Tevita Pangai Junior on the hunt for Canterbury, with his career at the crossroads

As Tevita Pangai Junior prepares to open his season for Canterbury on Sunday against Parramatta, there are certain games that rush to mind — the Bulldogs prop has that affect.

The first is a match in 2018 against North Queensland, back when a Broncos-Cowboys match was little less than a Queensland civil war.

Pangai is a hunter and the most dangerous ‘game’ back then was Jason Taumalolo, who put the Cowboys on his shoulders the previous season and carried them to the grand final from eighth spot.

Pangai has said many times how much he respects and admires Taumalolo, a longtime Tongan teammate. But, on that night in 2018, he played like he wanted to destroy Taumalolo and the rest of the Cowboys, or die trying.

Nobody had done it before and few have done it since – except for Pangai, who did it again the very next season.

Then, in 2021, bound for Canterbury, Pangai stopped in at Penrith for six weeks that have vanished into the pandemic memory hole. The Panther’s premiership win that year was a triumph of desperation that came somewhat against the odds; Penrith were underdogs against Melbourne for the preliminary final and were battered and bruised through the back half of the year.

To beat the Storm — sailing with 21 wins from their past 22 matches — Penrith needed a spark and Pangai provided it. He is a player who has always understood that on the field, nobody gives it to you; you have to take it.

Pangai only played six games for Penrith. In that prelim, the finest hour of the club’s golden era, he only played 16 minutes and hurt his calf, to miss the grand final.

But in the opening exchange he took it to the Storm, hunted them down and knocked them around, and found a crack in the purple wall by getting up close and personal.

It changed the game from the typical run-and-gun footy of that time into trench warfare, which is a battle Penrith can always win and haven’t stopped winning since.

Pangai didn’t clog the stat sheet in either of these matches — that’s never quite been his go. Instead, he makes big plays that you remember, and leaves no room for smaller ones. That’s become Pangai’s signature, for better and for worse — and we do mean, for worse.

He’s a dream player, but dreams aren’t perfect. The two games above were a showcase of everything Pangai can do when he wants to. There are other matches, or even parts of matches, like that in his career, but not as many as anybody would like. The moments where he touches greatness have been exceptions rather than the norm.

There were enough off-field incidents for Brisbane to decide he wasn’t worth the trouble.

There were injuries, particularly to his enormous hamstrings.

There were the other games you remember, the ones where Pangai lost his way and made mistakes, or didn’t find anybody to hunt and watched on as the result slipped away, or when he made foolish, hot-headed lapses of discipline.