Clinton Toopi has been transformed from a raw 19-year-old left on the outer during the dark days of 2000 to a highly physical, yet flamboyant excitement machine who has lit up the NRL with his sublime skills as the New Zealand Warriors have flirted with finals glory.
His defining moment as a centre of undoubted class came with a try hat-trick as the Kiwis thrashed the Kangaroos 30-16 at North Harbour Stadium last October. So what's in store for 2004? RICHARD BECHT meets the man with the big haircuts and the even bigger plays ... the ultimate Warrior.
When the words "Warriors" and "woes" went together so readily a few years ago, one Sunday home game was as grim as most of those times. Little equating to pleasure appeared to be on show on May 2, 1999, certainly not for the poor souls who listed themselves as committed Warriors supporters.
On this autumn afternoon, someone with a fertile imagination suggested an official crowd of 7241 was at Auckland's Ericsson Stadium for the fare being served up by the home side and visiting South Sydney. That numbers had dwindled to this still-inflated figure was testimony to the era.
Player Magazine
In Mark Graham's first of two years as coach, the Warriors hadn't quite reached their nadir. That would come in 2000. But they could smell what it was like and it wasn't appealing.
To provide some context, the then-haunted Auckland-based club was coming off four successive losses to Sydney City, Balmain, Melbourne and North Queensland, the last of them by a humiliating 0-24 margin. That wasn't the half of it. Captain Matthew Ridge, Nigel Vagana and Tony Tuimavave were all suspended, outstanding hooker Jason Death was out for six games with a broken jaw and young forwards Awen Guttenbeil and Monty Betham were sidelined, their seasons ruined by serious injuries.
Dire was probably as appropriate as any word that came to mind, other than adding a few expletives for added effect. Yet three players had just cause for rating this a very special day. They were making their debuts for the Warriors in the National Rugby League's premiership. Of the three, one proved to be the odd one out, his NRL career as brief as it was surprising that he had one at all.
Mt Albert fullback Carl Doherty, tagged "Billy Idol" for his white hair, came off the bench against the Rabbitohs, started in another four games after that and was never used again. The other two, though, would go on to establish themselves among the NRL's upper echelon, but only after being all but discarded by Graham.
One of them was a quiet Samoan-born centre-winger out of Auckland's Marist club. He'd just turned 20. The other was an extremely lean Maori lad from Otahuhu sporting very big hair. Not long past his 19th birthday, he could play in either the centres or as a back-row forward. While the former was in the run-on side, the latter had only about 15 minutes of game time off the interchange bench.
But the significance of the occasion was never lost on him. "Basically, it was the day when all my dreams came true," he says. "I used to have all of the Warriors' posters on the wall in my room. It was quite bizarre because I would come home every day and sit and stare at the pictures and say to myself, 'Hopefully, one day that'll be me'. It was quite geeky, but that's what I used to do. I'd just daydream about it." There was nothing dream-like for the two newcomers, or their coach for that matter, in the game that day.
The Rabbitohs gave the Warriors a fifth successive loss (12-8), which would become six in the next round. Mark Graham barely called on the pair again that season or the next.
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The last time the same two players were on rugby league's big stage together, the venue had changed and so had the team they were playing for. It was October 18, 2003. The Samoan was now 24 and a specialist winger, capping a year in which he'd terrorised opponents, scored a record bag of tries in an NRL finals match and set a club try-scoring record for a season.
The Maori boy was 23, no longer so lean, but prone to change his hair almost weekly. He had developed into a centre of such quality that he was attracting huge wraps from legends of the game. This was the transtasman test against the Kangaroos at North Harbour Stadium.
No creative accounting was needed to know the crowd was in the region of 22,000, nor were apologies needed to appease the fans this time. Instead, they feasted on one of the most sumptuous sporting dishes imaginable as the Kiwis conspired to turn a 0-10 deficit into a compelling 30-16 win on an emotion-packed evening. By now the two players were first-choice Kiwi internationals, had played at the 2000 World Cup for their ethnic teams, counted more than 70 NRL appearances each and had distinguished themselves as the most potent left-sided attacking force in the competition.
The boy with the big hair was sporting a mohawk design now, gorging himself with a performance that added a new line in New Zealand's test records. If he'd lived a dream and made it happen four years earlier, he'd moved into another stratosphere on this occasion.
"That's definitely up there as the best moment I've had in rugby league ... just to beat Australia," he says. "I'm one of those players who never likes to lose and after being totally embarrassed playing for your country and being slaughtered the way we were in Sydney [48-6 last July], there was a lot of hunger and revenge the next time around. I didn't know what would unfold that day, but we wanted to make a mark because it was the 100th test [between New Zealand and Australia]." That Maori player with the mohawk was, of course, Clinton Toopi ... and his Samoan accomplice was, obviously, Francis Meli.
His defining moment as a centre of undoubted class came with a try hat-trick as the Kiwis thrashed the Kangaroos 30-16 at North Harbour Stadium last October. So what's in store for 2004? RICHARD BECHT meets the man with the big haircuts and the even bigger plays ... the ultimate Warrior.
When the words "Warriors" and "woes" went together so readily a few years ago, one Sunday home game was as grim as most of those times. Little equating to pleasure appeared to be on show on May 2, 1999, certainly not for the poor souls who listed themselves as committed Warriors supporters.
On this autumn afternoon, someone with a fertile imagination suggested an official crowd of 7241 was at Auckland's Ericsson Stadium for the fare being served up by the home side and visiting South Sydney. That numbers had dwindled to this still-inflated figure was testimony to the era.
Player Magazine
In Mark Graham's first of two years as coach, the Warriors hadn't quite reached their nadir. That would come in 2000. But they could smell what it was like and it wasn't appealing.
To provide some context, the then-haunted Auckland-based club was coming off four successive losses to Sydney City, Balmain, Melbourne and North Queensland, the last of them by a humiliating 0-24 margin. That wasn't the half of it. Captain Matthew Ridge, Nigel Vagana and Tony Tuimavave were all suspended, outstanding hooker Jason Death was out for six games with a broken jaw and young forwards Awen Guttenbeil and Monty Betham were sidelined, their seasons ruined by serious injuries.
Dire was probably as appropriate as any word that came to mind, other than adding a few expletives for added effect. Yet three players had just cause for rating this a very special day. They were making their debuts for the Warriors in the National Rugby League's premiership. Of the three, one proved to be the odd one out, his NRL career as brief as it was surprising that he had one at all.
Mt Albert fullback Carl Doherty, tagged "Billy Idol" for his white hair, came off the bench against the Rabbitohs, started in another four games after that and was never used again. The other two, though, would go on to establish themselves among the NRL's upper echelon, but only after being all but discarded by Graham.
One of them was a quiet Samoan-born centre-winger out of Auckland's Marist club. He'd just turned 20. The other was an extremely lean Maori lad from Otahuhu sporting very big hair. Not long past his 19th birthday, he could play in either the centres or as a back-row forward. While the former was in the run-on side, the latter had only about 15 minutes of game time off the interchange bench.
But the significance of the occasion was never lost on him. "Basically, it was the day when all my dreams came true," he says. "I used to have all of the Warriors' posters on the wall in my room. It was quite bizarre because I would come home every day and sit and stare at the pictures and say to myself, 'Hopefully, one day that'll be me'. It was quite geeky, but that's what I used to do. I'd just daydream about it." There was nothing dream-like for the two newcomers, or their coach for that matter, in the game that day.
The Rabbitohs gave the Warriors a fifth successive loss (12-8), which would become six in the next round. Mark Graham barely called on the pair again that season or the next.
*******************************************************************
The last time the same two players were on rugby league's big stage together, the venue had changed and so had the team they were playing for. It was October 18, 2003. The Samoan was now 24 and a specialist winger, capping a year in which he'd terrorised opponents, scored a record bag of tries in an NRL finals match and set a club try-scoring record for a season.
The Maori boy was 23, no longer so lean, but prone to change his hair almost weekly. He had developed into a centre of such quality that he was attracting huge wraps from legends of the game. This was the transtasman test against the Kangaroos at North Harbour Stadium.
No creative accounting was needed to know the crowd was in the region of 22,000, nor were apologies needed to appease the fans this time. Instead, they feasted on one of the most sumptuous sporting dishes imaginable as the Kiwis conspired to turn a 0-10 deficit into a compelling 30-16 win on an emotion-packed evening. By now the two players were first-choice Kiwi internationals, had played at the 2000 World Cup for their ethnic teams, counted more than 70 NRL appearances each and had distinguished themselves as the most potent left-sided attacking force in the competition.
The boy with the big hair was sporting a mohawk design now, gorging himself with a performance that added a new line in New Zealand's test records. If he'd lived a dream and made it happen four years earlier, he'd moved into another stratosphere on this occasion.
"That's definitely up there as the best moment I've had in rugby league ... just to beat Australia," he says. "I'm one of those players who never likes to lose and after being totally embarrassed playing for your country and being slaughtered the way we were in Sydney [48-6 last July], there was a lot of hunger and revenge the next time around. I didn't know what would unfold that day, but we wanted to make a mark because it was the 100th test [between New Zealand and Australia]." That Maori player with the mohawk was, of course, Clinton Toopi ... and his Samoan accomplice was, obviously, Francis Meli.
