Former coach slams Warriors over Reece Walsh saga

Former coach Tony Kemp has slammed the Warriors for the way the club handled the Reece Walsh cocaine saga, saying the 19-year-old was hung out to dry in a "public whipping".

Walsh revealed last week that he was in possession of cocaine when he was arrested by Queensland police in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast.

He was charged with one count of possessing a prohibited substance and will appear in court in mid-October.

Walsh and Warriors chief executive Cameron George appeared in a media Zoom conference shortly after the news of his arrest emerged, where an emotional Walsh apologised and explained what had happened.

"I just want to say sorry to the sponsors, the fans, the Warriors," he said before appearing to break down in tears.

Speaking to Newstalk ZB's D'Arcy Waldegrave, Kemp said he didn't like the way the aftermath of the incident was handled by the club, saying Walsh lacked support.

"I thought it wasn't good," Kemp, who coached the Warriors from 2004-05, said. "The kid is 19 and he gets scolded in front of the public arena and made to apologise when I guess the question has to be asked how long has that been happening and what sort of problems does this kid have before he came to the Warriors and how has that amplified that problem – as opposed to the support that should have been put behind him in the type of year that he had.

"To be honest when I saw Reece come out and do that korero in front of the TV the other day, I felt a little bit sorry for him. I thought, 19 in the public arena, it was like a public whipping. I thought it was not the best form to be putting that on him on straight away."

Kemp questioned if making Walsh appear publically and apologise so soon after the incident was the best thing for the mental state of the teen star.

"Let's have a look at it in the realities of what actually happened. He's obviously out and had a big night, he's done some recreational things that he shouldn't have done and then no less than 12 hours later he's rolled out and made to apologise and we saw the mental state that the kid was in.

"I'm taking the sport out of it, let's remove the Superman cape and have a look at a 19-year-old kid in a vulnerable position made to front the media about all the stuff that he's done wrong. I get that everyone lauds it for him to stand up and step up to the plate and own it. For me he could own it a little bit better.

"I thought there might be a little bit more time in between drinks before you made him step up and take that public whipping. And I would have thought he would have had a lot more support around him. He's got a young family, he's also got player agents and his own whanau too that he probably needed to spend some time with to understand exactly the problem he had got himself into.

"For me, it was a club saying 'you come and own this straight away. This is about the Warriors'. But let's remove the rugby league, this is about Reece Walsh. How is he mentally?"

The NRL has had its fair share of misbehaving athletes over the years, with the Melbourne Storm the latest to come under fire when a few players were reportedly caught partying on video with "a white substance on the table".

However, Kemp defended rugby league as a sport and put incidents like Walsh's down to the pressures of being a modern athlete and a lack of support around them.

"You look at Melbourne, they're a club that you think that nothing ever goes wrong yet they've had a couple of instances over the last few years that left an unsavoury taste in people's mouths.

"If you're trying to hang something on rugby league you're doing it at your own peril. I can name a number of sports where if it's not cocaine they're talking about, it's something else. You need to think of it as a mental safety aspect of the athlete.

"It's getting harder and harder to be an athlete these days given the context of what they have to do 24/7. Yes you can use the cliche 'you're a professional player so behave accordingly' but a 19-year-old that has made it in the last six months what has he done over the last 18 and a half years?

"That's the issue. A lot can be said about that analogy if you take it into any of these issues. There's a support that needs to be around them."

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission