Paul Thomas: Enough of rugby's naysayers

Sonny Bill Williams can be a huge drawcard and should be embraced. Photo / Getty Images

If Benjamin Franklin was living among us he might be tempted to revise his famous dictum thus: The only certainties in this world are death, taxes, and the angst enveloping New Zealand rugby.

Everything in the garden is unlovely. Rugby is too corporate yet too brown, too money-driven yet too poor to hold on to players.

The World Cup will only make matters worse. We have seen the future and it's All White rather than All Black.

Having helped create the paradigm, a section of the media now dutifully sustains it.

Taking their cue from the almost cultish euphoria that has built up behind the All Whites, reporters with the team gush about their upmarket accommodation like giddy honeymooners getting their first taste of the high life.

When the All Blacks stayed at a Corsican resort before the last World Cup, they were portrayed as pampered prima donnas.

The latest voice to join the chorus of complaint is that of former All Black Chris Laidlaw.

With his donnish air, impeccable liberal credentials, and glittering CV, Laidlaw is a strange bedfellow for the strident malcontents with their often reactionary instincts. Yet the title of his new book - Somebody Stole My Game - could well be their slogan.

There are a few problems with this title/slogan, beginning with the fact that it sounds like something a spoilt brat would say.

There's the fact that Laidlaw's game - rugby as it used to be before it was tainted with money - didn't meet with his unqualified approval.

Indeed his first examination of the state of the game, the excellent Mud In Your Eye (1973), contained trenchant criticism of New Zealand rugby, its "sterile formality", its culture of conformity and, of course, its divisive obsession with South Africa. There's the unconscious irony.

Mistakes were made when rugby went professional virtually overnight in 1995; the repercussions of some of those mistakes are still being felt.

However, the administrators of the time had little choice but to act in haste and repent at leisure because somebody - the Kerry Packer-backed World Rugby Corporation headed by former Wallaby Ross Turnbull - was hell-bent on stealing the game and very nearly succeeded.

Finally, the game doesn't belong to any individual or group of individuals, even ex-All Blacks. As the Labour Party used to be, the rugby community is a broad church.

Laidlaw is a 66-year-old white male. To put it brutally, he belongs to a group of stakeholders whose size and influence is slowly but steadily diminishing.

To be fair he is less prone to perverse sentimentality than much of the company he now finds himself keeping - uneasily, one suspects. Their eagerness to find fault with the game as it is now is only matched by their insistence that everything was better in the good old days, even the funereal All Black team announcements under the stand at Athletic Park.

This almost wilful refusal to acknowledge there are some rugby fans whose perceptions are barely influenced by the game's history and traditions and who actually embrace the trappings of professionalism was evident in the reaction to New Zealand Rugby Union's courtship of Sonny Bill Williams.

It was said the NZRU shouldn't have a bar of him because he's a despicable person who walked out on the Canterbury Bulldogs, an organisation whose corrupt and unsavoury recent history should preclude it from claiming the high moral ground for a while yet.

Ah yes, but he walked out on his mates. Graham Lowe knows something about mateship in league.

A few years ago he had this to say on the subject: "Of the hundreds of players I've been involved with, I'd only regard three as being real friends. Professional sportsmen just look after themselves - there's no place for loyalty or friendship in their world."

But he's unproven. Right, that's why a hard-headed French businessman offered to make him the highest-paid rugby union player in the world. You want unproven, try Brad Thorn when he first switched.

Well, maybe but it was unseemly for Graham Henry to ferry his agent around.

For crying out loud, who cares? Unlike his critics, Henry has to operate in the world as it is, not as he would like it to be.

Strange days indeed when pundits bemoan the departure of the Tamati Ellisons of this world yet resist the recruitment of a player who, whether he makes it to the top or not, will be more of a drawcard and create more excitement than any number of journeymen.

Perhaps they simply don't like the idea of a superstar putting the All Black jersey before a barrow-load of money because it doesn't fit with their narrative of malaise and decline. If so, one can only say: how sad.