. Some of them just don't have the urge. Fine.
Impossible is explaining how people who can sit and reminisce about their own "glory" days on the sports paddock can be so dismissive of it now. Maybe that's called old age, when it is never as good as it used to be.