Frank Greenall: Heroes in sport, but zeroes in too many other areas

Frank Greenall

These days there's much attention on travails wrought in the highly fraught domain of the seven pivotal years suffixed by "teen".

But, by and large, the teen thing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Given the preceding (roughly) 8000 years of what passes for civilisation, it seems teendom only emerged when Ol' Blue Eyes (aka Frank Sinatra) started swooning bobby-soxers back in the 1940s.

Prior to that, individuals appeared to just fairly seamlessly transition from childhood to - if not the full monty - at least a simulacrum of adulthood, with minimal attendant drama and trauma.

As Chronicle editor Mark Dawson recently observed, teendom issues for him and his mates (and me and mine, for that matter) hardly ventured outside the twin stadia of football and girls - not necessarily in that order.

And if one's dreams of conquest and glory didn't quite always match up to their respective accompanying fantasies, that was just situation normal, stiff cheese.

No doubt there were those of alternative inclinations quietly hurting, but the notion of seeking professional psychological or medical help for this prevailing state of affairs would have been as fanciful as expecting a butler to deliver your lunchtime marmite sandwich.

I jest a bit - but not much. Partly it's just a feeble response to the utterly appalling reality that the supposedly affluent nation of New Zealand now suffers - leading the OECD countries in youth suicide rates, with all the attendant tragedies.

And this in a country, given its abundant natural advantages, that should be an exemplar to all.

So I was going to reflect on something that we do achieve at inordinately well - sport.

The Monday morning radio told me that we'd just won the last two America's Cup races. On the same sports bulletin was news that we'd also just beaten England by a cricket score to win the under-20 rugby world cup; a couple of NZ boys had nailed the 24-hours Le Mans classic; and Kiwis had picked up half-a-dozen gold medals at the latest World Championship rowing regatta.

For little old New Zealand, just another morning's work.

How come we're so good at the physically competitive stuff, but are cellar-dwellers when it comes to ticking the boxes that underpin inclusive and constructive civil society?

Apart from the tragic suicide stats, we assiduously churn out veritable swarms of additional social dysfunction: crime and close cousin incarceration; child and domestic violence;, homelessness ... mad, bad and sorry stuff we're all so unhappily familiar with these days.

A few weeks back, I recalled quaint old school days spent in arcane pursuits such as hand-writing essays. This was also the era of the do-or-die end-of-year exam - no matter how diligent you'd been during the year, to remain upwardly mobile in the school system hinged on successfully regurgitating the goods come fateful exam day.

Good exam results required a consistent swot regime, something I never really warmed to. This left only the highly fallible last-minute cram.

For the morning exams, I'd diligently set the alarm for a 5am cram-fest ... naturally I always serenely snoozed right through the alarm. But somewhere in the cranium's recesses the alarm would subliminally trigger a call to duty and, without disturbing my beauty sleep, I would proceed to dream I was diligently doing the vital swot.

How pleased my dream doppelganger was that I was dutifully cramming up large - albeit only virtually. When I eventually did wake for real, the whole artful deceit was cruelly exposed - a sorry situation duly reflected in the exam results. But I more or less got there in the end.

I was wondering if the same technique could be employed vis-a-vis improving the lot of our social edifice in general. To sleep, perchance to dream, and at least in the dreaming get a glimpse of the countenance and demeanour of a society quite a few notches up from today's sorely-flawed model.