Dignity, grace and humility have been much in the news these past few days, and with New Zealand's great cricketing carnival now over (and Australia's great cricketing hangover just beginning) it is those three nouns that will be remembered as the greatest gift the Black Caps gave this nation's sports fans.
It's a lovely gift. For those nouns are timeless ones, those qualities elusive. They are things that are learned over time, passed down by the wise to the impetuous. They are the rewards for curiosity and compassion. They are the qualities we wish our children to possess, and the things we search for in ourselves in times of stress and in times of celebration. Those qualities outlast the victories and, like a prescription for perspective, diminish the defeats.
Not every athlete possesses these qualities because competitive sport is by nature ruthless. Anyone who has spent time around top-level athletes understands the intensely personal sacrifice made in order to fuel the desire to achieve. Competitive sport is often a selfish pursuit, one in which things such as dignity, grace and humility are subordinate to those other three commonly quoted nouns: blood, sweat and tears.
During the recent national outbreak of "niceness" I was asked this question: "When results matter, is it better to be gracious in defeat, or an arsehole in victory?" It is a good question. The history of sport is a catalogue of extraordinary deeds, quite often performed by, well, arseholes. Some of those arseholes even have New Zealand citizenship.
The history of sport, however, also shows us that extraordinary deeds are often much better remembered when they are performed by the dignified, the gracious, and the humble, and in rugby those qualities are best and invariably embodied by that great chunk of a man from the Cape of South Africa, Schalk Burger.
