His world view is famously built on centre-right common sense, with little time for losers and dreamers. Which makes his undying love for the Warriors all the more baffling to this fellow supporter.

Hello, my name is Pete, and I am a New Zealand Warriors fan.

Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that – I was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and one of my special interests is the Australian Rugby League competition (especially the period from 1989-1994, aka The Golden Age). As a kid I would use my pocket money to purchase Big League magazine each week. There were other, glossier rugby league weeklies, but Big League was the only title which contained complete team lists for every club’s team playing in the weekend ahead. This was absolute gold to an undiagnosed autistic 12-year-old with minimal friends and maximum spare time. At my peak I could easily name all couple-hundred players in an edition, and was obsessed with following the game from across the Tasman. 

So, when the Auckland Warriors appeared in 1995 I was in. Now I could memorise all the players on a team based in the city where I lived, which was a way more useful skill than naming teams from a bunch of Sydney suburbs I had never visited.

Cut to the present day, and I have had a Warriors season ticket for a decade and a half with a group of friends. Being a part of a bunch of long-term Warriors fans is a specific experience. A special bond is formed between those who have sat together in the driving, sideways rain, while the team they have invested their precious time into once again surrenders an unassailable lead and loses. Things can get bleak, but deep down there remains a lingering and shared hope: maybe, just maybe, things will be different next year, and the faith will be repaid.

For mere mortals, such delusion is perhaps understandable, but there’s one hardcore Warriors fan whose undying commitment to the cause I simply can’t understand: Michael Noel James Hosking IV. 

Mike Hosking circa 2024 is all about dunking on the losers and haters of the world, marvelling at how out of touch the “wowsers” he sees everywhere are and how they just don’t get how the world really works. He mocks fanciful ideas like justice and fairness and the hope for something better as fairytales for the foolish, and there is nary an issue he can’t explain away as being fixable with some “good old-fashioned common sense”.     

Fun Hosking fact – did you know one of his favourite songs is ‘The Way It Is’ by Bruce Hornsby and the Range? This song opens with a verse describing a man in a silk suit rushing past an elderly woman while she stands in a queue to receive a welfare payment, and this silk-suited guy stops and tells her to “get a job” for his own amusement. I love that this is one of his favourite songs – the guy in the suit is simply the best representation I can think of in the history of modern pop music for the public-facing Hosking persona.

But behind the eyerolls and cynicism there is one topic which flips the Hosking world view completely: the New Zealand Warriors. When Hosking discusses his one true sporting love he effuses about “going to the promised land” when the club’s ship finally comes in. He unironically shouts out non-sequiturs even as the wheels wobble on the bandwagon by the midway point of the season.  

Hosking famously keeps his private life private, but seems quite happy to be a sort of poster boy for a certain kind of Warriors fandom, one which prefers to watch the game at home with an expensive red wine instead of traveling to industrial Penrose to actually be at the game in the flesh. He appears to suspend his capacity for any rational analysis as the team flatter to deceive on the season’s home stretch, and by the time the jig is truly once again up he can’t help but explode into an expletive laden rant at the TV while another season disintegrates before his very eyes. 

For the most part, this all adds up to a relatable Warriors fandom experience. But shouldn’t Hosking know better? Aren’t fairytales like the one that keeps recidivist Warriors fans like us coming back for more the domain of weak-minded and ill-informed fools? When Hosking rants about no one in the Green party being “a normal person” he could just as easily be describing the Warriors organisation for the bulk of its existence. 

Perhaps Hosking’s commitment to the Warriors illustrates that he is in fact capable of keeping an open mind, of being able to put aside his prejudices to succumb to the possibility that sometimes good things can happen. Who knows, maybe if the Warriors do one day take him to the promised land, he might even be able to apply this to things other than our godforsaken rugby league team.