All Blacks v Argentina: Steve Braunias - The dark thrill of the All Blacks losing

Losing is something to savour, to remember. Right now the All Blacks are creating history, writes Steve Braunias. Photo / Photosport

OPINION:

Losing is an art, like everything else. The All Blacks do it exceptionally well. The All Blacks do it so it feels like hell.

Art is the extreme edge of the human mind and the All Blacks are walking that edge into a dark unknown. Marlon Brando's great speech in Apocalypse Now provides the breathy soundtrack: "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving." But the All Blacks are not surviving. They are losing.

Losing is so much more interesting than winning. Anyone can win at something. It's a common experience, something routine and to be expected. The celebrations of a winning team are nothing to look at because you've seen it all before - the fizzing champagne, the coach held aloft, the boring hand gestures. Winning has such a narrow range. But the depressions of a losing team are deep and varied and always shocking to witness. Behold the pale, baffled faces of the All Blacks, losing.

Losing is something to savour, to remember. Right now the All Blacks are creating history. They are smashing the record books. Things have never been this bad before and the dark thrill, the amazing prospect, is that things could even get worse. This is something to pass down to the generations to come. "Were you there," kids as yet unborn will one day regard their grandparents in awe and ask, "when the All Blacks began losing?"

Losing is a bonding experience. We're all in this together, a nation united, a collective search party trying to find the reasons for this incredible losing streak, this repetition of Ls from the last eight All Blacks tests, this beautiful Ode to losing:

L
L
W
L
L
L
W
L

Codie Taylor and Aaron Smith after the All Blacks' loss to Argentina. Photo / Photosport

Losing of this order is something to to be marvelled at, as freakish and wrong as the Titirangi snowflake. "At Titirangi yesterday morning," the Herald famously reported on July 12, 1951, "a single flake was seen to drift down, settle on the ground, and quickly melt." Verily, the All Blacks are that worst slur in modern New Zealand society: snowflakes. Right now the All Blacks are as warped as that 1951 cold snap, as broken as another remarkable incident in Auckland's history - the blackouts of 1996, when the city lost power for five weeks. The All Blacks are powerless; the All Blacks are in the dark, losing.

Losing has pedigree. How well and fondly many of us remember the giddy summer of 2003, when Team New Zealand were whipped 5-0 in the America's Cup yachting regatta. In the first race, Dean Barker's leaky tub took on water, and nearly sank. In the third race, the mast snapped; a spinnaker pole got broken in the fifth race. Exhilarating, wondrous! So, too, were the Blues in 2012, under their hapless coach Pat Lam. The players snapped like masts, especially Ali Williams. "The acid is on Ali," Lam continually told the press; Williams continually played as though he was on acid, a lunging, blundering loon, hallucinating in the lineouts. It was hard to take your eyes off him, tall and mad and losing.

Losing comes to an end. "Even the losers," Tom Petty sang, "get lucky sometimes." The All Blacks play Argentina on Saturday night, Australia on September 15 and September 24. We have to come to terms with the possibility they might win one, two or even all three games. Normal service will be resumed. The All Blacks will once again be the All Blacks. We can all get back to sleep. Back to the ordinariness of success, to the banality of excellence, to the same old monochromatic New Zealand way of life – but right now we are experiencing a new and vivid New Zealand way of life, the national game held to ridicule and shame, the national psyche haunted, hurt, howling, held captive as a team of five million, losing.