Word: australianized
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...Zealand rugby league jersey. Williams, who's part Samoan, started playing at the age of eight for Auckland's Mt. Albert club and was soon turning heads with precocious displays of power and skill. He was in primary school when spotted by a scout working for the Australian National Rugby League club Canterbury, which brought him over to Sydney's southwest when he was 15. Three years later, Williams was an NRL star and New Zealand's youngest-ever Test footballer. One of the game's most astute observers, Phil Gould, called him the "Messiah of rugby league...
...clear those players were pioneers. The current crop of Maori and Islander players (the sons mainly of poor Tongan and Samoan immigrants) forms a quarter of the ranks of the NRL. To put that in perspective, a group that has a 1 in 200 representation in the Australian populace has a 1 in 4 presence in the country's premier winter sports competition. It's a similar, if less striking, picture in New Zealand, where Maori and Islanders comprise 17% of the population, yet of late have made up more than half the players in the country's five provincial...
...size issue has led to calls in Australia for competitions to be structured by weight rather than age. Such competitions have been around for more than a decade in New Zealand, and the Australian Rugby League sent a delegation there in 2006 to research the concept. Junior Panthers executive Feltis was a member of that party. He returned keen to start a weight-based league west of Sydney, but couldn't get parents interested. Feltis theorizes that, despite the grumbling on the sidelines, the spirit of rugby league is that you play the man in front of you. If that...
...Zealand, talent scouts swarm all over Manukau City, a poor region of Auckland with a large Polynesian population. It's a similar situation in pockets of Sydney and Brisbane, where mostly unskilled Maori and Islander migrants settled in significant numbers from the 1970s until recently, when Australian authorities tightened immigration laws. On both sides of the Tasman Sea, there's a sense that sports can offer a way out of poverty...
...have apparently suggested the dominance of Britain's cycling team in Beijing may be down more to performance-enhancing drugs than our bulldog spirit. (If it'd raced as a separate nation, the cycle team would currently be ninth in the medal table.) And John Coates, head of the Australian Olympic Committee, was even gracious enough to applaud a British gold in the pool as "not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap...