IN the small, tough towns of Patea, Taranaki (population 1143) and Kaitaia (5200), there were no rugby league teams. But the kids in Patea, a fading meatworks town, liked league because they liked Sonny Bill Williams. ''We all tried offloads and shoulder charges on the concrete at break time,'' says Elijah Taylor.
Taylor moved to Kaitaia in his early teens to live with his dairy-farming father, rising early to milk cows. ''I was going nowhere,'' he says. And yet last month he returned to the Northland peninsula to present a local league trophy named in his honour and talked about dreams.
Dreams, and hard work to realise them, are Taylor's story.''League was my dream and I wasn't going to let it go,'' he says. It's summed up by the screensaver on his iPhone, which reads, needlessly: ''Put some work in.''
On his school holidays in Auckland, where his mother lived, Taylor heard of the legendary St Paul's College - national champions for 15 of the past 18 years, alma mater of Stacey Jones - and knew he wanted to study there.
''I've seen plenty of kids come in here and say they want to be good at football,'' says principal and first XIII coach Mark Rice, who enrolled Taylor for his final two years of high school. It was a culture shock, not least because he was one of five Maoris on a mainly Polynesian roll.
Rice, who is not easily impressed, found himself immediately impressed by Taylor - as a good student, good kid. He first noticed his playing ability when he watched him, in the school's rugby team, dispossess the opposing five-eighth and run untouched to score. In his second year, Warriors coach Tony Iro told Rice that Taylor would be a future first-grade captain.
When the Warriors signed Taylor, he had played just 15 games of rugby league. They picked him straight from a national secondary schools semi-final. By chance, I was at that game, saw recruitment boss Dean Bell, and asked him who he was watching. It was almost a rhetorical question - even a league novice would have nominated the St Paul's No. 13.
This seamless journey to first grade was halted in 2009, when Taylor tore a hamstring four days before his debut against the Gold Coast. In 2010, at the final training session before the final pre-season trial, Taylor stepped sideways, and his knee collapsed. The physio Jude Spiers jogged over and said: ''Oh, I think that's your season.''
I spent time with Taylor during his long, solitary recovery from a torn anterior cruciate ligament; he would drive up from south Auckland to a deserted Mt Smart and walk slow loops of the playing field, head down, iPod on, his mix of old-school hip hop the only company.
''You end up talking to yourself,'' he told me. ''You have so many conversations. But you think, actually, life is not so bad. It puts life into perspective. I can play again. It could've been an injury that stopped me ever playing again. I thought about that, and thought why am I complaining? My dad is on a dairy farm, up at 4am, not home until 5pm, but I get paid way more than him. Why am I complaining?''
That it wasn't the end of his season - he returned to skipper the Warriors' under-20 team to the premiership - was down to attitude. Taylor worked harder than he was told to and kept working even when he didn't need to. He's an unusual young player: without fail, he will look you in the eye, shake you by the hand. As Warriors prop Jake Lillyman says: ''He's absolute testament to what hard work can do for someone. For a young bloke, he's definitely the most professional player I've seen. Every success he's had, he's earned.''
In part, his approach is down to the Pinnacle Program, a selective mentoring scheme for rising athletes with leadership skills. ''We do very deep psychological profiling with the guys we work with and he rates as a very sincere individual, serious in the sense of committing himself and seeing it through,'' says the Pinnacle chief executive, Ian Miles. ''He's a natural leader. The really top athletes have special stuff going on off the track to be able to perform consistently well on the track, and he has those qualities in bucketloads.''
Taylor, after a superb debut NRL season, , looks back now and says: ''It builds your character, stuff like that. You can show how much fight you've got in you. And it makes it a lot sweeter when you win something. Because you've done the hard yards, it makes victory feel even better.
Has it been worth it? ''It hasn't come easy. I have worked really hard for it. I have worked through all the disappointments. And mate, if you had asked me that question two weeks ago [when dropped for the preliminary final against the Tigers], I wouldn't have been happy. I am now.''
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