The SITTER! years
I took over Sitter! in April 1997. It cost a double whopper at Burger King and an upsized coke, from memory, but then Boy Gorge always drove a hard bargain.
Since then Sitter! has steadily evolved. It has become much more than a fanzine with a self-mocking logo. These days Sitter! is not so much a media product as an attitude, a set of values, and for those of us closest to the play, a way of life.
In this respect we don’t sell fanzines, we sell soccer ideas. Sitter! has become a brand. It is a living thing. It can conjure up emotions and has developed its own personality.
We’ve never sold more than 800 of any issue (mind you, we haven’t tried hard enough, have we -- circulation Ed). But our influence far exceeds our readership.
People who don’t buy Sitter! can be seen wearing the T shirts. Punters who pretend you don’t exist when you’re selling outside a match can later be found re-propagating the very arguments presented within Sitter!.
My deputy Grant Stantiall (Pornstar 5 in Bloc 5) has brought a whole new vitality to the fanzine. His sense of soccer activism, nose for a half-decent guerilla campaign and infectious ability to make a buck, stopped Sitter! becoming a marginalised theoretical journal.
We’ve put a decent five-figure sum back into the game by way of sponsorship and donations. Often for no return. Curiously, many of the people we support don’t support us. They don’t subscribe. Never mind. At $3 a copy (unchanged since May 1995), they’re the ones missing out.
We’ve made some mistakes. Giving Leo Bertos $200 to help him get overseas only to find he wanted to become a Greek has to be a questionable investment.
Buying ourselves swanky top-level season tickets for the lounge rather than the terraces (where we ended up anyway) in the Kingz first season was a gaffe also.
So were a couple of mean-spirited digs at Ken Dugdale back in 1997-98. On the other hand, perhaps we didn’t forcefully enough investigate Waitakere City returning New Zealand’s first positive drug test in soccer. (Of course nobody else will even report it was Waitakere, but it was.)
We’ll also have to watch that we don’t start nobbing it around with the suits at soccer bunfights. There is always a danger of losing your cutting edge if you get sucked into becoming part of “the establishment” or apologists for it.
But looking back, most of our articles have aged well. My favourite Sitter! pieces over the years include: The Joe McGrath version of the Parrot Shop Sketch (and excerpts from his diary apparently found on an Auckland golf course), the transcript analysis of a Wynton Rufer TV commentary session, Make Your Own Perry Cotton (out of a potato), Steptoe’s Magnificent Adventure, Chronology of a Shitfight (NZ Soccer v Roger Wilkinson), and the critique of the 1999 NZ Soccer AGM (“This is a difficult report to write for a number of reasons”).
We are indebted to contributors, including several professional journalists.
If there has been a tragedy of the Sitter! years it is that there has been no mainstream New Zealand soccer publication for us to feed off. It is hard to satirise events -- or provide an alternate view of them -- when they have had no widespread airing in the public domain in the first place.
With the internet increasingly becoming the key medium for soccer, who knows, we may never get a coffee table publication back (apart from Sitter!). The need for a weekly comment (as opposed to our 6-7 weekly comment) perhaps points to a glaring gap in the market for a fiesty internet page -- could we get more contributor columns on Colin Chin's Soccer observer site? -- if not a magazine.
This of course raises the larger question as to whether ink-and-paper fanzines are now a sunset industry themselves. I don’t think so. Not yet. We have some great ideas coming up for the next 50 issues. Sitter! will continue to evolve.
Bruce Holloway, December 2001
I took over Sitter! in April 1997. It cost a double whopper at Burger King and an upsized coke, from memory, but then Boy Gorge always drove a hard bargain.
Since then Sitter! has steadily evolved. It has become much more than a fanzine with a self-mocking logo. These days Sitter! is not so much a media product as an attitude, a set of values, and for those of us closest to the play, a way of life.
In this respect we don’t sell fanzines, we sell soccer ideas. Sitter! has become a brand. It is a living thing. It can conjure up emotions and has developed its own personality.
We’ve never sold more than 800 of any issue (mind you, we haven’t tried hard enough, have we -- circulation Ed). But our influence far exceeds our readership.
People who don’t buy Sitter! can be seen wearing the T shirts. Punters who pretend you don’t exist when you’re selling outside a match can later be found re-propagating the very arguments presented within Sitter!.
My deputy Grant Stantiall (Pornstar 5 in Bloc 5) has brought a whole new vitality to the fanzine. His sense of soccer activism, nose for a half-decent guerilla campaign and infectious ability to make a buck, stopped Sitter! becoming a marginalised theoretical journal.
We’ve put a decent five-figure sum back into the game by way of sponsorship and donations. Often for no return. Curiously, many of the people we support don’t support us. They don’t subscribe. Never mind. At $3 a copy (unchanged since May 1995), they’re the ones missing out.
We’ve made some mistakes. Giving Leo Bertos $200 to help him get overseas only to find he wanted to become a Greek has to be a questionable investment.
Buying ourselves swanky top-level season tickets for the lounge rather than the terraces (where we ended up anyway) in the Kingz first season was a gaffe also.
So were a couple of mean-spirited digs at Ken Dugdale back in 1997-98. On the other hand, perhaps we didn’t forcefully enough investigate Waitakere City returning New Zealand’s first positive drug test in soccer. (Of course nobody else will even report it was Waitakere, but it was.)
We’ll also have to watch that we don’t start nobbing it around with the suits at soccer bunfights. There is always a danger of losing your cutting edge if you get sucked into becoming part of “the establishment” or apologists for it.
But looking back, most of our articles have aged well. My favourite Sitter! pieces over the years include: The Joe McGrath version of the Parrot Shop Sketch (and excerpts from his diary apparently found on an Auckland golf course), the transcript analysis of a Wynton Rufer TV commentary session, Make Your Own Perry Cotton (out of a potato), Steptoe’s Magnificent Adventure, Chronology of a Shitfight (NZ Soccer v Roger Wilkinson), and the critique of the 1999 NZ Soccer AGM (“This is a difficult report to write for a number of reasons”).
We are indebted to contributors, including several professional journalists.
If there has been a tragedy of the Sitter! years it is that there has been no mainstream New Zealand soccer publication for us to feed off. It is hard to satirise events -- or provide an alternate view of them -- when they have had no widespread airing in the public domain in the first place.
With the internet increasingly becoming the key medium for soccer, who knows, we may never get a coffee table publication back (apart from Sitter!). The need for a weekly comment (as opposed to our 6-7 weekly comment) perhaps points to a glaring gap in the market for a fiesty internet page -- could we get more contributor columns on Colin Chin's Soccer observer site? -- if not a magazine.
This of course raises the larger question as to whether ink-and-paper fanzines are now a sunset industry themselves. I don’t think so. Not yet. We have some great ideas coming up for the next 50 issues. Sitter! will continue to evolve.
Bruce Holloway, December 2001