Sometimes people in or about sport take themselves way too seriously.

Look at the ongoing NBA lockout or the recent NFL impasse, which basically have seen billionaires fighting millionaires for more money.

Seriously, just give me one average NBA or NFL player's salary for a season and I'd be set at my bar on a beach in Jamaica for the rest of my days.

But, they are at least talking big bucks while others are trifling on in all forms of media about how insidious a ritual dance is.

Yes, undermining the whole sport of rugby and potentially the universe is the haka.

For those of you not in the know, the haka (which has various versions) is a Maori war dance that the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, performs before international games.

It requires a lot of foot stomping, arm smacking, poking out of tongues and rolling of eyeballs (as far as I can see) and is very aggressive in its intent it apparently fires up the Kiwis and, occasionally, intimidates small rodents.

All in all, I simply find it great theater before a game that is often less interesting than that opening act.

Yes, the haka with the throat-cutting gesture is over the top for today's sensibilties, and violence of any kind should not be promoted but this a Maori/New Zealand tradition that is harmless.

Well, Captain James Cook didn't think so when he said his sailors would rather drown on a sinking ship than be washed up on Maori shores, but that was a couple of years back now.

The Kiwis aren't the only ones to war dance; Pacific islands Fiji, Samoa and Tonga also have rituals that appear just as intimidating.

Opposing players don't seem to mind it, so why should we?

After all, in response, there's nothing wrong with the Springboks or Wallabies countering before a Tri Nations Test with a stirring version of Abba's Waterloo or the Village People's YMCA. They would get the crowd really rocking, and take a bit of the wind out of the Kiwis' sails.

Let the men in black dance. Sport, at the end of the day, is about entertainment.

Dance all night long, All Blacks.

Tym Glaser is a senior sports copy editor who last hit the dance floor in 1989. He can be contacted at tymglaser@hotmail.com

(China Daily 10/23/2011 page8)