IT’S A CRISP AUGUST morning at the historic North Sydney Oval when Mark Nawaqanitawase arrives for his Men’s Health cover shoot. The old ground is bathed in winter sunlight, the sky is an unbroken blue, the grass a verdant green beneath it. The grandstands throw long shadows across the field, and beyond the oval the city is already making its usual racket, though from here it feels distant and inconsequential. In other words, it’s the perfect day for a photo shoot.
Nawaqanitawase arrives dressed entirely in Under Armour. The brand’s new Bouncy Tee sits easily on his long, powerful frame, fitting him the way you’d expect on a man who looks like he never skips a workout. Nawaqanitawase has a physical presence. He seems larger in person than he does on television – and it’s not as if he looks small on screen. He’s broad through the shoulders, long through the limbs, but he appears relaxed. The athleticism is simply there, difficult to miss. Like an idling engine.
We take our seats in the Duncan Thompson Stand, overlooking the field. From here, the oval stretches out beneath us, enclosed by the wooden stands and the trees beyond them. Nawaqanitawase knows the ground well. While it hasn’t been used for an NRL game since 2005, he played Shute Shield rugby here for Eastwood almost a decade ago.
A few days before our shoot, Nawaqanitawase’s Sydney Roosters had beaten the Penrith Panthers, leapfrogging them into first place on the ladder. The finals are mere weeks away, and suddenly it feels like the premiership could be the Roosters’ to lose. Nawaqanitawase has started to entertain the idea of going out on top. “That’s the dream, right? It’d be very special,” he says, but isn’t getting ahead of himself. “We’ve still got a lot of hard work to do. There’s a lot of tough games still to come.”
Looking out over North Sydney Oval, it is tempting to imagine the younger Nawaqanitawase somewhere on the field below, playing a different code, looking towards the future without knowing what it might hold. Now, nearly ten years later, the path’s he’s followed has been anything but straight: he’s played union, league and sevens, been to the Olympics, played State of Origin and represented Australia across three disciplines. In the not-so-distant future, he’ll head back to union via a two-year contract with the Saitama Wild Knights in Japan, which he hopes will give him a shot at rejoining the Wallabies squad in time for the 2027 World Cup.
“Things have gone… unexpectedly,” he says. “New opportunities have come up and I’ve taken them because I thought they were the best decisions for my future. I still remember that I was just happy to get my first run with the Waratahs, now I’ve run out 40 times now for the Roosters; I’ve been to the Olympics. Life just goes on. You have to take these opportunities as they come.”
And take them he has. Nawaqanitawase is even unwilling to rule out a return to league someday – and, curiously, suggests trying his hand at soccer. But for all that has changed, Nawaqanitawase’s central proposition remains the same: give 100 per cent to whatever life throws at him.
I distinctly remember thinking Oh, crap when I heard that Nawaqanitawase was giving rugby league a crack and had signed with the Roosters. You see, I’m a fan of the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the Roosters’ hated rivals. And a marquee signing for them is a source of frustration for us. I held onto the hope that Nawaqanitawase might struggle to adapt to league and prove ineffectual. That hope was forlorn.
Nawaqanitawase was a revelation in his first full season in the NRL. He scored a gravity-defying aerial try on debut against the Rabbitohs, then finished his first season with 23 tries in as many games. In the last match of the regular season, he bagged a hat trick against the Rabbitohs to become the competition’s leading try scorer for the year (he laughs when I tell him I’m a Rabbitohs fan, but I don’t think it’s funny). He was selected for the Kangaroos’ tour of England and played in every match of the series. This year, the top-notch performances have kept on coming, earning him a State of Origin debut in which he helped steer New South Wales to a 2-1 series victory.
At the time of writing, Nawaqanitawase has 40 tries in 41 games for the Roosters. But it isn’t just the rate at which he’s scoring tries that has made the 25-year-old one of the NRL’s most threatening wingers, it’s the outrageous ways he scores them.
At 190 centimetres and around 100 kilograms, he has the proportions of someone designed in a lab to be a rugby winger. But the numbers don’t explain the elastic quality of his movement, the way he can seemingly hang in the air, or the remarkable body control that allows him to reach for balls other players can’t. He scores tries that make you wonder whether you saw what you thought you saw. In 2025, he scored the Dally M try of the season with an effort that needs to be seen to be believed.
Picture it: it’s round 11 against the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs. Nawaqanitawase receives a cut-out pass from fullback James Tedesco (who is about to get the easiest assist of his career) roughly 25 metres from the try line. He has some space, but it’s going to be closed quickly by Bulldogs’ five-eighth Matt Burton. Nawaqanitawase breaks Burton’s tackle, but it slows him down, and now Bulldogs’ fullback Connor Tracey is squarely in front of him and ready to tackle him out of bounds. In the millisecond between breaking out of Burton’s grasp and meeting Tracey’s tackle, Nawaqanitawase manages to get a foot on the ball, keeping it in the field of play while he hurtles after it from out of bounds. He slips back onto the field just before the corner post and, mere moments before the ball lands out of bounds, pulls it back in and grounds it.
Like I said, it needs to be seen to be believed.
It is perhaps the most unconventional route ever taken to score a try in the NRL. But then again, Nawaqanitawase doesn’t seem particularly interested in conventional career trajectories, either.
Nawaqanitawase first played rugby league before switching to union as a teenager. The decision wasn’t necessarily indicative of the path he wanted to follow, it was simpler than that. “I went to St. Patrick’s College in Strathfield, a rugby union school,” he says. “That was offered on Saturdays, and I chose it as my winter sport.”
He went from St. Patrick’s to the Shute Shield to the Waratahs to the Wallabies within the space of four years, debuting for the Wallabies at age 22. He made the squad for the 2023 Rugby World Cup and played in all four pool stage games, scoring two tries. Not long after, it was announced that Nawaqanitawase would make the switch to rugby league and had signed with the Roosters. (Oh, crap, I thought).
There’s a tendency to think of rugby league and rugby union as the same game differentiated by slightly different sets of rules. For an athlete crossing between them, however, the difference is enormous. “There was definitely an adjustment period,” Nawaqanitawase says. Not that you would know it by how well he has adapted. “It’s a whole different game. A lot of people think it’s practically the same, but it’s not. Whether it’s physically – like getting used to doing more running, more contact – or just the different rules, it takes a while to get around it.
“In league, the ball is actually in play for a lot longer than union,” he continues. “So you have to be really fit in terms of stamina, but you also have to be big enough and strong enough to take those hard runs early in the set, straight at the middles.”
Rugby league has required Nawaqanitawase to become a different kind of athlete. The game demands repeated acceleration and repeated contact. To prepare for it, he put in the work off the field, beginning with his diet.
“Maybe in my early days I wasn’t the best with my diet. But after a few years, you become a bit more professional,” he says. “I’ve gotten much better with it since joining the Roosters. The culture around the club is so good, and that has an influence on the playing group, even down to things like diet.”
In a locker room beneath North Sydney Oval, Nawaqanitawase is going through grooming and getting into his kit for the shoot, but the Bouncy Tee remains. He’s been an Under Armour ambassador for four years, but points out that he’d be wearing the brand’s gear even if he wasn’t obliged to. When I ask if Under Armour makes good stuff, he raises the modality to correct me. “The best,” he says.
There is, in a way, a fitting parallel between the Bouncy Tee and its wearer. The Bouncy Tee has been designed around versatility. It’s one shirt intended to work across the different parts of the day rather than demanding a separate outfit for every activity. It can be worn around the house, out socially, or during a workout.
The philosophy is simple: why have a different shirt for every part of your life when one good one can do all of it? Nawaqanitawase has approached his career in much the same way. Why be one thing? Why close off an opportunity before you know where it might take you? He’s become a kind of sporting Swiss Army knife, the rare athlete whose versatility isn’t simply a useful secondary trait but part of his identity.
When he signed with the Roosters, Nawaqanitawase was already (albeit inadvertently) hinting at an uncertain future. He signed a two-year contract, keeping his options open while signalling that his tenure in the NRL might not last. At the time, he says he didn’t yet know that he would eventually return to union, but the prospect of playing in the 2027 Rugby World Cup on home soil was already tantalising.
“I thought: There is a Rugby World Cup coming up, but I want to see what I can do in league.” The answer was quite a lot. But once he had proven himself and ticked some achievements off his bucket list, Nawaqanitawase’s thoughts returned to the looming world cup.
Next season he’ll head to Japan to play for the Saitama Wild Knights on a two-year deal. He has been there before and apparently liked it enough to live there, but the decision is more about opportunity than lifestyle. Thanks to Rugby Australia ditching the Giteau law in 2025, players no longer need to be contracted to Australian clubs, or to have made 60 caps and spent seven years in the Super League to be eligible for selection in the national team.
Japan, then, offers Nawaqanitawase a chance to readjust to union while also auditioning for a place in the Wallabies. “I think it’s the best spot for me to get an opportunity for the Rugby World Cup,” he says.
He won’t just walk back into Wallabies camp and he knows it. The team now has a considerably more stocked selection of outside backs than when Nawaqanitawase departed, with the emergence of Max Jorgensen and the arrival of Joseph-Aukuso Sua’ali’i. He acknowledges that he’s not guaranteed a place in the squad, but is self-assured enough to know he has the talent to re-establish himself as a regular.
“I’m confident I can get back into the team for the World Cup,” he says. “I just want to get back into the game and let the footy do the talking. Am I worried about not making it? No. I don’t think about it that way. All I think about is that I’m going to give it my all.”
Back in the Duncan Thompson Stand, the morning sun has moved slightly higher, Nawaqanitawase is looking out across the oval and, in a remarkably circular scene, remembering the player he was nearly a decade ago. This was once a place where he was trying to establish himself in rugby. Now he is one of Australian sport’s most accomplished hybrids, once again preparing to leave one code behind for another, in a career that has already taken several unexpected turns.
He has never really followed the obvious path. Which makes it almost impossible to predict what might happen next. Asked whether he plans to stick to union from now on, he laughs. “Man, I don’t know.” Then he begins imagining possibilities. “My whole career has been unexpected. In two years, who knows? I could decide to go and play soccer. How good was the World Cup? The next one’s in 2030, maybe I’ll push for that.”
He is joking, mostly. “Honestly, life changes so much, man. I’m trying to win a premiership this year. I’ll try to win the World Cup next year. And then we’ll see what happens.”
That is the Nawaqanitawase philosophy. Take the opportunities as they come and see where they lead. There is one constant: his effort. “I always give 100 per cent,” he says. “This doesn’t last forever, so why not go all-out while I can?”
He doesn’t need to know exactly what comes next. He does know that, whatever it is, he will give it his all.
Mark Nawaqanitawase’s full-body workout
This late in the season, Nawaqanitawase’s training load is lighter, but no less effective. “I would say my workouts at the moment are short, sharp and intense,” he says. Here’s the full-body workout he’s currently doing to maintain strength and condition his body for the rigours of the playing field.
Back squats – 4 sets of 10
Incline bench press – 4 sets of 10
Chin-ups – 4 sets of 10
Hamstring bridges and Copenhagen dips superset – 4 sets of 10 three-second holds for hamstring bridges, 4 sets of 10 (each side) for Copenhagen dips
Dumbbell Cuban press and dumbbell lateral raises superset – 4 sets of 10 for each move
Shop Mark Nawaqanitawase's training gear
Words: Cayle Reid
Photography: Rocket Weijers
Head of Brand: Ben Jhoty
Production Director: Rebecca Moore
Stylist: Kailee Waller
Video: Sahel Dupre-Virtamo
Grooming: Steph Lai
Design: Evan Lawrence and Krystal Hamady
Digi Op: Joshua Alexander
