We now entered the 8th month since the NZ Herald website first ran an item titled “The Life and Tragic Death of Sonny Fai”.
Fai was a young league player who drowned while swimming a decade earlier. On the decade of his death the Herald, this being the non‑news Xmas to February period, known colloquially in New Zealand journalism as the “silly season”, in which with everyone on holiday, reporters have to create stories, they decided to run one on Fai.
By all accounts he was “promising” in this minor sport but too young to have achieved anything noteworthy. Creating this “story” was silly. Keeping it permanently on their pay wall website is simply mind‑boggling.
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One has to dummy down the population somehow … by giving us (but not me, I’ll add) trivia to digest on a repetitive cycle. And, oh, how they could write story after story of my promising careers from some sixty year, no pun intended.
It’s a sad state of affairs at the Warriors that a player who never reached his potential for a legitimate reason continues to annually outshine others with these without that excuse for their performance.
His was a very simple story of a family of poor swimmers visiting for the first time a rugged dangerous beach and ignoring flagged off areas and lifeguards. If for example there was a beach in Thailand as dangerous they would sensibly close the beach and ban tourists from swimming.
In actual fact the Sonny Fai story has been on the site since January 2018.
The NZH is a dog anyway.