Former Port player Ben Eckermann reflects on the brutal hit that ended his footy career and led him to a life in southern Spain

In 2005, Ben Eckermann was leading any young footballer’s dream life – playing in the AFL for the reigning premier. Until a brutal on-field hit changed everything, setting the former Sturt junior on a very unique path.

It was a brutal hit that Ben Eckermann didn’t see coming – stopping his football career dead in its tracks. It also changed the trajectory of his life.

Now 37, Eckermann spoke to this masthead at the beginning of a busy early summer’s day at the wellness retreat and organic garden he runs with his Dutch wife Anne Marie in the southern Spanish city of Malaga, where he has lived for the past 15 years.

But 19 years ago, the kid from Sturt was just 21 days into an AFL career with the reigning premier Port Adelaide that had started so promisingly.

Eckermann remembers the time clearly, almost two decades down the road.

“That was a big deal, you know, to break into the (team of the) reigning premier so quickly … and I performed quite well and held my spot for four weeks,” he said.

Until he came up against West Coast at Subiaco – and what Eckermann describes as a “horrific concussion” after a collision with the Eagles’ Tyson Stenglein.

West Coast's Tyson Stenglein cleans up Ben Eckermann

The vision of the hit is pretty hard to watch. Stenglein runs past the ball and, with a huge arm tucked tightly into his chest, mows down the unsuspecting 18-year-old, snapping his elbow up as it connects with Eckermann’s head.

At the time, the hit was considered “rough conduct” and attracted a one-match suspension.

But even that was contested by the Eagles – with player advocate David Grace QC arguing a guilty verdict would put the physicality of AFL football in jeopardy.

A “footy act” 2005-style perhaps? It is certainly in stark contrast with how similar incidents are seen – and penalised – in 2024.

The hit knocked Eckermann out cold.

“(It) became the cornerstone of my career – the big turning point. From then on, I was plagued with concussion issues, unfortunately,” he said.

The AFL protocol at that time was that players who’d suffered a concussion would miss a mandatory week, which is what Eckermann did, but he wasn’t right.

“I was having ongoing concussion symptoms, I had a really bad neck problem,” he remembered. “The following week, I made my return through the SANFL with Sturt, but I only lasted til I think just before halftime, and I was gone. The concussion symptoms flooded back super quickly and I had to come off.”

It was the beginning of the end for Eckermann’s football career. He never played at AFL level again and was delisted by the Power at the conclusion of the 2006 season.

“I became very susceptible to a concussion, and had repeated concussions.” he said. “I think I must have been concussed over my two years at Port something like maybe eight times, quite a lot. It was getting to the point where even when I was the aggressor laying a tackle, I was knocking myself out just from the impact.”

Eckermann pictured at La Pachamama in Malaga, Spain.

A NEW LIFE IN SPAIN

When I connected with Eckermann over a WhatsApp call to Spain, the first thing I notice is his accent – it certainly doesn’t have the expected Aussie twang.

“The accent has certainly shifted and lots of people think I’m a South African, because my wife, Anne Marie, she’s originally from Holland,” he said.

Eckermann laughs when I raise it with him.

However, it makes sense – once his footy career came to an abrupt end, Eckermann set off to see the world and take advantage of the Spanish lessons he’d started at the encouragement of the AFLPA while still on the Port list. It was there – in 2009 – that he met Anne Marie, and where the couple have since built a thriving organic kitchen and garden.

But as soon as Eckermann started remembering his footy days, the unmistakeable South Australian pronunciation of “football” and “Port Adelaide” shines through, and I’m speaking to the bottom-age star of the 2004 South Australian team, which went within a kick of winning that year’s under-18 national championship.

His memory is that his team was super unlucky not to win it all.

“‘Bunga’ (Shannon) Hurn, the champion West Coast premiership captain, had a shot and kicked the ball out in the full. And if he’d just scored we would have won the title,” he said.

But Eckermann was good enough to be named All-Australian, and, while he’d only just turned 17, he entered into draft calculations that year and onto the radar at reigning AFL premier Port Adelaide.

Eckermann following a Port win in his debut game in 2005.

He’d grown up a mad Crows fan, and in the great tradition of Sturt fans everywhere, was raised to hate Port Adelaide by a dad who had played for the Double Blues in the ‘60s.

But that all changed when Port joined the AFL in 1997.

“I remember saying to Dad, ‘this is the arch rival, we hate them’ and he was like, “no, no Port are to be respected, they are the champions of South Australia. And the real enemy is Victoria’. So he was over the moon that I was allowed into the Port inner sanctum.”

Eckermann had won the lottery: he got to stay home in Adelaide, and was drafted to a team that had finally won a drought-breaking AFL premiership after being perceived as chokers for the previous two seasons.

But even then – and without the traumatic events at Subiaco – Eckermann felt different to his teammates, foreshadowing a life that would take him a world away from the AFL.

“I don’t know if I was the black sheep, but I was interested in travel and languages and learning guitar and things like that.” he said.

“And already I could sense – even in my first year – even when things were going very well, it was like ‘I don’t know if I fit in’, in a way.”

Eckermann resorted to wearing a helmet late in his AFL career to mitigate against regular concussions.

CONCUSSION RETIREMENTS

Eckermann doesn’t follow footy very closely any more, and was only vaguely aware of this year’s concussion retirements of Angus Brayshaw (Melbourne) and Nathan Murphy (Collingwood). But he remains a keen cricket fan and when I mention one-Test Victorian Will Pucovski’s situation, his ears prick up.

“I did see what happened to Pucovski and it rang true, you know, like, this fella’s got the exact same thing I’ve got, where a blow to the head and he’s just out, you know?” he said.

To this day, Eckermann suffers from memory loss, which obviously concerns him.

“Things like getting the months of the year wrong, my own birthday, my own age wrong.”

He can’t be certain they’re directly related to the concussion, because he hasn’t really known it to be any different in his adult life, but the likelihood is that it all relates to that brutal hit at Subiaco.

“Friends have been and stayed with us for a few days, but I’ve completely forgotten that. So that’s not great. And then there’s been bouts of insomnia and stuff like that,” he said.

He hasn’t had any contact with Port Adelaide since his career ended at the end of 2006, but doesn’t hold any grudges.

Eckermann (second from right) pictured with South Australian Under 18s teammates - and fellow AFL draftees, Ryan Griffen, Scott McMahon, Angus Monfries, Heath Grundy and Cameron Wood.

“I’m very thankful I got to achieve the dream of playing (AFL), but it didn’t consume my entire adult years.” he said. “And I was able to put that on the shelf and go, ‘Yeah, that was amazing. And I learned a lot and then I moved on to other things’.

“There are some friends, especially from Sturt, who never got a crack at the big time and just plugged away their whole careers, which is great and I’m sure they enjoyed themselves, but for me, I couldn’t … I wanted to do other things with my life for sure.”

Eckermann and his wife’s business, La Pachamama, keeps them busy – particularly at this time of year. They run an organic garden and restaurant and host wellness retreats at their base in Malaga and around Europe.

And while we shiver through another frigid winter weekend, he is off to Ibiza to host a retreat, one of “400 or 500” similar events the couple have hosted over the past decade.

That’s about as far from the AFL footy field as you can possibly get.