John Roughan: O'Driscoll incident a slur on our national character

When I was a rugby-mad kid in Christchurch, a veteran coach of one of the city's top club teams lived around the corner. He would drop in sometimes and chew the fat with my father.

Both of us were enthralled when he talked intimately of players we knew only as great names of the past or current heroes of Lancaster Park.

He was an insight to a culture that I never fully knew from reading every word of the sports pages or from biking across town to watch a senior grade match every Saturday.

Dad's friend was a matter-of-fact fellow who understated things as rugby men do. He wasn't, I remember, a particular admirer of the reckless rough game personified at that time by the young Alex Wylie, a fiery open-side flanker who could always be provoked to thump an opponent under the referee's nose.

But sometimes in his conversation I glimpsed a darker side to the game that he seemed to accept without pleasure or regret. Things happened, I heard, that those close to the game knew about but which would never be reported in the papers. Well, not unless it was written up by "that bugger McLean".

The name T.P. McLean really made his nostrils flare. You couldn't trust the bugger apparently. I got the impression the Herald's rugby writer was the only reporter on All Black tours who was liable to tell his readers exactly what went on.

As an avid borrower of his books from the local library, I blessed him, but kept that to myself.

Sir Terry McLean died last year, feted by many of the players who had been told not to talk to him in the 1960s. He was still writing up to a year of two before his death and I've missed him in the past few weeks.

I'd love to know T.P.'s take on the O'Driscoll incident. I gave mine here a couple of weeks ago; the way I saw it on television at the time was exactly as the victim described it in his newly published diary of the Lions' tour.

I don't know how anybody could honestly have seen it differently, yet if we are to believe most of my companions in print, they did.

The attitudes they have expressed over the past fortnight worry me more than the incident now, maybe even more than the lack of a decent gesture from the All Blacks who have been in his homeland this week preparing for tomorrow's match.

I was away when the Lions were here and have the impression that the whinging of Sir Clive Woodward and Alistair Campbell rubbed us up the wrong way. But those two are long gone.

It should have been possible these past two weeks to have a more honest, dispassionate discussion of the culture that caused the Lions' most inspiring player to be taken out in the first minute of the first test.

Instead, we still seem determined to draw up the wagons and deny the obvious. Former players turned pundits I can understand. Sean Fitzpatrick, writing in the Herald on Sunday, thought it "terrible" of the Lions' captain to revive an issue that would only fire up our team for their British tour.

"He's not even going to play against the All Blacks. I bet his team mates will be supportive publicly but in private they will be thinking something like: 'Shut up, just shut up'."

Richard Loe in the same paper said he did not believe the spear tackle was intentional, but added "The referee didn't see it. The touch judge might have seen it but didn't act on it ..."

Loe at least has a sense of humour. "I know something about the judicial system breaking down," he wrote, "because that's what happened to me in that famous incident where little Australian winger Paul Carozza hit my elbow with his face ..."

It is the more detached commentators who disappoint me. The best of them is blokey writer and broadcaster Phil Gifford.

Yet the week he collected the column-opinion prize at the Sir Terry McLean National Sports Journalism Awards, he devoted his Sunday Star-Times column to an attack on the London press for resurrecting the incident in time for the All Blacks' reception.

One of the British commentaries hit me hard.

A contributor to the Observer, Kevin Mitchell, wrote: "As depressing as it is to see individual players, coach Graham Henry, and most of the team in denial about what they did to O'Driscoll, the world's best centre - this is the way of the professional athlete - it is equally dispiriting that their compatriots have not risen up in indignation at their heroes' moral cowardice."

He said, "This goes beyond sport. It is about justice and fair play."

It does go beyond sport but, for us at least, it is about the national character.

Rugby is not called the national game for nothing. Of all activities, sporting, cultural or political, this is the one that most unites and expresses us.

Every country has one or several such activities and they have a significance far beyond the stadium or the stage.

This is not about the character of two men, one of whom, Umaga, is well remembered for coming to the aid of a choking Welsh opponent in the last World Cup. The fact that the deed was done by conspicuously clean players should only add to the concern.

This is about us. We know that sport at the highest level is played, as that rugby coach used to say, "just over the edge of the rules". Those who have risen in righteous indignation will be the first to nod knowingly about these things over a beer.

When disgraceful things happen in the heat of battle, we should have the courage to admit it. And when national representatives spend a week in the victim's vicinity and don't do the decent thing, we should ensure they know they've let us down.