AS 19-year-old Bulldogs rookie Arana Taumata ran out onto the SFS to warm up before last night's match, his father took a deep breath to stop himself from choking up.

"It's almost like seeing a dream come true," Arana Taumata snr, a political journalist with TV New Zealand, said as he watched his son listen attentively to some pre-match advice from Sonny Bill Williams.

"The whole family have been dreaming of this day and to see my son standing out there next to Sonny Bill Williams getting a last-minute pep talk off an icon like that is just amazing."

Taumata snr had flown from New Zealand to watch his son's NRL debut, the first time he had seen him play since 2005, when the boom five-eighth joined the Broncos.

But ever since Taumata, nicknamed AJ, graduated to first grade in Wellington at the age of 14, his father knew he was capable of the feats that saw him run 70 metres to score in the 30th minute.

He even showed enough cheek to throw a dummy to Williams before slicing through a gap in the Roosters defence.

"He's got plenty of confidence," Taumata snr noted. "There's a lot of big Pacific Island boys that played in the premier competition over in Wellington, and that always worried me when I used to say goodbye to him, but he just lives for rugby league and he has alway backed himself.

"It was a really tough decision for us as parents, but he really wanted to be challenged so he started playing senior football at 14 years of age. Obviously we were really apprehensive about it but he did really well, he held his own and when he was at Wainui High the Broncos came over with a delegation led by Wayne Bennett.

"That year what Wayne Bennett wanted to do was take the best senior player and the best junior player and he selected John Te Reo as the senior player and AJ was the junior player."

Before then, however, Taumata was almost lost to rugby union after showing enough promise to earn a scholarship to Rotorua Boys High.

That he didn't adapt to life at a boarding school led him back to the code he began playing as a four-year-old in the Wellington rugby league stronghold of Wainuiomata, famous for producing Tana Umaga, Piri Weepu, John Lomax and Paul Whatuira among others.

"He got a bit of a scholarship with the Broncos, they flew him over to Brisbane for a camp and he got a bit of footy gear but the following year the Broncos expressed an interest in him going over there full-time because they were also concerned, as we were as parents, about him playing senior footy in Wellington, so he went over there a week after his 16th birthday," Taumata snr said.

Having such a young son trying to make a career for himself in another country was as tough for his parents, who had seven other children, as it was for Taumata himself.

Inevitably, there were problems and like Te Reo, he didn't last at the Broncos.

After a season at Sydney Roosters, he was also shown the door and it has been only recently that the Bulldogs became convinced he had the attitude to make it.

His debut last night may not have been a winning one but he showed plenty of promise and left his father proud.

"When he rang me on Monday night and said I'm making my first-grade debut on Friday night and I could hear the pride in his voice," Taumata snr said. "I almost had a tear in my eye and certainly his mother shed a few tears, it was an amazing feeling.

"There have been highs and lows. The worrying thing for us always has been that he's over here and we're back in New Zealand but I'll give it to my son - he came over here when he was 16-years-old, it was a big city in a foreign country and there were hairy moments along the way.

"But I'm just glad that he's stuck to it and finally got this opportunity. It's his debut match, it is an achievement to play first grade at 19 but I just hope it's the first of many more games."