Power Play

There was always the chance that Sonny Bill Williams would be special. Old-timers remember his maternal grandfather, Bill Woolsey, as one of the toughest men to wear the New Zealand rugby league jersey. Williams, who's part Samoan, started playing at the age of eight for Auckland's Mt. Albert club and was soon turning heads with precocious displays of power and skill. He was in primary school when spotted by a scout working for the Australian National Rugby League club Canterbury, which brought him over to Sydney's southwest when he was 15. Three years later, Williams was an NRL star and New Zealand's youngest-ever Test footballer. One of the game's most astute observers, Phil Gould, called him the "Messiah of rugby league."

Williams has been a stellar, if injury-prone, performer in the years since, blending strength and finesse in a way the game has rarely seen. He became bigger news than ever July 26, when, in the run-in to next month's NRL finals and without a word to anyone at Canterbury, he walked out on his club and sport to sign a new, richer deal with the French rugby union club Toulon. Pursued by Canterbury for breach of contract, Williams, 23, has settled out of court with his former employer and insists his rugby league days are over.

Williams is one of a host of Polynesian players who are shaking up a century-old game in both Australia and New Zealand — and transforming rugby union as well. As recently as the 1980s, players of Maori or Pacific Island descent were rare in the elite ranks of union and league in Australia, and well outnumbered in New Zealand. Broadly speaking, union, amateur until 1995, was the exclusive domain of affluent private-school alumni, while league was the professional game of the white working class. The few Maori or Islander players who broke into the latter were often racially abused by spectators and ostracized by teammates.

It's now clear those players were pioneers. The current crop of Maori and Islander players (the sons mainly of poor Tongan and Samoan immigrants) forms a quarter of the ranks of the NRL. To put that in perspective, a group that has a 1 in 200 representation in the Australian populace has a 1 in 4 presence in the country's premier winter sports competition. It's a similar, if less striking, picture in New Zealand, where Maori and Islanders comprise 17% of the population, yet of late have made up more than half the players in the country's five provincial rugby sides. The trend is set to accelerate. In Australia, the proportion of Polynesian players in high-level junior rugby league teams is even higher than it is in the NRL.

Some fans think the Polynesian presence has made both rugby codes more exciting. Were the NRL's Islander contingent to up and leave overnight, "the game would be totally lost," says Richard Becht, an official with the NRL's New Zealand Warriors. "I guess we'd always have enough numbers, but the competition would become a throwback. In the power factor, in the entertainment factor, it would be markedly inferior." But nothing about sport is as simple as it looks. In New Zealand, where rugby is the national passion, the rise in Polynesian participation appears to be at least one reason for the flight from the game of large numbers of comparatively slight boys, to the point where more New Zealanders now play soccer than the brutal 15-man game. Driving on Saturdays around Hawkes Bay, on New Zealand's North Island, the former New Zealand rugby league international Kevin Tamati notes that New Zealanders of European descent are all but absent from the rugby fields. "It saddens me," says Tamati, a Maori, of the exodus.

Crunch and Run
The polynesian surge has forced coaches and administrators to review old habits. As a young player, Don Feltis idolized champions of the 1950s and '60s such as Clive Churchill and Johnny Raper. Nowadays, at 73, Feltis is immersed in the new wave as the boss of junior league at the Penrith Panthers, an NRL club west of Sydney where close to half the youngsters are of Polynesian descent. It's a realm very different from league of old, in which the Islander players routinely gather to pray before matches; in which a coach couldn't connect with his church-going, 14-year-old Polynesian charges until he realized he was offending them with his swearing; and in which youths who earn their first big contract will buy their parents a new home before acquiring one for themselves.

While the Polynesian influx is enriching junior league, it's also raising tricky issues. It would be hard to find anyone who would dispute that Polynesian kids grow fast. In football, this means they tend to be bigger than their white peers at a stage of life — seven to 17 — when players lack the technical refinements that can neutralize differences in bulk. "The small kid can't help his size, and the bigger kid has done nothing wrong either," the former New South Wales Rugby League development officer Frank Barrett said recently, "but as an administrator it breaks my heart to see a kid weighing 35 kg get flattened by an opponent who weighs 80."

Daniel Penese and Willie Isa, both Auckland-born to Samoan parents, are Penrith teammates in the National Youth Competition, a nursery for the NRL. "Me and Willie were always stronger than the other kids," says Penese, who'd scatter opponents with a cattle-prod-like fend. Both say they were targeted by referees and implored by parents to take it easy. Isa contends there are two distinct sides of him: the aggressive, ultra-competitive footballer and the otherwise gentle man. Young Willie would crunch his fine-boned foes, then approach them after the game to say sorry. But the smaller boys had trouble reconciling the two Willies and rarely replied. "It's a Polynesian thing," says Isa of the fever that grips him on match days. "We love the physical side. It's like a war. You can't let anyone beat you."