Claire Harvey: Professionalism of sport has infected its rhetoric

The Western Force rugby team's bus pulled up outside Eden Park the other night, proudly emblazoned with the words "Let the Journey Begin".

Truly. And it wasn't even a joke at John Mitchell's expense; it just happens to be the slogan of Johnston's bus company, which had leased a coach to the visiting Perth team.

Mitchell, the former All Black coach now running the Western Force as they enter the Super 14 competition, is rightly infamous in this country for his habit of talking about very simple things in very complicated language.

"We're on a journey," he used to say, when talking about the All Blacks' desire to win the 2003 World Cup. "All the building blocks are in place ... as I've already shared with you ... our key performance indicators are very pleasing."

Mitchell seems a decent, polite man and is undoubtedly a talented, accomplished coach. He should be popular with the media and the fans - but unfortunately, like so many people involved with professional sport in the modern era, he comes across as confusing and obfuscatory by insisting upon speaking only Managementese, a language which sounds extremely posh and means virtually nothing.

After his new team was flogged by the Blues in Auckland on Thursday night, Mitchell arrived at his post-game press conference to tell the assembled journalists (who were cranky anyway, because he had kept them waiting an hour without explanation or apology) why his team had only managed to score five points against the Blues' 43.

"I was very happy with our scrum platform, we got good, clean ball from lineout, we also got on the gain line pretty well, but against the Blues side, and any New Zealand side for that matter, if you cough up turnover ball they will shift it to the other end. I guess the area that disappointed me most was individual tackle accuracy," Mitchell said.

Translation: "We lost. The scrums and lineouts were good and I was pleased because my players kept running fast, but the Blues kept getting the ball and scoring tries. They were also slippery buggers."

Managementese is the product of a dark and disturbing trend in our society to tizzy up plain language with weasel words and euphemisms, to make ordinary concepts sound more impressive than they are.

It is bad enough to hear businesspeople talking about "outcomes" and "upskilling" and "rightsizing", but it's sad that professionalism has brought the same curse to top-level sport.

When games like rugby were just hobbies, nobody expected players and coaches to say much more than "We done good in the first half and full credit to the ref."

Now that rolling around on the grass with your mates is a proper job, and the athletes and administrators are rightfully able to earn a living from their skills, sport has become infected with the same linguistic curse which makes banking and insurance seem so obscure.

Somewhere in the transition from recreation to corporation, sportspeople have started sounding like human resources team leaders on a convention weekend.

CEOs might be able to get away with blathering acronyms and catchphrases, but it is completely absurd to hear a man with mud all over his face say: "I feel our completion rate is improving," or "My execution continues to be disappointing."

The reason we like sport, the reason it's fun and not work, is that it is simple; it is an arena where social advantages are modified by other, purer factors, like speed and guile and the right hook.

And the danger of Managementese is that rather than protecting its user from seeming silly, it makes him terribly easy to mock.

When the All Blacks were beaten in the World Cup semifinal, Mitchell's famous slogan came back to embarrass him in headlines like "Journey over", "Bad trip", "Journey to nowhere".

Perhaps that's why he moved to Perth - it's the only city in Australasia where smart-alec taxi drivers won't have a clue who he is, and thus won't feel any need to make travel-related cracks at his expense.

Listening to Mitchell is strangely compelling, even though he is so frustrating. I showed up at Thursday night's press conference purely to see whether the widespread teasing he incurred as All Blacks coach had modified his language at all, and was almost pleased to find him still talking like a robot.

If consistency is a key performance indicator, he's executing in a very pleasing fashion.