By Dan Walsh,Emma Kemp

Copyright brisbanetimes

It was in Las Vegas in March 2024 that Brisbane played the Roosters in that inaugural season-opening double-header. The whole affair was mostly a curiosity for locals, but they did get to witness Walsh’s exquisite skill set when he set off and deftly kicked for Deine Mariner to score his team’s first try of 2024. This is the same guy who, a month earlier, was dubbed the “Tom Brady of Queensland” and then caught a pass from the NFL great himself.

The seven-time Super Bowl champion hurled the ball from the stage of a speaking engagement in Brisbane and watched as Walsh caught it on the run. The audience loved it. The internet did too. It was apparently one of the rare occasions he had been nervous. The event’s MC half-jokingly floated Walsh’s potential for an NFL career. “With your looks and skills, you’re looking at $25m to $30m a year,” he said. “And that’s US.”

The business of Walsh was booming, and nobody was happier than NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo and V’landys, the ARLC Commission chair, who’d used his 13-year-old daughter as his focus group to prove this “bloody good-looking” young man was single-handedly driving interest in the code among girls and young women.

“She’s got posters all over the wall of him, and she has no interest in rugby league whatsoever, even though I’m the chairman of the ARLC,” V’landys said on the eve of the 2023 grand final. “All she’s interested in is Reece Walsh … he has a massive future as a rugby league player and as a rock star … he’s the full package. He has the looks, and there’s an element of charisma. There’s something that’s present that not many people have, but he’s got it.”

Walsh, of course, is not universally loved. Often characterised as the villain, he’s also criticised for being a player bigger than his club. Similar to the storm around Latrell Mitchell at South Sydney, his perceived power and reluctance to take part in media commitments helped feed a narrative that Walsh was given too long a leash and that had contributed to 2024’s failure. That, and the shirts-off training sessions that Walters’ successor Michael Maguire promptly prohibited in public. It was dubbed the “six-pack ban” and bolstered Maguire’s quest to drive higher standards, a successful endeavour as they stand 80 minutes away from a first premiership in 19 years.

For Walsh, Maguire’s tight ship offers a more streamlined vessel towards the complete player being slowly developed since he was an Indigenous Australian-Maori kid growing up in Nerang on the Gold Coast. In another life, Walsh might have been a chippie like his father.