Martin Snedden, rugby salesman

BY ANTHONY HUBBARD

Lots of people tell Martin Snedden they want to be out of New Zealand during the Rugby World Cup. "I hear that all the time," says the man leading the rugby jamboree. Snedden is affable and relaxed and does not think that loving rugby is compulsory for Kiwis. He knows plenty of New Zealanders hate it.

Yet in this he is offside with the official cup myth, which says that the stadium contains all of us. Snedden knows the polls prove this is not true. The RWC chief executive thinks about 40% of the population "is either indifferent to rugby or actively dislike it". That, he says, is the fun part of his job – trying to convert 1.75 million people.

The politics of the RWC are full of irony. The sporting code that once split the country into warring camps is now presented as the great unifier. The Labour-led government helped win the right to host the cup next year using the marketing lie that all of us are rugby-heads. National cheerfully follows.

Both governments, of course, say the cup is a big opportunity for New Zealand. The politicians don't acknowledge their personal interest. A successful tournament will put lots of voters in a good mood just before the next election. A shambolic cup will put them in a bad mood. Is Snedden worried that he is just a pawn in the politicians' game? "Not in the slightest," he says, leaning back on the boardroom couch with a huge view of Wellington Harbour. "It's not for me to judge what the government's motivations are. My job that I've been hired to do is to put on the best possible event that I can – and I will."

One way of luring the dissidents into the stadium is by appealing to their patriotism. "A hell of a lot of people who are going to go to the rugby are not rugby supporters," he says. "They're gonna go because they want to be part of the Rugby World Cup experience, just exactly the same as when the All Whites played Bahrain here in November and they filled the stadium down the road.

"I would say probably one-third of those were soccer supporters, and the rest were people who recognised that this was a moment in time they wanted to be part of, so they went there – and I was one of those.

"I don't follow soccer at all, but I thought it was the best night I'd ever had at sport, and I've been around a heap of sport in my time. And, for me, it just captured everything at that one moment – the drama that was happening on the field, the team overcoming obstacles to finally succeed, the crowd... there was an unbelievable din in that stadium for 90 minutes. I've never come across anything like it."

The RWC – Snedden often shortens it to "Rugby World Cup" without "the", like the name of a favourite pet – was not primarily a rugby tournament, but a unique opportunity for New Zealand. And he says that will appeal to the 16% of New Zealanders who, according to the long-running UMR poll about sport, usually say they are "not at all interested in rugby" (an equal number say they are "not all that interested").

"That percentage exists in sport right across the spectrum, including cricket," says Snedden, a former Black Caps seam bowler and former CEO of New Zealand Cricket.

"It's nothing personal to rugby, it's just the reality of life. But within that 16% there will be a portion who are passionate about New Zealand. So if you can present something to them that they can see is enhancing New Zealand in whatever way... then their dislike in this instance will become slightly irrelevant.

"They will see there's something slightly more important going on here than just rugby."

Snedden and his team are making sure local communities buy in to the cup – they appeal to their self interest. The jamboree gives every hamlet a place in the sun: grab the chance and sell yourself! More than 1000 local festivals are due to blossom.

The cup maestro also knows that women are more likely than men to dislike rugby: many hate its violence, its strutting machismo. So he is targeting them. This week there will be a special Women for the Rugby World Cup party in Auckland with 200 women invited.

"I'm not allowed to go," he says. Will this enormous political marketing campaign pay off? Some people still hate rugby because of the Springbok tour of 1981, as anti-tour leader John Minto points out. He has never been to a rugby match since then, although he played rugby at school and was a rugby coach as a young teacher in 1978-79.

"I feel quite neutral about the whole thing – I'm not interested," he told the Sunday Star-Times.

"It's not that I've got anything against the game per se. It doesn't warm me, it doesn't move me."

Snedden knows how divisive rugby was in 1981 – it divided his own family. His brother Pat, the most political of the five children, was passionately opposed to the tour.

Minto reveals that it was Pat who took him out of Hamilton on the day the Boks match there was cancelled, and an angry rugby mob chased protesters such as Minto through the streets and beat up some of them. Another brother, Peter, was passionately in favour. Martin didn't have strong feelings.

"I guess I was pro [tour]," says Martin. "I was down at university in Otago. Now I can tell you, in Otago, it wasn't an issue on campus to any significant extent and so our focus was on the rugby, and we enjoyed the rugby. We knew what was happening but my view was politics can stay out of sport – let the thing go ahead and get on with it."

The family argued furiously, and "Mum, at one stage, just closed down all discussion about it. It was just getting too heated, and it wasn't going to reach any kind of conclusion." Pat persuaded him he was wrong. "That's one of the really lovely things about Pat, he actually took the time to educate his own family, and you know, we're the better for it."

Later, as boss of NZ Cricket, Snedden found himself arguing for another unpopular tour – the cricket team's visit to Zimbabwe. Snedden says he had to support the tour "because as chief executive of New Zealand Cricket, I knew damn well what our contractual responsibilities were".

At the same time, many New Zealanders "quite rightly didn't want the tour to go ahead". He privately opposed it too, but "I didn't hang my hat too much on that one because I was taking responsibility for what I was doing. I wasn't trying to get a sympathy vote at the same time."

Pat, a businessman and now the chairman of Housing New Zealand, was always the leftie in the family, says Martin, who was more conservative.

Pat was arrested during the Bastion Point protests, and educated the family about Maori matters. His prize-winning 2005 book, Why It's Our Treaty Too, says Pakeha should support the treaty settlement process.

"It's a lovely, concise, easy-to-read-book and I bought heaps of those and hand them out to people when I'm trying to persuade people of the importance of this tournament being about the whole of New Zealand," says Snedden. "It's quite important that we get at ease with who we are, and I think one of the really nice things about Rugby World Cup is that it can be used as a catalyst for our social and cultural development as a nation."

The decision to open the tournament with a match between the All Blacks and Tonga "was intended by us as an overt signal that this tournament firstly was about the whole of the makeup of New Zealand. [Tonga] are representative of the South Pacific which is a big part of who we are."

Tonga has its own pre-match haka, and the spectacle of the two teams "going at each other" in dance is brilliant, he says. He uses a YouTube film of it in many of his speeches.

Who would have believed it? Rugby, which split the country in 1981, in 2011 is being used to promote unity and national togetherness. Minto points out that money has helped change the politics of the sport. When it was an amateur game, it was administered by flinty right-wingers, blokes who insisted on their right to play the all-white Springboks. When rugby turned professional, it had to widen its appeal to sell more tickets.

"Rugby is now part of the corporate world, where it needs to present a different image," he says. "It's not going to get by with that reactionary rural rump mentality that dominated it for so long."

The political effort to boost the cup is huge: a cascade of taxpayers' dollars; special legislation to allow world cup liquor licences; Labour even changed the dates of the school holidays to stop school-related traffic making it harder for rugby followers to get around.

Isn't this way over the top? Again, Snedden is all sweet reason. Changing the holidays was the government's act, not his, but he supports it. He had a discussion about it with his wife, who teaches at a private school in Wellington.

"I said to her, 'OK, explain this to me. This change, how many days less does it give you to prepare your pupils for NCEA?' 'Oh, there's no less days, same number of days.' 'And you've been given four years' notice of this?' 'Yes.' 'So don't you think you're good enough to actually organise things so you can deliver?"'

What was her answer? "She says, 'Of course you're right, darling,' as she always does." Snedden laughs.

Critics of rugby point to its beer-swilling culture, its celebration of "piss", and say that the National government's law change allowing special cup liquor licences is a charter for drunken excess. Snedden won't buy this. All the law does, he says, is make the bureaucratic process easier.

Snedden's organisation has control only over the stadiums and the fanzones, and promises a safe and responsible alcohol regime there. A free-for-all "doesn't suit us in the slightest", and nor is there any incentive to increase boozing. "We get no revenue from the sale of liquor during the tournament."

In any case, he says, there is no evidence that rugby tours lead to drunken riots. During the 2005 Lions tour, he says, 20,000 supporters followed the team, and they certainly drank, but the number of arrests was negligible.

This might sound Pollyanna-ish, but Snedden isn't really like that. He says there is a real risk that the enormous marketing effort will put some people off.

Many Aussies complained before the Sydney Olympics about the fuss, he says, and some carried out their threat to flee the country during the Games. Later, some "regretted vacating Sydney because ultimately they came to realise that they missed something really important in the history of their country".

The backlash regularly breaks out here – some people "are simply turned off by this event". Snedden pays close attention to their complaints.

It will help him, he says, to tweak the tournament "in a way that maybe gives us a chance of capturing them".

Martin Snedden has his eye on you.

- © Fairfax NZ News