{"id":690718,"date":"2026-05-24T03:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T03:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/690718\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T03:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T03:23:09","slug":"i-had-to-grow-up-the-reformation-of-fonua-blake-the-canberra-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/690718\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;I had to grow up&#8217;: The reformation of Fonua-Blake | The Canberra Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Paragraph_wrapper__6w7GG\">Fonua-Blake often courted controversy when he was younger and credits a move to the Warriors in 2021 as reviving his career and getting him on the straight and narrow.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When you&#8217;re younger you get your priorities mixed up and I had to grow up a bit too,&#8221; Fonua-Blake said.<\/p>\n<p>In 2020, Fonua-Blake was sanctioned by the NRL for using an ableist slur.<\/p>\n<p>Two years later he was warned by the NRL for celebrating with a hand sign that appeared to be a show of support for ex-Manly teammate Manase Fainu, who was jailed for stabbing a youth leader at a church dance in 2019.<\/p>\n<p>In 2024, Fonua-Blake was stood down for one game by the Warriors for failing to show up for coach Andrew Webster&#8217;s post-match address.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fonua-Blake often courted controversy when he was younger and credits a move to the Warriors in 2021 as&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-690718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}