Scotty Stevenson: NPC outsiders forge a brotherhood in the north

Scotty Stevenson goes down memory lane in Northland as he meets with the Taniwha, who are ending a season with a shot at the national title for the very first time.

The tar seal gives way to dusty brown gravel a few kilometres down Mangapai Caves Rd, which I should have expected. Why should it be any different to the thousands of other roads in these parts, winding their way to places no one goes, unworthy of modernity’s lick of bitumen. I’ve turned off State Highway 1 to revisit my youth, such as I can remember it. There are no other cars to pass, none moving at least, but I am happy about the solitude. Time travellers prefer it that way.

It is late afternoon and the sun has advanced well west, deepening the forested valleys, and accenting the green hilltops with a spring shimmer. I am making my way back to Auckland after an afternoon spent with the Northland rugby team, otherwise known as the Taniwha, AKA the Tanis, AKA the Whas. They are preparing to play their first topflight NPC final against Canterbury on Monday, and my time with them has shaken awake the child in me.

Puffy grey clouds make their way east, lugging a cargo of grey and the threat of overnight rain. The westerly is warm for this time of year up here in the winterless north, and the grass is, for the colour buffs among you, a lush Pantone 7740 C. I was born into this part of Northland. Delivered in Whangārei before being carted to the old schoolteacher’s house in the Springfield Valley to share my first few months with Mum, Dad, my older brother, and a calf called Babalu.

This was small farm territory, back when you could make a buck on a small farm, and the small farms were found down roads that bore the names of the farmers: The Salmons, the Whittles, the Yoviches, the Hewletts and Prices and Knaggses. The primary school rolls recorded the same names, as did the local college. Our friends lived on the roads named after their grandparents. I drove past them all, remembering the kids that grew up on those farms, down those roads, marvelling at how easy it is to recall childhood moments when you take even the shortest break from adulting.

I’ve thought a lot about the north lately. I haven’t lived there in any permanent sense since I was 15 because I was shipped off to board at school in Auckland, alongside a bunch of other Northlanders, and got on with life in the big smoke after that. Three decades and change have passed now, but Bream Bay still calls me back, that old sandy Siren. My favourite view in New Zealand is the one that greets me when I crest the Brynderwyn Hills: Bream Head stretches out like a crocodile in the distance, the wide, blue bay opens up below. The air is thick with salt, and I am five minutes from Mum’s pantry.

I’ve thought about the north because Northland – the rugby team – has brought me home. For many years as a broadcaster and a journalist I considered announcing an allegiance to my province more provocative than professional but the NPC, I’ve come to realise, draws you in and draws you back. I think of the names I have worked alongside: Grant Nisbett is as Wellingtonian as they come, Tony Johnson, a Tasman man. Richard Turner and Ian Smith remain to this day Hawke's Bay boys. The list goes on. We all have our places. I am a Northlander. They are my team.

The NPC is like that. It sends you headlong down memory lane. For me that’s afternoons on the bank at Okara Park, with my dad and my Pop, or trying my luck with my mate Marty, sneaking into the crumbling old grandstand if the weather turned gnarly (which it often did), then running onto the field at fulltime searching for a scribble from Warren Johnston and Ziggy Seymour, Con Barrell and Kamo Jones. The NPC, and specifically the success of the Taniwha, sent me on the slow road home to Auckland this week, through the Mangapai backroads, onto Ormiston, then Shoemaker, and into Waipū, before rejoining SH1 and leaving home again.

Earlier in the day I had arrived at Northland Rugby HQ where team manager Brad Te Haara had hustled me into the kitchen for a coffee. The Taniwha had the speaker on full blast. There wasn’t a machine in the gymnasium that wasn’t been treated like it owed someone money. Players were hunched over deadlifts, hanging from bars, sprawled out on the floor with bands attached to various body parts. I made a cuppa and wandered through, an insider outsider, a Northlander. We were there to film some clips ahead of our grand final broadcast on Monday. I was there to work and rather fittingly had wandered into business time.

It’s fresh territory for the Taniwha, to end a season with a shot at the national title for the very first time. It’s already been a season to remember. Northland’s biggest moment of the year, or any year in the last 48 years, came in Christchurch back in August when they put 36 points on the Cantabs and came home with the Ranfurly Shield. The Log o' Wood barely spent a minute at HQ as it toured the province. Asked how he kept tabs on New Zealand Rugby’s most treasured taonga, Te Haara said, "To be honest, I put an Air Tag on it."

The Tanis defended the Shield against Tasman in front of more than 16,000 at Semenoff Stadium, and they did it again against Waikato. They were odds on favourites to keep it for the summer, but Jimmy Tupou and his Steelers came to Whangārei and pinched the bloody thing. They posted videos dancing on the main street in Waipū – my town – with the shield on the road trip back to Pukekohe. How very dare they!

The Shield came and went but the wins kept coming. If their brief but colourful shield reign had brought the fans back, their abundant toughness and ‘defend the pa’ attitude encouraged them to stay. A home quarterfinal was the next big milestone – again a first for the union, as was a home semifinal featuring a haka framed by an incoming southerly front and a face-off with Otago that threatened to last into next season and beyond before referee Paul Williams managed to intervene. The Northlanders accounted for both their playoff opponents, outlasting the Mako and overpowering the Razorbacks.

I sat and spoke to the players about what the province means to them and what the players mean to each other. What did they think about when they looked at the men alongside them in this team? One word was mentioned more than any other: character. I liked the description, and its myriad definitions. A team of characters, more like it, each able to be themselves under the banner of a collective, aspirational goal. Head coach Ryan Martin told me that they had spoken at the start of the season of winning the competition. "Outside the group people would probably laugh at that, but inside, we were deadly serious."

Deadly serious is not how one would describe James Mullan, or Olly Ryan or either of the Rush brothers. The latter two whakapapa to the north but Mullan and Ryan have found their way to Te Tai Tokerau from Christchurch. These days they’re the self-styled 'Marsden Mob' making themselves at home on the beaches of Bream Bay as if they had been born in the dunes and spent their lives catching snapper. This is the brotherhood of the north; the deal they have made with each other and with themselves. This is not a place for mercenary attitudes; you either go all in, or you may as well go home. Better still: this is your home.

Part of that deal means staying true to who you are, even when that means being one thing off the field and quite another on it. You could never accuse the Northland pack of being pushovers, but sit down with Terrell Peita, for instance, and you are met with a considered, softly spoken philosopher. Stand in front of him on a rugby field and you’ll likely come off second best. They have forged a brotherhood, built upon embracing contrast.

It’s a land of contrasts, the north. For those of us who grew up in the south of the province, the far north was as much a mystery to us as it would have been to any foreigner. Bream Bay was the hatch through which Northlanders escaped and visitors arrived. We grew up closer to Auckland than Cape Reinga. The Hokianga, to where one of my family lines was anchored only existed to me through the stories of my Nana. Contrasts: a province of old and new, of consent and dissent, of national significance and national indifference, of weekend beach houses and entrenched deprivation. In Waipoua Forest, Tāne Mahuta pushed apart his parents and gave us the world of light. That’s a divisive act we can all get around. Meanwhile, in Wellington they politicised the road north, labelling it the 'Holiday Highway', largely forgetting that us Northlanders also occasionally drove south.

These Northlanders will fly south this weekend, to take on a provincial side for whom success is second nature. No side since Auckland in 2018 has beaten Canterbury twice in a season. Canterbury are reigning champions, perennial winners, overwhelming favourites, stacked with All Blacks and expectation. The Taniwha are the story of the season, the proverbial battlers, the smell on the oily rag.

They’re my guys, though. And when I left them that afternoon, I was pining for endless summer days on Ruakaka Beach, and roast dinners at Nana and Pop’s in Whangārei. I left them and I left Whangārei and I turned off SH1 and onto the gravel backroads of the Bream Bay hill country. I parked at the top of a ridgeline and let the warm westerly ruffle the grass and send cloud shadows dancing over the hills. I may have left Northland a long time ago, but it never left me. It took this team to remind me of that, and to give me a gift worth more than any title: the fondest memories of my childhood. I am grateful to them for that.

The 2026 Hilux NPC Final between Northland and Canterbury is live and free on TVNZ+ or TVNZ 1 on Monday at 2.10pm.