Brian Rudman: I'll spell it for you, NZRU: S-O-R-R-Y

The NZRU seems to think omission of Maori All Blacks from 1928, 1949 and 1960 tours of South Africa was a mistake, like a spear tackle, best left on the field of play. Photo / NZ Herald

The generous explanation for the New Zealand Rugby Union's refusal to apologise for past sins to Maori players is, what else would you expect from a big brawny lunk-head being told to get in touch with his feminine side.

I prefer a more simple answer. The rugby bosses are still traumatised by the 1981 tour demonstrations, and continue to believe they're victims of an international leftie plot.

To them, even if it was a mistake to embrace apartheid and leave Maori players out of the 1928, 1949 and 1960 All Black tours of South Africa, then it's like a mid-game spear-tackle, a simple heat of the moment error of judgment to be left on the field of play.

Maori Rugby Board chairman Wayne Peters says the NZRU has twice asked the Maori board if it wanted an apology and both times the Maori board has said it would be wrong to be critical of apartheid-era decisions.

He told Sunday papers that "in 2010 we are focused on the future rather than the past".

To the national body, that lets them off the hook, but to me it seems perilously close to the battered wife scenario. We have hubby saying he has no idea where her black eyes came from, and they're not that bad if you dim the light. Meanwhile cowering in the corner, the long-suffering victim mutters through her split lip: "He's a wonderful father, really."

The awkward thing for the NZRU is that they're now facing the same sort of external political pressure to join the modern world that their South African counterparts got from New Zealand anti-apartheid campaigners back in 1981.

Now, 30 years on, South Africa's Sports Minister, the Rev Makhenkesi Arnold Stofile, has shone the spotlight on NZ rugby suggesting it apologise to the victims of past white-only All Black selections.

In a letter to Sunday News, Mr Stofile says "this cannot harm anyone who genuinely accepts that racial prejudice was an injustice then as it still is an injustice now".

With an NZRU apology, the problem will be knowing when to stop.

Discrimination against Maori players for half a century is only the beginning. There's also the Olympic movement. It was the NZRU's disdain for the worldwide sporting boycott against apartheid South Africa which, in 1976, led to a mass African walkout from the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand athletes were competing. And what about the clown who was clubbed senseless by police protecting Eden Park in 1981?

The formal "apology" burst on to the New Zealand scene in November 1995, when Treaty Negotiations Minister Doug Graham persuaded the Queen to sign a statement offering "profound regrets" and unreserved apologies for past wrongs to Tainui.

It wasn't the first apology of this kind. In 1988 for example, the US Congress apologised for interning Japanese Americans during World War II, but the Tainui apology did spark a flurry of apologies worldwide that still goes on - particularly in democracies like ours.

The British apologised to children that had been shipped off to overseas orphanages after World War II, the Canadians for executing World War I deserters, and the Pope for missionary excesses to indigenous peoples - and more recently, much more besides.

Both in Canada and New Zealand, there were official apologies for levying a head tax on Chinese immigrants a century ago.

The US Senate has apologised separately for ignoring the lynching campaign against African-Americans last century, for atrocities committed against Native Americans and for slavery and racial discrimination against African-Americans.

Earlier this year, the British Government was apologising to victims of the thalidomide scandal of the 1950s. Not so lucky have been Afrikaner and Irish groups, both encouraged by the Tainui example to chance their arm and seek apologies from the Queen for respectively, the Boer War and the great potato famine.

It's easy to dismiss these symbolic "sorries" as just a bunch of words. But the June 2009 US Senate apology for slavery encapsulates their deeper essence. The resolution acknowledged it was important "for the people of the United States, who legally recognised slavery through the constitution ... to make a formal apology ... so they can move forward and seek reconciliation, justice and harmony for all people of the United States".

That's the key. The formal apology sets the historic record straight, or perhaps more accurately, reinterprets history to reflect current morality, creating a new jointly accepted version of the past. Crucially, it also removes from the wronged party the burden of being the revisionist underdog.

But you can't have an apology without someone willing to say sorry, and that, so far, is the case with our rugby bosses. For much of last century they treated Maori rugby players as second-class citizens and saw nothing wrong. Now they're exploiting Maori once more, using the Maori Rugby Board as something to hide behind.

With the Rugby World Cup approaching and Mr Stofile on the trail, they'll have to come out soon. And if the present leadership can't mouth the S word, they'd better hand over to someone who can.