Dialogue: All at sea over our sports worship

By KATE BELGRAVE

At the weekend, I put on my cleanest frock and minced on down to the Viaduct Basin for about the second time in my life. I probably left this let's-get-in-behind-the-America's-Cup run a little late; still, the mood was now firmly upon me.

The first thing I wanted to do was to find out who had won. Thus updated, it was time to address myself to the meat of the project. I wanted to spend time with one of the purported thousands who genuinely believed (up until this weekend anyway) that the America's Cup was about loyalty to country and the good of man, as opposed to egos, false modesty (presuming there's any other kind of modesty) and money.

There's always been something weirdly compelling about the way people suspend all disbelief, and, indeed, all reason when it comes to investing emotional energy in their sports stars. "But he's a Christian," wailed otherwise reasonably rational sports writers (there are a handful around the world) when Hansie Cronje was discovered up to both elbows in the till, as if Christians, by definition, only ever took what was theirs. Clearly, those writers had never heard of Jimmy and Tammy Bakker, Oliver Cromwell and so on.

Anyway, the Viaduct Basin, a day or so after Brad and Russell revealed they were leaving Team New Zealand. It wasn't much of a picnic down there on Sunday afternoon. The tables were only partly full, and the punters who were there were dying quietly of cold, shivering violently in their jackets. The water-taxi bobbed, vacant, at the pier, sad as an empty tinnie.

The sky, needless to say, was deeply overcast - right up to the point where it started to rain on everyone. And before us all, that other boat, KZ-whatsit, mounted high, reminding us all of happier, more uplifting days (the days when the leading ethical lights in seagoing circles were Sir Michael Fay and Dennis Conner).

The comments I have heard all weekend about Russ and Brad have been very much in keeping with the dank weather. "Can't believe they're going." "They should have said they were leaving ages ago," right down to "this is 'effin' incredible" - and so forth.

One elderly guy I know was almost in tears. Right through the racing season, he'd stood in front of the television, chatting on (obviously thrilled to pieces about the whole thing) about the design of great boats and the speeds they reached and the joys of hurtling along the open seas.

The sense of betrayal people seem to feel at the exit of Russ and Brad (who have, let's be honest, done the smart thing by getting out while the going was good) seems only marginally less desperate than the crashing depression that threatened to lay out the entire male population when the All Blacks were hung out to dry by France. I saw grown men cry over that one, too.

So, why do people invest such emotional energy into sportspeople? "It is natural to believe in great men," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. That may be the case, but wouldn't it be better to believe in someone like Gandhi or X-Files' Agent Mulder?

Sportspeople require several notable characteristics to achieve world-class results. They need a killer instinct, an eye for the main chance, impregnable self-confidence and an absolute conviction that what they do is important - all characteristics that would preclude admiration, or so I keep thinking. Yet, people keep believing in them, and keep falling apart when it is revealed that their heroes have Nikes of clay.

Such is the need to believe in sporting greats that people try to resurrect fallen greats - even in those cases where the fallen have fallen foul of the law. I'm thinking overseas now. Remember fallen Cincinnati Reds baseball star Pete Rose, who was banned for betting? Plenty thought he should still be elected to baseball's hall of fame.

British Home Secretary Jack Straw, meanwhile, has just allowed convicted felon Mike Tyson into England for another visit. Clearly Straw sees qualities in Tyson that I do not.

The only sportsman I ever really admired was Muhammad Ali. At least he came right out and told everyone that he thought he was the greatest. It's odd how attractive that honesty was. Cutting through the crap, I guess, allows the great unwashed what it needs - a glimpse at the true man.