The Black Ferns after winning the 2006 World Cup. Photo / Photosport
The Rugby World Cup kicked off at Eden Park in 2022 and the Black Ferns changed the game on and off the field. Greg Bruce looks into media coverage of women's rugby at the start of the Cup.
Media coverage of women's sport in this country sucks, making up just 21 per cent of the total, but because the worldwide figure is 4 per cent, we're a world leader. "I mean, it's still terrible," says University of Auckland's Professor Toni Bruce. "Well, let me rephrase that: We are going in the right direction. And women's rugby has been quite a big part of that, I think."
As an expert in the field of sports media and women's place in it, Bruce has spent "many, many years being very grumpy". But she describes herself as an optimist and says she has changed her outlook because she felt she needed to focus on the places where change was happening: "That's the story I'm much more interested in telling now," she says.
And there is good evidence for change. In a 2008 study, Bruce found that, of 3100 stories about rugby in the New Zealand Herald and Waikato Times, 15 were about women's rugby. Eight years later, at the Rio Olympics, where rugby was represented by men's and women's sevens teams, the coverage for each was identical - 47 stories.
This is important, Bruce says, because sports coverage tends to follow events: "If there is no regular weekly women's rugby to be reported on, then women's rugby is not going to get much coverage." Women's rugby has historically had very few events but now, with the provincial competition Farah Palmer Cup, the just completed first year of Super Rugby Aupiki, and a rapidly growing test match schedule, opportunities for coverage are increasing.
Bruce says: "I would argue there's a confluence of factors happening in the last five years or so that actually suggests that women's rugby is really on the rise." These include the growth of women's competitions and media attention, including live television coverage, women players receiving full-time contracts and salaries that allow them to focus full-time on rugby, with access to coaching, physiotherapy, physical conditioning and psychological support. In a recent test match where they played before the All Blacks, the television audience for the Black Ferns was 500,000.
"What interests me is that women have obviously always wanted to play rugby, right from the very beginning," Bruce says. "And it's taken over 100 years for rugby to gain purchase or gain enough purchase for ideas about gender and sexuality and physicality to change. I think we're now at a point where rugby is considered a perfectly normal sport for women to play. And that's a massive change. We've got girls leaving netball for rugby."
But the news is not all good. In 2019, rugby commentator Scotty Stevenson ripped into the "Super Series" tournament then taking place in San Diego, featuring the five best teams in the world, including the Black Ferns, on a field that was described as barely fit for a training run, in front of fans who'd been asked to bring their own seats. Instead of changing rooms, players were using a tent and a portable toilet. They couldn't retrieve the ball when it went out of play because of rattlesnakes.
Dr Lydia Furse, education officer at London's World Rugby Museum, and one of the world's leading experts on women's rugby history, was expecting a spike in media interest 100 days before the tournament, so she marked the date on her calendar and freed up time in her schedule to talk to journalists. Not a single person called.
As well as having a PhD in women's rugby, Furse is a player and fan but, "Even as somebody who is very interested in the games," she says, "I've still not found who is broadcasting the [World Cup] in the UK."
Even if we accept that coverage and appreciation of women's rugby is improving, there have been several points in history when that has appeared to be the case, yet the game always seems to end up back in a portaloo filled with rattlesnakes.
University of Auckland Professor Jennifer Curtin, who has traced the history of women's rugby in New Zealand, says: "The women's game sort of features and then it dies away again and then there's this amnesia that it even happened."
Furse says: "What I see in the history of women's rugby is big gains, and then it kind of drops off again and gains and drops off again. So I do have a pessimistic fear that we are in the middle of a big gain coming up to a potential drop."
Bruce says: "I know there are lots of things that still need to happen, but I think if we don't celebrate the positive steps forward while keeping our eye on the ball … because I am very aware that we've had these explosions of media interests in various women's sports at times, but there's no guarantee that that will continue. So my interest is in, 'Things are going really well now. How do we make sure that that goes on?'"
The first explosion of interest in women's rugby in this country was 1891, when the Auckland Star reacted very badly to Nita Webbe's attempt to form a women's team, writing: "We subscribe most heartily to the doctrine that every sphere in which women are fitted to take their part should be as freely open to them as to men, but there are some things for which women are constitutionally unfitted, and which are essentially unwomanly."
Webbe replied: "'If it is permissible for ladies to participate in gymnastics, swimming matches, and cricket teams, is it not equally permissible for ladies to play football? To draw a line between them would be to make a distinction without a difference."
Regardless of her logical dominance, Webbe's team never took off and the next time women's rugby began to make a splash, in the early 1920s, it was again slapped down by authorities and idiots. The New Zealand Education Department chief physical instructor said that girls who didn't play rugby would become better mothers to healthier children, while The NZ Truth wrote that it was okay for, "Chummy" girls to play, "But we don't want our girls to become half-men."
Even when women's rugby really began to be taken seriously, with the rise of the first New Zealand women's team in the late 1980s and the Black Ferns in 1998, much of the focus was not on their performance. A leading player of the 1990s to mid-2000s, interviewed by Bruce, told her: "I was very aware of the image that we portrayed. So we got that kind of instilled in us from our coaches. That we were there to try and show that women who play rugby are not butch … So we put a lot of effort into wearing feminine … clothing, putting makeup on, making sure we look pretty when we were on television. Coming across as friendly when we're on the radio. That kind of thing."
Furse says players are open to criticism of their on-field performance, because that indicates the game is being taken seriously but that is not typically how the game is covered: "No offence for what we're doing here, but this is kind of representative, that the women's story is coming out in the social and cultural pages rather than on the sports pages. It's great - definitely the story should be told - but that still tells you that the space for women's rugby isn't considered in the sports section."
When I asked Bruce if that was the case here, she said no: "I think women's rugby is getting normalised, standard coverage. And that's what you need if you really want to see a shift in coverage. It has to shift from, 'Wow, look, women's rugby, it's on the rise!'" The only way this happens, she says, is if there are regular competitions at a number of different levels that provide the opportunity for journalists to cover women's rugby as they cover men's. She doesn't think we're going to see a post-World Cup repeat of an explosion of interest in women's rugby followed by its disappearance.
"I think that there's just been this expansion about ideas, about gender broadly."
She cites the example of the games the Silver Ferns play against the New Zealand men's netball team, which used to be behind closed doors, but are now broadcast, and are challenging the way we think about netball, which has traditionally been so strongly linked to femininity.
"The same with rugby, which is, in New Zealand, articulated to masculinity and hard-man masculinity - the sort of most desirable cultural understanding of masculinity. But to have women playing, that throws that into question. So if we're seeing the same reversals happening in netball and rugby, that to me is representative of a much wider shift in our understandings of gender within society."
The first game ever played by a New Zealand women's representative team was at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, in 1989, against a touring team from the United States, which was at the time the powerhouse of women's rugby. As it was pasted up ready for print, the headline on the article about the game to run in the following week's Rugby News was: "Women's rugby has the knockers boobed." Fortunately for Rugby News and the sub-editor who wrote the headline - and all future generations of New Zealanders - the article had been written by Heather Kidd, who was one of the very few women sports journalists in the country at the time. Kidd discovered the headline just before press time and prevented the sub-editor who wrote it from being remembered for all eternity as a purveyor of ignorance masquerading as cleverness. The headline was changed to: "Women players are here to stay!"
The Rugby World Cup kicks off at Eden Park on October 8.
Kiwi schools have now won the tournament three years in a row.