KEY POINTS:
For years we've been subjected to vacuous-looking models grinning at us with their perfectly white teeth yet toothpaste companies would do worse than sign up Krisnan Inu as their frontman.
The Smiling Assassin, as he's been dubbed by Sydney media, lines up each kick at goal wearing a smirk that sometimes borders on a giggle.
It might seem a juvenile way to handle a deadly serious part of rugby league but it's Inu's way of dealing with being booed by 30,000 rival fans and is now part of his pre-kick ritual.
"It started at training," Inu says from his base in Sydney. "Every time I practised kicking, the first thing I'd try to do is kick from the sideline and everyone would start bagging me out and I would start laughing.
"It's the same when the crowd starts booing. I just start smiling and laughing. If they are going to boo me I might as well laugh about it and if I get it over it just shows them up so I can laugh even more."
Inu will be laughing all the way to the bank after last week signing one of the most lucrative deals in the NRL. The 21-year-old penned a deal to stay at Parramatta that will see him earn $400,000 a season.
Judging by what he achieved last season, he is well worth it.
Last season he was runner up for Rookie of the Year, behind childhood friend Israel Folau, made his test debut after only one NRL appearance, and scored tries the quality of which most mortals could only dream.
In a match-winning effort against the Bulldogs, he picked up a ball from his boot laces and in one quick movement stabbed it into the in-goal and won the race to the ball. Pure genius in such an important match.
To confirm his class, he then nailed the conversion from the sideline. After his trademark smile, of course.
Inu is one of a new breed of player that is the talk of the NRL. A few of his contemporaries just happen to be some of his best mates.
He was born in Auckland but grew up on a council estate in Minto, in Sydney's south-west, with Folau and Eels team-mate Jarryd Hayne. The three of them played touch rugby down at the local park most days after school until they couldn't see the ball in the dark.
"That's all we had, football," Hayne told reporters last year. "You talk about musicians and how they play music to get away, to escape to their own world. That's like footy.
"I think that's why we're so skilful. We didn't have much growing up, but we had football.
"We lived and breathed it."
In his NRL debut last year, Inu celebrated his try by pressing his thumbs and forefingers together in the shape of an 'M'. For most people it meant nothing. For the people of Minto it meant a lot.
Inu didn't expect he would be playing NRL quite as soon as he did and nor did his coach Michael Hagan. His talents, though, just couldn't be ignored.
"It probably happened a little sooner than we had planned," Hagan says. "Some of the feedback on Krisnan was that he could be like rocks one day and diamonds the next.
"But I would have to say his performances last year, and the level of consistency he showed, was the thing that really struck me about how he handled his first year.
"He was always renowned as being a little bit casual in his approach to things but I think he understands that he needs to prepare and train better to become a better player and he now does a lot of additional work on the training ground. Given what he's achieved in his first year I don't think there would be any real limits on what he could achieve as far as becoming a very good NRL and test player."
One thing Inu is still working on is re-adjusting to playing at centre. He played the first 10 of his 20 games there last season but switched to the wing outside Timana Tahu, who has converted to rugby union.
Hagan has already said he thinks Inu and Hayne, who won the Rookie of the Year award in 2006, can become the best centres in the game. While this is a big statement, few would be surprised if it eventuates.
"I grew up playing centres, wing, fullback so I wasn't too picky," Inu says. "But now I have the chance to play centres I'm going to try to cement that spot.
"You get more ball in attack and in defence you get to hit more players than you do on the wing or fullback."
It will also mean Inu comes in for more attention because he will have less room to move than on the wing but he doesn't seem to mind. After all, he has unparalleled confidence and, it seems, it has always been that way.
"He was a cocky kid," says Bernie Perenara, who was coach of the New Zealand A side when Inu played as a 17-year-old. "I remember after the first try we scored [in the 42-16 win over Australia A] I was talking to Tony Iro on the walkie talkie and I looked up and he was taking the goal kick. That wasn't his job. Luke Covell was our sharpshooter and was supposed to take all of our kicks."
Inu played fullback that day against a side that contained Willie Mason, Mark O'Meley, Trent Barrett, Matt Cooper and Scott Prince. Former Kiwis coach Brian McClennan took a close interest in that game, as well as a training run against his New Zealand side, and was so impressed he drafted Inu into last year's Anzac test despite a lack of experience.
McClennan said it was done very much with one eye on this year's World Cup but Inu was the best choice to replace the unavailable Brent Webb. He was superlative in the 30-6 defeat, with his performance best illustrated by the calm way he took a Darren Lockyer spiral bomb that would have had air traffic control momentarily worried about an unidentified flying object.
Inu looked like he was catching a ball down at the park in Minto.
"I don't really get nervous before a game," he confesses. "I don't know why. I don't think too much about it until kickoff or I'm actually out on the field. Then I'm ready to play.
"I wouldn't say I play with no fear, I just don't think too much about it. I just play what is in front of me. It might be my background. Growing up in church with all the support of my family around me, whether you're going to play good or bad doesn't really matter because they will always support you."
The church has always played a big part in Inu's life. As a devout Mormon, he doesn't touch alcohol, tobacco, coffee and even cola and there was a chance he would be lost to rugby league for a couple of years as he undertook missionary work.
Signing a new Eels contract committed him to the game until the end of 2010 and it was decided by Inu and his family that he could do more to spread the Word through his profile in rugby league than any missionary work.
He is still keen to go on a mission one day and may even follow in the footsteps of his father and become a bishop - but for now rugby league is his calling.
And that ought to make fans smile as widely as Inu does when he takes a kick at goal.
