Mitchell Pearce may be a tool when drunk sometimes — is that a crime?

COLMAN’S CALL: To read and hear some of the moral outrage following Mitchell Pearce’s big Australia Day out, he is public enemy number one.

Mitchell Pearce was hounded by the media after making news for an Australia Day incident. Picture: Adam Yip

DID Mitchell Pearce really say he’s the worst role model in sport?

He must be joking. Pearce is almost as big a role model as his father.

About 30 years ago I was talking to then-rugby league boss John Quayle about the way the game had turned around its image and attracted women and kids to the sport.

Some 10 years earlier rugby league was in the gutter. The stadiums were rubbish, half the players were long-haired thugs and a day at the footy was akin to a front-row seat watching bear-baiting.

“Then,” said Quayle, “On the 1982 Kangaroo Tour we saw a player who was everything we wanted our game to be. He was a fitness fanatic, good-looking, didn’t smoke or drink. We held him up to show the world everything that is good about rugby league.

“That player was Wayne Pearce.”

Now, here we are in 2016 and once again rugby league is holding up one of its players as an example — this time to show the world everything that is bad about rugby league.

The Pearces have come full circle.

Or that’s what some people would have you believe anyway.

Mitchell Pearce gets frisky with a puppy on Australia Day. Picture: DiiMEX

Mitchell Pearce apparently drunk on the night of Australia Day. Picture: DiiMEX

To read and hear some of the moral outrage following Junior Junior’s big Australia Day out, he is public enemy No.1, topping the list of rugby league atrocities, with a bullet.

I can’t recall any player in the modern era being banned for life, but given the calls from NRL women’s adviser Catharine Lumby for his papers to be stamped Never To Play Again, you could be forgiven for thinking Pearce was spotted drinking his own wee-wees, sticking his finger up another player’s backside, taking performance-enhancing drugs, rorting the salary cap and sucking back Island Coolers on a mate’s roof, all on the one day.

Up against other entries in the NRL Hall of Shame, the headline, ‘Young Bloke Makes Idiot of Himself at Party’, doesn’t seem all that indictable, but I guess you had to be there. With a camera.

As for everything that has happened since the morning of January 27 when Pearce woke up with a hangover, saw 1486 messages on his phone and thought to himself, “What have I done?”, it has all taken a fairly predictable route.

Media outrage, shamefaced press-conference where he admits to having a problem (bloody oath he does — this could cost him a motza), and of course the old quick exit to a rehab centre offshore.

Now regarded as a standard Get Out of Jail Card by football club execs the world over, the rehab centre works a treat on any number of fronts: it affirms that the misbehaving player in question is sick, and not just a complete goose, thus attracting public sympathy; enables the club to blow the dust off the moth-eaten statement that reads: ‘We’re just interested in his welfare right now’, and, of course, gets him out of the spotlight for a couple of weeks.

Problem with Pearce’s stay at a mysterious Far East Asian clinic (Sheraton Phuket?) is that no-one is quite sure just what his illness is. By his own admission he’s not an alcoholic and there’s no suggestion he is addicted to drugs, which suggests he has been treated for acting like a complete tool when he has a bellyful of booze.

And if he can show the world that there’s a cure for that, other than growing up, he will be an even bigger role model that Junior ever was.

Originally published as Mitchell Pearce may be a tool when drunk sometimes — is that a crime?