Source :- THE AGE NEWS
It’s the question that has been fizzing around rugby league circles for the past two years, and has only grown louder at the business end of the season: what can’t Roosters superstar Mark Nawaqanitawase do?
Well, his mother has a few answers.
Cook a steak, for starters. Putting clothes in the washing machine remains a work in progress. Making the bed can apparently present its challenges, too.
There is nothing like the gentle ribbing of an adoring mother. And if anyone is qualified to explain the making of one of Australia’s most exciting footballers, it is Fiona Tovehi, who has spent 26 years watching her son turn almost anything he could get his hands on into a ball.
She’s also one of the few people allowed – or game enough – to take a cheeky dig at her son’s defensive capabilities.
“He’s not domesticated at all,” Tovehi says of her son, who still lives at home and hauls a bulging Roosters bag into the laundry after training each day.
“The kid has got it pretty good. He’s going to get a rude shock when he goes to Japan.”
Before his two-season sojourn in Japanese rugby, and a likely tilt with the Wallabies at next year’s Rugby World Cup, Nawaqanitawase has one rather significant piece of business left in rugby league.
An NRL grand final.
“I’m feeling chill,” Nawaqanitawase says ahead of Sunday’s clash against Newcastle.
It is the latest entry on an already ridiculous sporting CV: a Super Rugby debut in 2020; a Commonwealth Games berth in rugby sevens in Birmingham in 2022; a Wallabies debut against Italy in Florence later that year; a Rugby World Cup in France in 2023; a maiden Olympics in Paris in 2024; an NRL debut in September that year; a Kangaroos debut in late 2025; State of Origin series winner in 2026; and now one game away from becoming an NRL champion.
Yet to understand how Nawaqanitawase got here – the outrageous aerial skills, the hand-eye coordination, the ability to make the difficult look absurdly simple – you have to return to a backyard in Burwood.
There was always a ball in his hands: rugby, soccer, basketball – it hardly mattered. Getting him inside for bath time became a nightly battle.
His mother repeatedly told him he wasn’t allowed to play league. He did briefly, turning out for Concord-Burwood Wolves and Leichhardt Wanderers, before switching to rugby union in high school.
Even when the Roosters came calling in 2024, offering him the chance to walk away from the Waratahs and Wallabies, Tovehi gave her son the cold shoulder for two weeks.
It has become one of rugby league’s more spectacular backflips.
“I was so against it,” she says. “I tormented him. I kept saying to him, ‘No, you’re not going, too dangerous. You’re going to make a fool of yourself.’
“It’s a dream, a fairytale. I would have never dreamed he’s in an NRL grand final. League is made for my son.
“I actually thanked [Roosters coach] Trent Robinson last week. When he came to league, he couldn’t tackle; his defence was quite weak. But they’ve developed him to be an amazing athlete.”
But there was a moment, during a “shocking” time for the family, when Tovehi realised her son had made the right decision to join the Roosters.
As Nawaqanitawase prepared to transition to rugby league following his Olympic campaign in Paris, his stepfather, Aisake, died after a battle with cancer.
“It was very hard for Mark,” Tovehi says. “My husband was always there for him and mentoring him. Rugby league was an unknown journey that we were both embarking on without him.”
Then, at Aisake’s funeral, two unexpected faces appeared. Jared Waerea-Hargreaves, the fearsome Roosters enforcer, arrived unannounced in a suit. Club great and board member Luke Ricketson was there, too. They had known Nawaqanitawase for a matter of days.
John Georges, a close family friend and the father of one Nawaqanitawase’s best mates, remembers Tovehi beginning to “shake and cry” when she saw Waerea-Hargreaves.
“Jared grabbed Fiona and said, ‘I know you are worried, but I will personally look after your son’,” Georges recalls.
“The Roosters sent flowers to their house. Fiona was just bewildered. What ultimate respect to attend that funeral.”
For a mother who had spent two weeks trying to stop her son joining the Roosters, it changed everything.
“I couldn’t ask for more than that,” says Tovehi of Waerea-Hargreaves’s gesture. “That day was a bit of a blur. Every time I see Jared, he always asks me how I am going. He’s a gentle giant.
“I’ve done this whole league journey without my husband. As sad as it’s been – and so hard – it’s distracted me 100 per cent. I always say to Mark, he’s watching from above and he’s so proud.
“The whole world would know that his boy was playing in an NRL grand final. We’ve never looked back. It’s a beautiful club.”
The affection runs both ways.
“She’s a beautiful person,” Roosters supremo Nick Politis says via text message from Tokyo, before flying back to Sydney for the grand final.
Nawaqanitawase has been bombarded with media requests this week. Ask him how he plucks a football out of the sky, produces an outrageous offload or sees something on a field that others don’t, and there is rarely a grand explanation. Talking about himself is not his forte.
But there is one Nawaqanitawase-related question that fascinates him.
How would you make a clone?
“I actually think about this all the time. How can I get my kid to be like me?” Nawaqanitawase says.
“Upbringing is a big thing and what you were exposed to as a kid. We all lived in the same street and just played so many sports every day. They just said go outside and play. Mum definitely encouraged it.
“I was very fortunate that I had a loving family.”
The making of Mark Nawaqanitawase, it turns out, was hardly sophisticated.
There were no specialist coaches, no carefully curated development programs, no childhood spent being shuttled between representative squads.
There was a backyard in Burwood, a seemingly endless supply of balls and a revolving door of brothers, stepbrothers, cousins and neighbours.
And there was an auntie across the road who probably would have appreciated a sleep-in.
“It would drive her insane because in the morning she could hear Mark kicking the ball against the fence or bouncing a basketball,” Tovehi says.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know how he does it. From when he was little, he played everything. He was just forever with a ball.
“He’s a very determined person and believes in himself. He knows he can do things. He just watches what happens on the field and then, bang, he’s off. He’s a freak. He’s shocked me what he has done.”
For every kid who didn’t make rep teams growing up, Nawaqanitawase’s path is worth remembering. For all his freakish exploits, it wasn’t until after school that he really started getting noticed.
There was no procession through elite junior representative teams or indication that the kid driving his auntie mad would one day play two football codes for Australia.
Two Johns, however, saw something.
John Georges first spotted him at 11. A Roosters tragic, Georges would later get Nawaqanitawase into a Tricolours jersey for a handful of sessions with the club’s under-17 development squad in 2016.
“He was a very outdoor person, and he’s got that Fijian dynamic,” Georges says.
“I said to the Roosters, ‘He’s a lay-down misère. You’ve got to have a look at this student’. He went straight in and they loved him.”
No contract eventuated.
The other John was Manenti. The long-time Eastwood rugby coach had kept an eye on Nawaqanitawase since his days at St Patrick’s College in Strathfield. When the Waratahs offered the teenager little more than an opportunity – a two-month train-and-trial deal in late 2018 – he turned it into a Junior Wallabies jersey the next year.
A few years later, Manenti would coach Nawaqanitawase at the Paris Olympics.
“It was really nice to see him switch over and do well,” Manenti says. “He’s going to put bums on seats, no matter which code he is playing.
“It is a great story. Athletically, he’s quite a specimen. He’s probably had time for his body to grow and develop. He was always good at basketball and soccer. He’s one of those guys around the group who is always goofing around with a ball.”
The two Johns sat next to each other when Nawaqanitawase made his Roosters debut in 2024.
Did it almost not happen?
According to Georges, South Sydney made an eleventh-hour attempt to lure Nawaqanitawase across Anzac Parade when he was all but committed to the Roosters. Nawaqanitawase was a Wests Tigers fan growing up but fell in love with what the Roosters offered.
“We indoctrinated him. He was playing for the Roosters and no one else,” Georges says.
“He told his manager, ‘If the Georges find out I’m talking to Souths, I’ll be blacklisted. There’s not a chance I can even talk to them. It’s the Roosters or nothing’.”
The irony is the person who needed the most convincing was Nawaqanitawase’s mother.
While she can’t predict what her son will do next – he is off contract in mid-2028 – she knows things have changed forever.
Her son’s anonymity has vanished, for a start. Going to a restaurant isn’t quite what it used to be. Even sitting outside the family home with his mother can result in passing cars slowing down when someone spots him.
“He’s unpredictable,” Tovehi says. “I know that there’s a lot of attention around him, but I think he can handle it. It’s been magnified now. He literally can’t go anywhere. Not even to the chemist.
“I just want him to be happy.”
Sunday is a big day for the family. After that, there is another frontier for one of Australian sport’s most versatile athletes to conquer: the kitchen.
“I got sick a few weeks ago and he had to cook one night. He tried to cook me a steak, god love him,” Tovehi says with a laugh.
“I’m just lucky I’ve had him for 26 years.
“I often say to him, ‘I’m grateful you chose me to be your mum’. I always text Mark and tell him to keep chasing his dreams.
“Believe me, his dream will come true if he wins this grand final.”
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