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O'Davis says drugs and culture change put fans offside
CHRIS BARRETT
March 6, 2010
NEWCASTLE legend Robbie O'Davis has bemoaned the decline of the Knights' ''home-grown culture'' and warned that the drugs crisis engulfing the club has the potential to further erode its support base.
With both Danny Wicks and Chris Houston facing charges of supplying drugs including ecstasy and cocaine, the Clive Churchill medallist and two-time premiership-winning fullback believes the lack of locally born or raised players in the first-grade squad was having a detrimental effect on the club's status in the city.
Wicks, from Grafton, and Houston, from Moruya, were both recruited from St George Illawarra.
O'Davis, who served a 22-match ban in 1998 for steroid use, said he felt no sympathy for anyone who was proven to have supplied drugs but could identify the fall they would take.
''As far as them going out and jeopardising their careers and their club, I know first-hand what it's all about,'' O'Davis said. ''But if you're indulging in drugs, trying to make money when they're on three times any person in the town's wages
it's just stupidity.''
The former Australian and Queensland State of Origin fullback said the profile of most Knights players was far removed from what it once was when stars such as Andrew and Matthew Johns, Paul Harragon, Adam Muir and Matt Gidley were at the club.
''No one in this town has got a really passionate love for the players like they used to. They'd call them family members,'' he said. ''You hear it in the street all the time. They say 'there isn't the personalities in that side that there used to be'. There's four or five from the town that play in the side now whereas it used to be 10 or 11 or more.''
O'Davis joined the chorus of former Newcastle players, and the Knights administration, in denying that a culture of drug use has existed at the club. Instead, he said the common theme in a play-hard, party-hard lifestyle during his 13 seasons at the club was alcohol. ''We got known as the team that won full of piss,'' he said, with a laugh.
While admitting that times had changed and there was no place for a culture of heavy alcohol use at the club, he said the latest allegations against former housemates Wicks and Houston, coupled with Andrew Johns's previous admission of drug use, were tainting the legacy of the Knights' great teams of the past.
O'Davis said: ''I walk into a coffee shop and we're the ones getting questions again: 'You were doing this sort of stuff when you were playing
Johnsey proved that'. You say back 'it's not like that at all'. The old boys are starting to get the questions if it was a culture that ran through our club.''
O'Davis, who works on commission as an insurance broker, said he offered to speak to the Knights playing group about his own fall from grace before Houston's arrest on Monday but was told Newcastle's ''alcohol and drug policies [are] in place'' and he would not be required.
''I think [it's time to get] someone in who's served the time for committing the crime, it's about time to get someone like that in front of them,'' he said. ''I signed two $1.2 million contracts in my career.
''I lost marriages, I lost massive amounts of income, sponsorships. Now I work for $600 a week.''
http://www.theage.com.au/rugby-leagu...0305-poru.html
