Kevin Walters: His toughest job yet
HE’S tackled the ups and downs of life but Queensland’s new State of Origin coach now faces his toughest job yet.
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FOR a moment Queensland’s new State of Origin coach is a boy again, his face pressed against the glass in a jumble of restless young limbs squeezed into the back of an old Holden station wagon.
It’s the early ’70s and Kevin Walters is a short bundle of high expectations as the car cruises out along the concrete driveway of a weatherboard house opposite the East Ipswich railway station and rumbles past a row of similar working-class homes along Merton St.
His dad, Kevin Snr, is at the wheel, his mum Sandra next to him on the vinyl front bench seat as the Walters family navigates its way through the weekend minefield that comes with five rambunctious boys with energy to burn.
Each weekend Sandra, a nurse, and Kevin Walters Snr, a carpenter, drive their five sons wherever their hopes take them as they indulge their shared passion for rugby league, never complaining about the effort needed or the hours spent nurturing the young talent in the back seat.
More than 40 years later Kevin Walters is sitting just around the corner from his home in Brisbane’s inner-west Auchenflower explaining how those family road trips and childhood footy games taught him life lessons that have sustained him ever since. He still looks fit, dressed in a maroon-coloured T-shirt, boardshorts and running shoes.
Walters is relating how in the rough and tumble of backyard football games he learnt to handle life’s triumphs and disasters. Picking himself up off the grass with skinned knees and sucking up the hurt taught him to keep moving forward in life, something he applied later when the loneliness of hospital wards and the uncertain void of being a young widower with three small children threatened to overwhelm him.
Since December, when he was appointed to take the Queensland rudder after Mal Meninga’s 10-year run, Walters has had a bullseye on his forehead. He’s constantly had to sidestep tackles here and jink to the right there as strangers in the street quiz him on how the hell he is going to cope in the vast shadow of Big Mal, whose Origin team won nine of the past 10 series including eight on the trot.
“Nervous, yeah of course I’m nervous,” the 48-year-old says about the biggest job he’s ever had going into the year’s first Origin match at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium on June 1.
Sure, he feels the pressure. He knows the whole rugby league world will be watching to see how the former larrikin five-eighth for Brisbane, Queensland and Australia performs.
But what’s the pressure of a football game compared with the pressure he felt 20 years ago when his wife Kim, his high-school sweetheart who was then pregnant with their third son, discovered a lump in her breast and came home from the doctor to tell Walters it was cancer? That was pressure.
Pressure was trying not to fall apart in front of her or in front of the crowds or in front of their three young sons when he had to play for the Broncos and Queensland, wondering all the time about Kim’s ultimate battle and how he and the kids would get through the dark days and months ahead without her.
“Pressure in sports is nothing compared to problems in life that every one of us has to face in some shape or form,” Walters says about losing Kim in 1998.
At Walters’ childhood home at Ipswich there was a patch of well-worn grass between the clothesline and the concrete path, which became as important to the five brothers – Brett, Steve, Andrew and the twins, Kerrod and Kevin – as Suncorp Stadium.
“We played the game with a lot of passion in the back yard,” Walters says (Kerrod describes it to Qweekend as “ferociousness”), “and there were many fights and many tears – most of them from me … ”
The recollections of his brothers laughing and fighting are precious to him and they linger even for someone who since those days played 296 first-grade games, 23 matches for Queensland and 11 Tests for Australia.
“We claim our mum invented the sin bin,” he says.
“If we started fighting she’d get the hose out to cool us down or grab us and say ‘OK, you’re out – come and stand over here for 10 minutes’.”
Then the voice of the Origin coach falters for a moment. “Sorry mate,” he says, “I get very emotional when I think of my family.”
AFTER GROWING UP WITH FOUR BROTHERS AND WITHHIS first four children all boys, Walters says the addition to his clan of daughter Ava, now 10, was “something special”.
“She’s heavily into dance,” says her proud father, “and she’s brought a different perspective into the house – a young girl among all the boys.
“My wife Narelle and I were so thrilled when we had Ava – there was the joy at another child, of course, but being a girl made it even more special. At one time my mother had five sons all under the age of four.”
Walters married his longtime partner Narelle Bristow, a former state champion rower, in the Whitsundays in 2012. She is the mother of his two youngest children, Ava and Harry, 13, and stepmother to Jack, 24, Billy, 22 and Jett, 19.
They were together for the final years of Walters’ career when he replaced his old Ipswich mate Allan “Alfie” Langer as captain of the Broncos and Queensland.
They have also gone through the swings, roundabouts and big dips in the life of a professional sportsman and pulled hard together when Walters’ mentor, Wayne Bennett, sacked him in a cull of coaching assistants at the Broncos in 2005. Now they are ready to tackle another challenge together, head-on.
“Narelle has been absolutely brilliant for me and our family,” Walters says.
“She’s been there for the hard yards. She has two degrees – one in science and one in law – and she virtually sacrificed her career for us to go forward as a family.”
ALFIE LANGER WAS ON THE PHONE TO WALTERS AS SOON AS his mate was given the Queensland job after the more fancied contenders dropped out near the finish line.
After Meninga’s decision to coach Australia, Walters had waited for weeks in a kind of purgatory while the Queensland Rugby League weighed up its options for a successor. Wayne Bennett was in the frame to reprise the Queensland role that he had first undertaken way back in 1986. Then Townsville’s premiership-winning coach Paul Green became the frontrunner before announcing he wanted to concentrate on the Cowboys.
Walters was the last man standing and Langer rang him immediately, asking for “Kevin Bradbury”, a reference to Australia’s Steven Bradbury, who won a 2002 Winter Olympic gold medal after all the other racers crashed.
“I know I wasn’t the first choice for the Origin job,” Walters admits, “but that doesn’t bother me. I got the job I’ve always wanted, so it worked out well.”
It will work out even better if he can lead Queensland to victory in his first game of a three-year contract.
Steve Walters, now 50 and running a Brisbane firm that builds patios, says that “as a very successful player, Kevvie knows what winning teams are about and he brings that experience, plus a lot of emotion, passion and fun”.
Steve played 272 first-grade games, 17 times for Queensland and 18 times for Australia. He says few coaches have the tactical nous of his brother.
“When the Broncos were going so well in the ’90s, Kevvie and Alfie Langer were steering the ship,” he says. “Alf would be running the ball and Kevvie would be organising the team, so it’s natural he would slot well into a coaching role.”
WHILE ALL FIVE WALTERS BROTHERS HAD SUCCESSFUL league careers, Kerrod was the first to play for Queensland and Australia. He featured in 245 first-grade games, eight Tests and made seven Queensland appearances. Perhaps his most memorable Queensland game, though, was in 1980 when he was 12 and sat in the packed outer at the old Lang Park (now Suncorp Stadium) alongside Kevin, Steve and Andrew Walters and Alfie Langer.
It was the first Origin match, played in front of a capacity crowd and the boys first watched older brothers Brett Walters and Kevin Langer play in the Queensland under-18 win over the NSW juniors. Then they roared along with 33,000 other fans as 35-year-old Arthur Beetson led his Queensland team on to the field and started a punch-up by belting his Parramatta teammate Mick Cronin before lifting the Maroons to a memorable victory.
Kerrod recalls: “We walked out of Lang Park that night saying how good it would be to wear the Maroons jersey.” All five brothers played for the Queensland under-18 team and Brett, now 53 and a builder, and Andrew, 49, who runs an Ipswich car wash with Kevin, were both in the original Broncos squad in 1988.
Kerrod is talking while driving down the highway from his Caloundra home for a Brisbane meeting with his old Australian teammate and now senator, Glenn Lazarus, to nut out strategies for the biggest game of their careers – the July 2 Senate election – as the front row of the eponymous party, the Glenn Lazarus Team.
Kerrod sold real estate for many years after his football career ended and has a commercial cleaning business. He suffered a heart attack three years ago but says he’s never been more ready to tackle a challenge.
“There are similarities in playing Origin for Queensland and going into Parliament because once again I want to do my best for the state,” Kerrod says.
He was born 15 minutes before Kevin in Rockhampton Base Hospital. When the twins were infants, the family moved to Ipswich, where Sandra’s father Harold Hill was a stationmaster and Kevin Snr found work as a carpenter.
The new Origin coach was named after his father because, as he says, “I guess they figured I was going to be their last child. They had been trying for a girl – Mum had names picked out every time – but it never worked out. I’m sure they were happy though, with their sons.”
The Walters home was 100m from a park where the Booval Swifts trained and where the brothers played their junior football. They graduated to representing the Ipswich Jets alongside the Langer brothers – Alfie, Kevin, Cliff and Neville – and in 1984 Kevin met Wayne Bennett, who was coaching a Queensland junior side.
In 1987 Kerrod and Alfie stayed in Brisbane to become part of the Broncos, but Kevin and his fiancee Kim Facer followed Steve Walters to the Canberra Raiders, where Bennett was working alongside coach Don Furner.
Kevin and Kim had met at Bremer State High School, before Kevin and Kerrod won sporting scholarships to Ipswich Grammar for Years 11 and 12. They played league on Sundays but school rugby on Saturdays, and in their final year helped the school win its first GPS title in 50 years, joint winners with Brisbane State High School.
In Canberra, Kevin and Kim shared a townhouse with Steve. Working as a carpenter’s apprentice and playing in the Raiders’ lime green, Kevin was a reserve in their first grand final in 1987, was an Origin reserve in 1989 and that year came off the bench in Canberra’s astonishing grand final win over Balmain. When Kevin moved to Brisbane in 1990 his form was so hot that Bennett, now in charge at the Broncos, moved Wally Lewis, the team’s long-term five-eighth, to lock and made the Ipswich boys, Walters and Langer, his halves.
Walters married Kim in January 1991. He made the Australian team that year and in 1992 he, Kerrod and Steve made rugby league history when all three brothers were chosen to play for Australia in the World Cup squad.
“Our parents were that happy,” Kevin says.
“They went over for the World Cup final at Wembley (England) and went up to Wigan to see me and Kerrod play for the Broncos in the World Club Challenge – they’d never been outside Australia before.”
By 1996 Kim and Kevin had two children and a third on the way when Kim returned to the Walters family home in Brisbane and told her husband she had breast cancer. Kim, the daughter of Toowoomba boxing trainer Buddy Facer and his first wife Lorraine, fought cancer with everything she had. She gave birth to the couple’s third son, Jett, in October 1996, but passed away in February 1998.
“I never once heard her whinge or complain about her illness,” Walters said as he eulogised her at St Luke’s Anglican Church in Toowoomba in front of 400 mourners including their sons Jack, then 6, Billy, 4, and Jett, 16 months. “I will take the strength she gave me through the rest of life.”
True to his word, within a few weeks of Kim’s funeral Walters was back on the paddock playing some of the best rugby league of his career.
“Kevvie saw football as an outlet and a focus to help him go forward,” Kerrod says. “There was no stopping him.”
With barely a minute remaining in the 1998 State of Origin opener, and with Queensland down 23-18, Kevin chanced a speculative kick over the top. The bold gamble led to Tonie Carroll’s matchwinning try. “I think I had some help from above,” Walters said after the game.
In the third match of the series Walters went on a darting run to score a try in Queensland’s series-clinching victory. Then, that September, he and Langer were the dynamic duo behind the Broncos scrum as Bennett’s men crushed the Bulldogs 38-12 in the NRL Grand Final.
A few weeks after his wife’s death, Walters launched the Wesley Hospital’s Kim Walters Choices program for breast cancer research. With the Broncos’ support he hoped to raise $100,000 in a year. They raised $100,000 in a week.
WALTERS TELLS QWEEKEND HIS FEBRUARY DECISION TOslap 12-month bans on potential Origin game-breakers including Anthony Milford and Ben Hunt of the Broncos for breaking curfew during the Emerging Origin camp may be costly. He had his moments of off-field strife as a player but as a coach now has to walk a fine line between being one of the boys and wielding the big stick. “I had to take a strong stance over the bans or it would have put me under a lot of pressure down the track,” he says. “Playing for Queensland is a privilege, not a right. Those boys didn’t do what was required of them so unfortunately they’re going to miss out this year.”
He knows what it’s like to be on the other side of tough team discipline and recalls being fined by Bennett after once breaking a curfew in a pre-season game in Auckland.
Walters was Broncos’ captain when they won the 2000 grand final and former teammate Gorden Tallis has long marvelled at Walters’ mental strength and passion for the game. “He’s done an apprenticeship for years,” Tallis says. “He’s been under Bennett, he’s been under (Melbourne Storm coach Craig) Bellamy. He’s won six grand finals and he’s the most passionate player I ever played with.”
Walters began coaching in 2001, the year he stopped playing, taking the Toowoomba Clydesdales to the Queensland Cup premiership before linking with Bennett as an assistant at the Broncos. The arrangement ended badly in 2005. “Wayne cut me loose,” Walters says, “I was very upset at the time because we go back to 1984. Myself, Glenn Lazarus and Gary Belcher – he let us all go. At the time I couldn’t understand it.”
Bennett told Walters to go away, improve his skills, get more experience and wait for a return to Red Hill. So Walters coached his old club the Ipswich Jets and then took Narelle and the family to Canet-en-Roussillon, a French town on the Mediterranean coast where he based himself as coach of the Catalans Dragons in the European Super League for the 2009-2010 season.
After two years they returned to Australia with Walters as an assistant to Bellamy at the Melbourne Storm and then with Bennett at the Newcastle Knights. He followed Bennett back to Brisbane but the boss has told Walters that with his Origin workload, he can’t coach at the Broncos for 12 months, a pause Walters hopes will evaporate quickly.
Outgoing Origin coach Mal Meninga has known Walters since he was a teenager fighting for a place in Canberra’s top side in 1987. It was his fire and intensity that first impressed Meninga along with his scheming tactical brain.
Meninga played in two grand finals with Walters at Canberra and was his teammate in Queensland and Australian sides in the early 1990s. He says Maroons dominance of the past decade should not put a weight of expectation on the new coach. “He’s going to put his own take on things and I’m pretty sure that will work for him,” Meninga says. “Kevvie was a very good organiser on the field and he has a great understanding of the game.’’ Meninga says one of the biggest attributes Walters brings to the coaching box is the “confidence and high energy of a winner’’.
“He understands the art of winning,’’ Meninga says.
The game has changed in the 16 years since Walters hung up his boots. It is more structured, with more video analysis and assistant coaches for individual advice. “The interchange is relatively new, too, and the players are a lot bigger and better prepared than when I was playing,” Walters says. “The games are physically a lot harder.”
But he says the principles are the same as ever – run hard and tackle, the same as when he started playing in the back yard and the same as when his two oldest boys play the game in the Queensland club competition, the Intrust Super Cup: Jack with Souths Logan, and Billy with Easts.
His first two coaches – his parents – have both passed away but he says they had “great lives, full lives” and taught their children to make the most of the cards they were dealt.
“They taught me that in life there’s going to be good times and tough times for everyone; to enjoy the good times and not to dwell on the bad,” he says.
“You have to keep going in life don’t you? You have to keep picking yourself up and moving forward.” ■
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