Culture
In New Zealand there are 520 clubs, 141,726 registered players and 2309 referees. In colonial New Zealand, rugby football served to hold loyalty to the Crown within the emigrant population, whilst introducing British culture to the Māori population. It was the New Zealand Natives' Rugby Tour of 1888/89 showed that New Zealand could compete with other nations, something they had trouble doing in another traditional sport, cricket. Similarly, the 1905-06 tour, in which the All Blacks went very close to a clean sweep tour (one loss against Wales), helped to create a sense of national pride around the All Blacks, as they appeared physically superior and pulled off an admirable performance on their British tour. It is also thought that this saw the emergence of the Kiwi as a national symbol. Rugby is considered to be a part of New Zealand life - dominating the sports media. The Haka, a Māori ceremonial dance, which has been immortalised in popular culture by the All Blacks has become an iconic image of sport. Rugby being the unofficial sport of New Zealand, attracts large sporting attendances, both in New Zealand and in other rugby nations. As many as 5000 people have simply turned out to All Black training sessions. There is a pay TV channel dedicated to rugby in New Zealand.
Read more about this topic: Rugby Union In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)