Weekend Diary: Dita De Boni

The manly art of getting legless

By DITA DE BONI

The public may claim to be shocked and even the Australians are feigning hurt feelings, but was anyone really surprised at what happened at Carisbrook this week?

For years this country's male sporting events have been inextricably linked to drinking and jackass behaviour. Isn't that the whole point of going to watch your national heroes play ball?

In this country male sport and male bonding go hand in hand. Male bonding – ie, drinking to excess – is not only a rite of passage for many Kiwi men but at the very least a part-time occupation during the rugby or cricket seasons.

From the time you grow up in small-town New Zealand you know the rugby club (sometimes doubling as the cricket club in summer) is the centre of that bonding and it is from here that the close relationship between beer and ball begins.

We have all seen young boys carted off to the rugby club as little nippers and encouraged to "drink like a man!" and we can chart the inevitable consequence of that culture: pot bellies and myriad associated health and relationship problems.

In short, arrested development.

Women used to be an adjunct to that world. They would drive their husbands to and from the club, bake cakes for the rugby club social club, pull the car over while he threw up all the way home from an after-match event and bundle him into bed at the other end.

For some reason, several women have decided to grab equality by the throat and join the terrace culture. The co-ed, agitated, sore-losing crowd of the new millennium is born.

It is now probably inconceivable to think of a match without refreshments of the alcoholic type, and game organisers would have anything from financial suicide to pre-match riots on their hands if booze was not supplied to punters.

But if they are serious about controlling the crowds, they will simply have to find ways of sponsoring games that aren't brewery-dominated.

Tobacco companies may be personae non grata, but at least if they had been allowed to continue sponsoring cricket, the worst the pitch would have pelted with was cigarette butts and the odd putrefied lung.

Why not side-step breweries for those companies who indirectly make a killing out of our sport'n'booze culture? Car-wreckers, undertakers, doctors, marriage counsellors, liver specialists – I'm sure there would be a veritable stampede of sponsors eager to protect their profits.

To be fair, the rugby clubs now do seem to be trying to encourage good behaviour – undoubtedly because it costs them the business of family groups not to – and it is encouraging to see beer logos taking up slightly less than the 75 per cent of jersey space they used to.

But the clubs, and the business of sport, are simply cashing in on well-developed bad cultural habits.

Lowering the drinking age and making alcohol more readily available are a good start to trying to encourage responsibility with drink, but nothing will change until attitudes inside the family change, and until the connection between being a man and drinking until you are violently ill is severed.

There's one more thing that might prevent instances such as Carisbrook recurring: we should learn to lose to the Australians gracefully!