Dialogue: A cruel end, or start of something greater?

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

On Tuesday I was lunching with a friend in Dunedin, outside but tucked in shadows away from a sun entirely uninterrupted by clouds (more of that later), when I realised that a bunch of young men drinking and wandering in and out and round an adjacent bar were famous Otago rugby players.

It was their restlessness that first fixed my attention, especially that of the discarded All Black fullback/winger Jeff Wilson, wearing the latest casual gear - long shorts (or is it short longs?) and a baseball cap worn like a skateboard kid.

He seemed struggling not to look forlorn, and suddenly I felt so sorry for him - everyone's Golden Boy at 20 and all washed up at 28.

Remember those soaring runs down the sideline by the idol of the Scarfies, legs like pogo-sticks in seven-league boots, seeming to take him over the top of the ground, effortlessly eating up the metres; the magical hands and feet with their robot-like coordination; and the very human exuberance on scoring that started a talkback debate on whether that was showing off or natural, allowable ebullience.

What does he plan to do now? The writer in me urged an approach to talk but he was with his mates and I noticed that the eyes of the best-known among the group flicked around self-consciously, warily, as strangers got close or when they themselves came out to the restaurant courtyard on the way to the kitchen.

Does Wilson have an internal life, some absorbing or burgeoning interest that will carry him forward into a satisfying maturity? Or has having too much too soon destroyed the chance of that?

I was reminded of a marvellous poem by W.B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, in which he hopes she will not be too beautiful because beauty may bring more woes than happiness.

Likewise, I hope my grandsons won't become famous in their youth so they can grow used to themselves first.

So often I've seen parents and grandparents, living with their own disappointments, imposing their need for glory onto their offspring. A sad sight it is.

Just before I left, the group, now expanded by Tony Brown, Carl Hayman, Chainsaw Laney and others, sitting around a table, roared with laughter at something and I realised that was the only time they'd laughed at all. In my 20s, a lunch over beer with my mates would have rollicked without abatement.

For a long time I've wondered why writers - real writers, that is - have not tried to look inside sport and the sporting figures who become objects of our national obsession in a bid to explain them with perception and experience.

Norman Mailer and other Americans have done so with revelatory power. What makes New Zealand's sportsmen tick?

The obligatory autobiography at the high tide of a career, written in conjunction with a sporting journalist, is like all of the genre - authorised, self-justifying, superficial and spiced up just enough with some controversial comment on other players to titillate the news sense of fellow sportswriters.

One problem is the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, now a commercial corporation interested only in its properties and protective of them but not deeply interested in their humanity.

It has a wall around itself and the players, and invites you inside on its terms only. The union has a fulltime staff of nearly 100, some of them dealing with contingency plans for corporate crises and other corporate concerns. The team manager comes from the armed forces, institutionally given to control and not to openness.

* All this week in Dunedin I have awakened within a glowing morning, hardly a cloud visible in the sky, the merest whisper of wind to gently stir the mass of various shades of green surrounding the lovely old villas that dot the hillsides. I'm staying in an apartment that faces the luminous north. The sun floods in the door over the breakfast table, seducing me away from the work I've come all this way to do.

It's not that I've forgotten those winter days when level, grey skies sometimes sit not much above your shoulders and gently leak soft rain onto your covered head; or the late afternoons that have prematurely become early evenings in July when everyone looks like the Michelin man, round and bumpy in their jackets, leaning into the lancing wind as it swirls, inescapable, around the Octagon.

It's not that my memory fails; indeed it prompts me to remember, too, these stunningly beautiful days, the air crisply free of pollens and hydrocarbons, and free, too, of the underlying hum and sporadic shrieks of Auckland's urban and inner-suburban traffic.