Read Born to Fight for Free Online Page B

great upcoming league players knocking around Auckland at the time; one of them was Ruben Wiki, and another was Mark. Mark played in the front row, ran like a winger and hit like a freight train. He could have been one of the greats in the NRL, I got no doubt about that. As awesome as he could have been at league, that guy was born to fight. They say that fighters are made, not born, and that’s true for everyone I’ve ever seen, except Mark.
    DAVE FUIMOANA (FRIEND)
    It had only been a few months, but when I got out of Waikeria I felt like I had crossed some kind of threshold. I felt older. I felt tougher. I felt less like a boy and more like a man, for better or for worse.
    In prison, I met the real
hombres
. Not the bored shoe stealers and the drunken joyriders I’d hung out with up to then, but the real-deal criminals – the dudes who did the heists and the shakedowns, the guys who sold the drugs and stuffed people in car boots.
    When I got out of prison, no one was going to tell me what to do. Before prison, the group of fellas I’d rolled with had me as their heavy-fisted lackey, but now I refused to be anyone’s bitch.
    Prison had put me over a hump with my dad, too. After my release I lived at home for a while, but he didn’t have the power he’d had before. He, like most other blokes then, didn’t have the stomach for stepping to me anymore.
    My mum was almost a stranger to me then, too, but I do remember one day when she stopped me with concern in her eyes and said, ‘Son, I heard about that bank that got robbed this week. Was it your gang that did it?’
    I laughed right in her face. She really didn’t know shit about me. Robbing banks was not ripping off shit-box cars and belting other teenagers. I went to leave, still laughing, but she grabbed me on my way out.
    ‘If it was, you have to give me some of that money, right?’
    That’s when the laughter really took off – peals and peals of it. I do feel sorry for my mum, and on my mostgenerous days even my dad. They never learned to be good adults, no one ever taught them. They lived a hardscrabble life, and it sent them wild in their own way. It’s not an excuse, but at least it made sense.
    I enjoyed my new post-prison status, but I also came out craving some of the structure I’d experienced inside. In prison, I’d been put to work at a nearby dairy farm, and even though it was tough, stinky work, I got a lot out of it. I needed dates on the calendar to remember, something to strive towards. I took a couple of regular jobs in that period. I worked at a Mobil petrol station, and I also started to take my rugby a little more seriously, joining my first club side, the Mangere East Hawks.
    As I described earlier, when I played rugby at school I played like a dickhead, disrespecting the rules of the game and the other players. Now I understood that only within the parameters of the game could I really test myself. That’s what I wanted to do. I was good, and now I wanted to know how good.
    I played in the forwards, and while there were a lot of big, strong Polynesian blokes in that competition – including future heavyweight boxing legend David Tua, who also went to my school – I found myself pretty mobile compared to a lot of them.
    After prison, I also started to generate a little bit of rep interest. I was picked for the Auckland under-nineteen rugby league team, and there was some talk of me getting a start in the Junior Kiwis, who were touring England later in the year. That would have been an honour, and I hadn’t had any of those in my life at that point. Even now, with more years living in Australia than New Zealand, an Australian family and Samoan blood in my veins, I still consider myself a New Zealander. No matter what happens in life I will always be a Kiwi, and being picked to represent that country in rugby league would have been a big deal to me.
    They didn’t want me, though. I started hearing that the coaches had found out I was