I’ve been thinking about Juliet. Not the Binoche kind, from the French movie about chocolate with Johnny Depp that didn’t make any sense, more the House of Capulet kind, on a balcony wistfully pining for her lover boy Romeo to change his name.
Sounds dramatic, right? So was the play, the guy who wrote it knew a little about drama, knew how to pull the heart strings of those that listened in rapture to his words as they dripped from his quill into the mouths of the men who performed his plays.
Juliet’s whole point is this: what’s in a name? Quite a lot, I reckon. Names hold meaning and convey emotion. When it comes to sports, the city is an integral part of any team’s name. When they are successful, sports teams form an inextricable bond between the players, the fans, and the history and culture of the city itself.
Think Greg Alexander’s proclamation when he lifted the trophy in 1991 that the win was for “the people of Penrith”, or the impassioned speech by Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles to the City of Brotherly Love after their 2018 Super Bowl victory, stating the players won for their fans, that they knew the privilege they have to play a sport for money, and the joy they felt delivering success to those fans who grind away at life on a day to day basis to support them.
In writing plays like Romeo and Juliet, it’s a misheld belief that William Shakespeare wrote for the upper classes of Elizabethan society. Sure, he had a few wealthy landowners, gentry, royalty types, or ten, as patrons to keep him in snuff and booze, but his plays were in fact created for the masses.
He wrote not for the elites but for your average joe, he wrote to take them away from the despair of the London slums of his time.
Sure, he used some highfalutin language, but the themes of his plays were universal, and even if you didn’t understand his prose, the sum of the parts told you that at the heart of the plays they were telling your story, that life is hard, and we are all searching for happiness.
Big Will wanted more than anything to give his fans that happiness.
Which leads me to the crux of things: who are the Warriors playing for? The fan base of late has been incredible, and the thousands of fans who have travelled to Vegas to watch them perform on the American stage epitomise this.
But do they get the same devotion back from the team itself? When you consistently have squads of players that are on a carousel in and out of Auckland, does anyone else wonder if the fans figure in the team’s motivation to succeed? “Blasphemy!” I hear you say, “Witch!” others cry out. But think about it, do we ever get a sense of desperation from our players when adversity strikes?
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck (Photo by Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
That there is something more than the win the team is playing for? When we capitulate, like we did against the Titans (60-plus points) last year, or the Storm (70 points) in 2022, do we really think the players seem to care about how those losses impact the fans beyond a few cursory words in a press conference? Do these professional players feel like they represent New Zealand?
I know this will not be popular, and the knives will come out in due course, but this writer feels like they don’t, that in fact they care more about playing for their next contract, and if you read the Warriors fans pages many others agree.
Now the players will say we play for the fans, of course we do, and maybe some of those born and bred in Auckland do but contrast the way the current crop of Penrith Panthers proudly represent the region of Mount Druitt. Do we ever hear that type of heartfelt rhetoric from our lot?
I have been hinting at this for a while so let’s call a spade a spade. It’s ridiculous to call a club side the ‘New Zealand’ Warriors (the USA Lakers or Bayern Germany anyone?) and I am championing for them to change their name back to the Auckland Warriors, our original name from 1995.
And let’s pause to remember – they were formed in Auckland, play out of Auckland, and the overwhelming majority of the supporters are from Auckland.
Here’s why I think a name change is important: an athlete needs more motivation than playing for money alone to succeed and tribalism in sports breeds countless success stories where teams playing for something more than themselves overachieve. I am championing a change because I believe that this name reset is critical for our Warriors team to reconnect with the everyday Aucklanders that bleed for their club.
For the players to play for something more than the money that gets direct credited every fortnight. I’m sorry folks but a club side, a professional sports franchise, trying to play for the “whole” of New Zealand doesn’t resonate and the players end up playing for no one.
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck celebrates with teammates (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
We talk endlessly that finding the extra one per cent in sport is critical for success all the time. This connection with Auckland will yield more than one per cent, for proof please recall Sam Burgess crying with his broken cheek for Souths after winning the Grand Final in 2014.
An Englishman who knew what that win meant for the people of Redfern and their 100-plus years of history and the heartache of being kicked out of the competition only a few years earlier.
We need to get the players to understand the struggles of the people they play in front of, and for that interaction to not be a one-off press jaunt for an Instagram reel or the 6pm news, but to see the people on a regular basis to understand intimately what success every weekend means for these fans.
Like the dad who saves his hard-earned money he made fixing cars, that could have gone to pay the mortgage but instead went to taking his family to Warriors games. The labourers on a building site who look past the dirt and the dust to the end of the week to watch their team play. To the mum who works two jobs to feed her family and to have a little left over each week to buy Warriors tickets and hot chips for her kids to see their heros.
The Warriors need to be playing for this Auckland, for the people who live one suburb over from them, the people they pass on their way to training, the kids in the schools with dreams of being them. They need to play for an Auckland that needs respite, to take them away from the fact now, and for large chunks of the city’s history over the last 30 years, things have been hard. Three further points before I rest my case.
1. We have a New Zealand League team already; it’s called the Kiwis.
2. If expansion happens, and Sir Graeme Lowe pushes his case for a second New Zealand team, you must change the name anyway. So why not do it from a positive standpoint.
3. The Warriors have only held a handful of games in 30 years north of the Harbour Bridge. There are nearly as many people in this region as Christchurch and Wellington and way more than Hamilton or Napier/Hastings. Do those fans not matter?
When Juliet is pining for Romeo in that eponymous play, she bemoans the fact that Romeo’s last name is the reason keeping them from being bound together for eternity and find a winning love. In the climax of her soliloquy, she asks would a rose smell less sweet if it was called something other than a rose?
So, the question is back to you, what’s in a name?
