By Spiro Zavos, Nick Bollinger, Justin Paton
Awa Press, NZ$24.99 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

DON'T LIKE RUGBY? Well, I didn’t have any time for soccer until I read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Spiro Zavos’ How to Watch a Game of Rugby might do the same for you with rugby. He combines an understanding of the game and its nuances (both technical and philosophical) with wit, intelligence and flair in his turn of phrase. He’s even endorsed by Greg “Foreskin’s Lament” McGee. Much as I was traumatised by rugbyhead boorishness at high school, I double as a rugby columnist in another life.

“Chess played by massive pieces who are allowed to smash into each other,” so Zavos describes rugby. The book is a concise, lively 119-page overview of the brutal, beautiful game. From its origins to the increasing impact of Polynesian players to the pros and cons of pre-match conjugal privileges, Zavos knows his stuff.

Zavos has also mined the best writing on rugby, and come up with some pearls of wisdom. From a The Listener editorial by Denis Welch: “Rugby remains one of the great games, precisely because it totally involves the body... Is there any sporting thrill to in the world to equal that of a great try? There are also qualities about the sport, like unselfishness and unpretentiousness, that distinguish it from flashier rivals.”

Don’t let Fuehrer Bishop Brian get hold of the following insight: “According to Jock Phillips in his pioneering study of New Zealand male culture... It is not inconceivable that playing rugby helped to sublimate acute sexual frustration... It may have given males a form of physical contact which they could not legitimately get elsewhere.”

Then there’s PG Wodehouse’s witticism. “The main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end, and in order to squelch this programme each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in fourteen days without option, coupled with some strong words from the bench.” No kudos: Justin Harrison.

There are strong similarities between rugby and music Mu, who cites Jerry Collins as an essential influence, told me: “Playing and managing Fat Freddy’s there’s some parallels there with being a captain in a rugby team, you’ve gotta try and keep it all locked down.” Justin Paton describes Victory Over Death 2 in How to Look at a Painting, “McCahon’s big statement (which is really a big question) feels as unswervable as a haka.” Like Mu, Zavos and Paton, Nick Bollinger lyrically locksdown his subject in How to Listen to Pop Music.

“The biggest threat to American children since polio,” George W Bush critiqued Eminem. From hip-hop to African maestro Issa Bagayogo to rhythm before speech, Bollinger is arresting. One of the reasons Bollinger remains an outstanding critic (National Radio and The Listener) is his imagination and adventurousness for new, different music. He fisks the tired music’s not- what- it- was whinge, famously expressed by Nick Hornby with “contemporary rock music no longer sounds young – or at least not young in that kind of joyous uninhibited way.” As Bollinger incisively points out, “What all these pop scholars are really mourning is the passing of their own youth.” (There’s a similar problem with sozzled film critics too.)

“A sense of place”, Bollinger’s valentine to New Orleans, attains added poignancy post Hurricane Katrina. Bollinger atmospherically, enticingly describes “a unique mash-up of cultures... both magical and cruel,” recording a gig by the late, criminally unknown James Booker. “In the Pro-Tooled, Auto-Tuned, quantised world, the first thing that disappears is a sense of place.”

In How to Look at a Painting, complemented with 24 well-chosen colour reproductions, Paton also deftly evokes sense of place, such as the magic of an exhibition just before an opening: “The kick of a colour, the jolting power of a detail, the simple fact of a painting’s size – all declare themselves with fresh intensity.”

In “On Going to a Museum”, Paton homages the great critic William Hazlitt. “And when he turns to the harder task of describing what he loves, he also unintentionally delivers a description of his own virtues. The Rembrandt, he writes, is ‘full of grace and gusto’.” Like Paton and Bollinger.