Chris Laidlaw: It's a role All Blacks shouldn't have to play

Richie McCaw is the exception. Photo / Getty Images

An interesting photo appeared in newspapers in the days before the All Blacks' last match in Europe against Wales. A number of them were snapped wandering down a Cardiff street in 'mufti'.

They made an arresting sight. There were some in hoodies, some in dangerously low-hanging jeans, others in baggy shorts; dreadlocks were much in evidence.

The casual observer could have been mistaken for assuming this was some sort of local gang out looking for trouble. The casual observer would have been wrong. These were the All Blacks, upholders of the world's best rugby brand.

Numerous letters to the editor followed, complaining that these players somehow weren't presenting the right image. Nobody, however, was able to tell us what the right image is. Should they have been in blazers and ties, even on their day off? After all, aren't they supposed to be role models?

All Blacks, whether they like it or not, are automatically anointed with the laurel wreath of 'role model'. But too often, that laurel wreath turns out to be a crown of thorns.

Before the professional age, All Blacks could get away with a highly respectable public image and a private life that was no better and sometimes a lot worse than your average Joe Blow. All that has changed. Every moment of an All Black's life is monitored, scrutinised and held up to an obsessively critical public gaze. There is no private life any more.

The case for considering full-time rugby players as role models has effectively collapsed. It is absurd to saddle a bunch of young men with virtually no real life experience and very little prospect of any in the near future with any such responsibility.

The same idiotic instinct prevails all over the world. Sports stars are held up as paragons, then publicly crucified when they don't, or won't, live up to it.

Charles Barkley, the great NBA basketball star of the 1990s once declared in frustration: "I am not a role model."

He objected, justifiably as it turned out, to being held to a higher moral standard simply because he could score goals.

"A million guys can dunk a basketball in jail," he once famously observed. "Should they be role models?"

Barkley has since gone on to demonstrate why people had no business holding him up as a role model. The same could be said of countless others who have this status thrust upon them when everybody knows they can't really live up to it.

It is high time those who insist on bestowing this dubious honour thought about the logic of it rather more deeply. It is muddled thinking to assume that the status of role model must come naturally with the territory of being an All Black.

It is unfair and unwise to put players on such pedestals. The lifestyle of the modern pro player is idiosyncratic, the salaries are unrealistic, the work ethic is distorted and the example for youngsters unsuitable. They just aren't right for role models.

There are exceptions. Richie McCaw seems one of those individuals who leads an utterly blameless life. He is balanced and savvy about the limits of pro rugby. He's loyal, putting his country ahead of the fast bucks of European rugby. If ever there was a model for young New Zealanders to follow in terms of honest commitment, McCaw would be hard to fault. But he is a rare exception.

By and large, New Zealand's elite rugby players are young men struggling to come to terms with full-time footy, full-time exposure and lots of money. Responsibility doesn't come easily in such circumstances. How could it? Professional sport is a lotus land removed from day-to-day reality and that is not the right imagery for a 21st century kid.

However hard it may be, the biggest favour the rest of us can do any All Black is to spare him the agony of having to be anybody else's role model.