Tomorrows people: Playing for a home win

Rugby is the life for Matthew Atiga. He talks to GREG DIXON about a playing career, being a motivator, and what spurs him on.

Matthew Atiga's eyes are glistening with pride. The 18-year-old is 7 again and he's running, running out for his very first game with the Richmond under-8 league team.

He's on Fowlds Park, he's pulled on the Bulldogs' maroon and blue strip and "chucked on" a pair of Adidas boots.

"First touch, I scored a try. Loved it, loved it ever since," he says with a grin. The memory - his earliest, he reckons - seems so clear it's crystal. But 11 years on the "it" he loves is no longer rugby league. The "it" is rugby union.

He's been playing for five years now, since he left Ponsonby's St Paul's College for the hallowed rugby fields of Auckland Grammar School.

This year he captained Grammar's First XV to victory in the Auckland Secondary Schools competition and now, with school over and university beckoning, he wants to make the nation's most popular sport his job.

It's down to Jonah Lomu, he says. It was the big All Black wing's World Cup debut in 1995 that made professional rugby an option for the born-and-bred Aucklander, who is half Tongan, half Samoan.

"It was not so much that he inspired me, but it was what he did, what he's done, for professional rugby. It would be nothing without him, basically.

"He's provided a lot of opportunities for everybody else just by showing what he showed at that World Cup - and the money you make out of it.

"It's a way out for some people."

Which suggests Atiga is wary of what New Zealand now has to offer its young people.

Politics, the economy and social issues concern him only when he sees them on the television news, however.

Rugby, it's clear, is one focal point of his life's trinity of key cares and responsibilities.

His family - the most important, he says - and his friends are the others, but they are and always have been realities. A professional rugby career is a vision he must realise.

He hasn't, Atiga admits, treated education as a top priority in the past. And, even if running on to Eden Park in the black strip of his country is Atiga's ultimate dream, he knows he must have a fall-back in the future.

He has signed up for a two-year sports diploma course at the University of Otago in Dunedin, a qualification which should guarantee that he could coach rugby once his playing career - professional or not - is over.

"I know it [a professional rugby career] will happen. But I'm concentrating next year on study.

"It's going to be tough. Next year is make or break for me. I know I have to succeed at the books because there is a lot of [family] money being spent on me. I've got to remember that there are five children in my family, so I've got to provide money for them."

However, the quietly confident Atiga, who's been a loose forward until now but might move to the backs, is not prepared to oversell his physical skills.

"I'm okay at rugby, not too bad. I like to see myself as a leader-motivator. I think they're my strengths: the ability to motivate people, the teams that I've captained, to winning teams, hopefully.

"I'm not necessarily a big star, but I know how to lead a team, that's for sure. The coaches and the [Grammar] headmaster must have had a lot faith in me, and it paid off in the end."

If he accepts - even enjoys - responsibility and leadership, that is the way he was raised, he says. His mother and father (a community police officer at Mt Roskill) gave him a Methodist upbringing, though he admits that rugby commitments mean he doesn't get to church much during the winter.

But the Atigas have also pushed their eldest son, "nagging" him to plan and focus on making something of his life. He's listened and learned.

But his personal fear - one that seems common to his generation - is that he will do the unthinkable: fail.

"I like to win, I have to win. I have to win all the time.

"I've cried over rugby games that I've lost. I never forget it. I never forget any wrong moves, how many mis-tackles, how many dropped balls. I count them.

"I've got to be the best. I just want to be the best."

Which means that if he has to - if he doesn't get a rugby contract here - he would be happy to leave the laid-back, modest shores of "home, sweet home."

He would represent Samoa or Tonga or Fiji (he has Fijian blood through a grandfather). He would head over to Britain to play lucrative club rugby there.

The only true barrier to success is himself, he says. His self-discipline and motivation can wander at times.

"Personal things are the only things that can stop you from succeeding in anything you want. It's how strong you are and how motivated you are to continue along your plan.

"Any career is not going to be a perfect straight line to the goal. It's going to deviate up and down, sideways and backwards. But if you stay focused, you reach it, that's what I believe - but that's the hardest thing."