A cult hero amongst rugby league terraces on both sides of the world, Tawera Nikau has seldom talked about the two major incidents that shaped his and family’s life forever in the early 2000s.
Whilst plying his trade for Warrington, Nikau lost his wife, Letitia, to suicide in 2001, before a motorbike accident in 20023 left the former Melbourne Storm and Cronulla Sharks star in hospital.
Nikau was left with a choice: face 12 to 18 months in hospital to repair his shattered leg or amputate.
With Nikau’s two kids, Heaven-Leigh and Tyme, waiting at home, Tawera asked doctors to remove his leg – a decision which would enable him to return home in just two weeks.
“I drive past the cemetery every day where my wife is buried. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about what happened,” Nikau told the Daily Telegraph.
“After losing my wife, losing half a leg was nothing. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. The quality of life you ultimately enjoy isn’t determined by what has happened to you, but by your attitude towards it, and what you decide to do about it.”
Nikau, for the first time, delves deeper into that horrific day back in 2001.
“I had gone to pick my son up from school – he was at cricket training. I came back home and it had just gone dark but I noticed the light was on in the garage,” Nikau said. “I went around the back to turn the light off and my wife had taken her life. It was the most horrific thing you could ever experience. He (Tyme) didn’t see her, he didn’t.
“It was very traumatic and challenging, bringing up two young children at the time. It was the hardest thing I have ever been through in my life.
“You go through this whole rollercoaster of emotions about what happened – anger, guilt, frustration. For me, it was about trying to get my head around why.
“It came on the back of playing in the grand final for Melbourne. I had gone to England and signed a big deal, was playing at the highest level, captained New Zealand Maori in the 2000 World Cup, everything was perfect, and then all of a sudden your whole world gets taken away from you.
“Letitia was a beautiful mother. My children didn’t want for anything, they had a beautiful lifestyle, travelled the world, so it was hard for them to be bought up without a mum. I was in a dark hole. Losing someone through suicide is tough, but adversity makes you stronger.
“I was lucky because my Warrington coach, (Australian-born) Darryl Van de Velde, who passed away earlier this year, helped me and got some counselling, which got me through it. I am forever grateful to Darryl.”
Letitia, Tawera reveals, had a difficult relationship with her parents whom came to visit just a fortnight before her death.
“I was in Spain with Warrington and her parents had come over for a couple of weeks while I was away. There was something (that happened) in the past. She had a bit of a falling out with her parents,” Nikau said.
“I haven’t got to the bottom of it but some of the stuff with her parents came back (to her) when her mum and dad came over. When I got back to England, she had kicked her parents out and said she didn’t want to see them again.
“I think that triggered some bad things that happened in the past. I told her not to worry about it and that her parents had gone but I hadn’t taken much notice when I went to pick my son up.
“This was 2001 – 23 years ago and people didn’t talk much about depression and suicide. It was all swept under the carpet. I didn’t realise until after it happened that she had suffered from that.
“I came back home to New Zealand for a little while after it happened. Because Letitia was also my manager, she managed my footy career the whole way through, I had to go and finish that contract (at Warrington). That was about honouring my wife. After that last year at Warrington, I never played again.”
Nikau played 53 NRL games for Melbourne and 61 for Cronulla in a four-year period Down Under before heading to England for a further 259 matches for Warrington and Castleford.
The rangy loose-forward was also capped 19 times for New Zealand.
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