Call me loyal, says Steve Price

Steve Price understands loyalty, that people treat the team like a family member, like a little brother or a little sister, or a son or a daughter. Picture / Brett Phibbs

There's a point in the conversation when the amiable Steve Price comes to a sudden and stricken pause.

Man, the Warriors captain can talk. The pause is unexpected - and doesn't last long. If surprisingly chatty for a rugby league player, a bigger surprise is his willingness to front so candidly to a member of the media given the week he's had.

The profession has grilled the club relentlessly over this past week from hell and Price has been burned by journalists before. But he's a laid-back bloke and was well brought up by his mum Margaret in Toowoomba, Queensland.

She taught him right from wrong, he says, and instilled the principle everyone should be given a chance.

Besides, he had been told at the outset he was being interviewed by a blindly loyal Warriors fan.

So here we both are, on display like goldfish in a glass-walled office in a row of such offices at the revamped Warriors HQ at Ericsson Stadium. The occasional player peers in, grinning, probably relieved it's not him having to front.

Coach Ivan Cleary strolls by. Yep, he's got a big grin. He was going to do the interview but was too busy. "Yeah, he looks busy," says Price. He smiles.

Price is a smiley sort and very open. He talks easily and at length about all manner of things, from the "bucket hats" he loves to wear, why he bites his fingernails - "always have since I was a baby" - to his mild affliction with the pokies a few years back, to salary caps, to the suffering of fans, his love for his wife and family and his great passion for footy.

Then he's floored by a simple enough question squeezed in when he takes a breath. "What was the very first thing that went through your mind when you heard the Warriors had broken the salary cap?"

The blue eyes look haunted and he travels back to a place of trauma. He is, momentarily, lost for words. He actually looks close to tears.

"No," was his first thought, he says quietly. "No, not again.

"I, out of everybody, definitely didn't want any salary cap problems."

Price has been here before, at the hard end of a salary cap scandal. When the Bulldogs breached the cap in 2002 Price was their captain. It cost them, probably, a grand final win. They were slammed by a 37-point deduction and were the shame of the NRL.

Now, it's the Warriors' turn - and guess who the captain is.

When Price was negotiating, he made a point of seeking reassurances all was well with the salary cap.

"And every time I spoke with Mick [Watson, former CEO] and Spiro [Tsiros, former general manager] I made sure there was definitely no problems. I said, 'You sure everything's right? Are you sure everybody knows who should know?'

"And that was the thing, I just used to be so confident because I thought there hasn't been any problems with the Warriors with the salary cap. There didn't seem to be any worries ..."

When he was signed for the Warriors last season, fans didn't care about the Bulldogs salary cap saga. We were delighted someone of Price's calibre was joining the team. He, and the signing of Ruben Wiki, gave renewed hope to a club battered by disappointing seasons, musical-chair coaches and financial woe.

The latest scandal, which took our breaths away, could leave a fan thinking "what more can we take?"

But Price and I know better. Diehard fans don't go away that easily. The ice is broken when out comes my slightly battered Warriors key ring. The key ring is a few years old now but it's tough, as a Warriors fan has to be.

Price's eyes light up. He understands the loyalty of fans, even the really obsessed ones like the Mad Butcher who has admitted to saying prayers for the team. Price understands that when the team hurt, the fans hurt.

"For sure. Cause people treat it [the team] like a family member, like a little brother or a little sister, or a son or a daughter.

"You know, you don't like seeing things happen to your son or your daughter, or your brother or your sister."

Fans like this make you feel proud and make you want to do your best on the field every week, he says.

The Bulldogs salary cap saga taught him this too. He spent 12 years with that team, with some of the most "beautiful people" who were supporters, and he cherished them during the scandal.

Instead of turning away, the fans and the team became closer. He remembers the weekend after the scandal blew the team had to play in Canberra and about 5000 supporters turned out to see them off. They made a massive tunnel for the players to walk through to get on the bus.

It was "so emotional to think that people cared that much" even though the team had dived from the top of the table to the bottom.

Warriors fans are similar. Price runs into people all the time and has listened to the radio "and they all say, 'Mate, I've been with the Warriors since day one. No matter what happens, we've gone broke twice, we've gone through this, we've gone through that, it doesn't matter, I'm still here cause it's my team and I love the Warriors'."

The knockers who say the season's over because the team are already four points down - the punishment for breaching the cap - are up against Price's determination. The scandal can be a turning point for the team and the club.

There are 24 games to go: "We know we're starting negative four. That's gone, over. Let's worry about each game as they come and what we're going to do in each of those games."

There will always be knockers, Price knows that and is philosophical. I repeat a remark from a mate delivered shortly before leaving for Ericsson. "I think they're a bunch of cheats who have had all the publicity they deserve."

All this gets from Price is a mild, "Right. Well."

He explains he learned very quickly that whether something goes right or wrong in the wonderful world of football, there are always people with an opinion.

It's what we love about Australia and New Zealand, he says, the fact that it's a free world and you say what you like.

But people who voice opinions also need to respect the fact that what they see and what they read is not always the whole story, he says.

Price says he doesn't know what the others in the team earn and never will. Their pay is their business, and his is his own business.

And even though the salary cap has seen two of his teams get into big trouble, he still defends the system.

He could earn a lot more money if there was no salary cap but he loves league and does not want the NRL competition to turn into the English soccer league where the rich clubs buy all the good players.

His love of the game is genuine and his credentials impressive. In addition to 222 games for the Bulldogs, he has played 10 tests for the Kangaroos and 17 State of Origin games for Queensland.

He eats and breathes football so much his wife Jo - they met at the age of 12 - used to say she thought he would marry a football.

He just doesn't like it when his family suffer because of it. Like the time his Mum became upset because an Australian newspaper had run a story about his so-called pokie addiction - a media beat-up, says Price.

He confesses to playing the pokies a bit when he was away from home and lonely but nipped it in the bud.

His Mum, who he reckons would have spent a whole $100 in her lifetime on the pokies, was playing them one day when a woman walked past and said, "Oh, I know where your son's got it from".

"It nearly broke Mum's heart ..."

He reckons he wouldn't have been able to survive without his Mum, his wife and his kids - Jamie, 10, Kasey, 7, and Riley, 4. Oh, and his new bulldog pup called Dozer, as in bulldozer.

"It's like having another kid," he says. He's not jinxed, but it's interesting he got Dozer about two weeks ago and since then the Warriors' world has blown up. Maybe it's the bulldogs coming back to bite him.

At the end of the interview former All Black coach and now Warriors football manager John Hart walks past the goldfish bowl and pops his head in.

"You okay mate, are you?" says Hart. "Can you handle it on your own?"

He knows the interview is nearly over and he's joking.

Price jokes back, sort of, that he hopes he hasn't said anything he shouldn't.

And Hart says, seriously: "I'm sure if you're honest you'll be honest, and that's how you are mate. Never duck away from it."

You'd think there would be an air of doom at the Warriors HQ but there's no sign of it. I guess it's just a matter of faith.