'The whole question bristles with difficulties': Sport and war

Abstract

The legacy of the war years for New Zealand sport was necessarily varied. Most immediately, one could point to a missing or damaged generation of athletes. Among those who did not return were tennis maestro Anthony Wilding, promising New Zealand cricketer Robert Hickmott, featherweight boxing champion Jimmy Hagarty, and thirteen All Blacks, including the 1905 captain Dave Gallaher, killed at Passchendaele in October 1917. Indeed, rugby drew on its sacrifices, and especially Gallaher, to obscure its pre-war tensions and establish an enduring image in the public mind that it, above all others, was the game that shaped the qualities displayed on the battlefield. The quest for unity extended to the reinstatement of defectors to rugby league. For its part, league lacked the numbers, especially among schoolboys, to sustain public interest and meaningful competitions during the war in the way that rugby union did. The threat of a professional game that many had feared up to 1914 quickly shrank to a few small pockets. Rugby union was therefore able to emerge from the war with relative unity and increased respectability, and to secure by the early 1920s a much better claim to the title of ‘national game’ than could have been imagined earlier in the century. Other team sports such as hockey and soccer also lost ground against rugby, and especially so outside the four main centres, as their smaller competitions struggled and frequently failed to survive the depletions of the war. The Taranaki, Horowhenua, West Coast and Buller hockey associations all disappeared during the war.