Paul Thomas: When too much sport is not quite enough

This week the Listener devoted several pages to the proposition that anyone thinking of shifting to Australia needs their head examined.

An expatriate who came to his senses enumerated the delights of our temperate, non-aligned, nuclear-free Shangri-La, attaching the mild reservation that "sport's continuing stranglehold is bemusing".

Quite why New Zealand should have wriggled out of sport's iron chokehold on the developed world wasn't explained.

With the strategic partnership between the mass media and professional sport force-feeding us more and more product, it would actually be bemusing if sport wasn't strengthening its grip on the collective consciousness.

In the catchphrase of This Sporting Life, the brilliant, long-running Australian radio show founded on the premise that sport is too rich in comic potential to be taken seriously, "Welcome to another weekend when too much sport is barely enough".

Live on TV this weekend are: the All Blacks v Wallabies rugby test and five NPC matches, several rugby league games, golf from the United States and European tours, US Open tennis, a one-day cricket international, American college football, basketball, oodles of horse racing and at least a couple of games from the Australian soccer league, which for New Zealanders amounts to a death-watch on our re-branded but still anonymous team.

Next weekend, as well as most of the above, European soccer and motorsport invade our living rooms, and a memorable Ashes series reaches what one hopes will be an appropriately satisfying climax.

Those of us who like to see ourselves as normal, well-adjusted human beings leading busy, fulfilling lives will exercise discretion, self-discipline and, depending on the dynamics of our relationships, some degree of self-preservation.

What we will try to avoid at all costs is ending up sprawled on the couch at 3am, square-eyed and inert, channel-hopping between the cricket, a game of gridiron in which victims of the fast-food conspiracy try to crush their opponents to death, and the inevitable unadvertised curiosity - elephant polo, perhaps, or the caribou race that brings Lapland to a halt.

The appetite has always been healthy. On my first Saturday night in Toulouse, where I lived for a couple of years in the 1980s, the main square was jam-packed with raucous, flag-waving citizens and a never-ending convoy of cars snaked through the streets, horns blaring.

The celebrations to mark Toulouse's return to French soccer's first division after a long absence were loud and protracted. Next morning, in a sleep-deprived grouch, I grumbled to a local, "I thought Toulouse was a rugby town."

"It is," he replied.

The appetite was healthy but rationing was in force. Then came professionalism. Then came pay TV.

It's now conventional wisdom that sport is a business and its business is entertainment. The money-making imperative has transformed sport at the elite level. We no longer go to a stadium or turn on TV in the hope of seeing a good game; we take it for granted that we'll be entertained, if not enthralled.

Thirty years ago, run-a-minute scoring in test cricket was regarded as madcap and games often meandered to a stalemate after five days of wary attrition. Now run-a-minute is the norm and draws are oddities.

The 1959 British Lions were an adventurous lot, yet their match against the New Zealand Maori featured 72 lineouts, 35 scrums and 42 penalties. All told the whistle went 227 times.

Those players were playing for fun - their fun. They might have felt a vague obligation to the fans but there was no implicit contract. If they wanted to butt heads in scrums and barge each other out of lineouts all afternoon, they did so, and hard cheese for the 40,000 spectators who paid to see one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the tour.

We're still coming to terms with the ramifications of this fundamental shift and no one can be entirely sure of the long-term consequences.

The obvious template is the US, where the pay TV/professionalism nexus has been in place for much longer: what we see there are athletes who earn as much as movie stars and a sporting culture based on spectating rather than participation.

The hype, glamour and blink-and-you'll-miss-it action of top-level professional sport make it more accessible to the casual follower and more attractive to young women - that cashed-up, increasingly assertive chunk of the demographic.

Whereas old-style participation sport was male-dominated and exclusionary, 21st century spectator sport is a game anyone can watch.

One thing the 1959 and 2005 Lions tours had in common was hyperbolic British media coverage on the theme of New Zealanders' suffocating obsession with rugby.

This often took the form of dubious anecdotes involving little old ladies with bewildering expertise in scrummaging techniques.

The way things are going, they ain't seen nothing yet.

The next Lions team to visit these shores will probably find that even the most glamorous and worldly young women are hardcore rugby fans. That will be the good news. The bad news will be that talking rugby really will be their idea of good time.