Rugby league loses two of its true heroes in retiring Billy Slater and Luke Lewis
ON Friday night, either Billy Slater or Luke Lewis will walk off the rugby league field for the final time, and they will take a great chunk of the game with them, writes PAUL KENT.
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TIME moves differently for NRL players. They live in a strange world where the years get shorter but the weeks get longer.
Luke Lewis could look back on his 18-year career and not be able to say where the years have gone.
One minute he was young and scar free and bouncing into the next game and, now, by the time he needs to be ready for his next game he is still getting over the last.
Lewis realised in July he could not go through another season like this and announced his plans to retire.
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Inevitably, the way it was going, the real fear was the weeks of soreness would begin to overlap.
Three weeks after Lewis put up the closing down sign another solid endorsement for the game, Billy Slater, announced he would also retire.
Craig Bellamy has spoken often on his thoughts that Slater is retiring a season too early and only a small window of game time needs to be witnessed to realise Slater is going as well as ever.
But, as close as he is to Slater, Bellamy could not possibly know what it takes each week, the mental cost it takes for Slater to get ready for the punishment so soon again.
So it has come to this, to Friday, when one of them walks away forever.
Whoever it might be, they take a great chunk of the game with them.
The NRL has copped its bruises in recent weeks.
The Bulldogs Mad Monday, the trouble at Souths, the black headlines at a time when the product itself as never been better.
It is enough to make you wonder how well the game could really be travelling if ever it got a solid block of clear air.
Either Lewis or Slater will go this Friday, and the other certainly the weekend after, but their lessons remain. They remove every excuse for poor performance, both on and off the field.
In their own way they come from traditional rugby league stock.
Lewis, 35, was born and raised in Sydney’s west. Solid blue-collar, he began playing in Australia’s biggest junior nursery, the Penrith rugby league, and loved it from the moment he watched his uncles play.
When he got sick with chickenpox and couldn’t train because he might infect his teammates he made his mum Sharon drive him to training so he could sit in the car and watch.
When he cracked it in first grade he played on the wing but as the years took the brilliance off his speed he moved slowly infield until the conversion was complete and he was regarded as a fully-fledged backrower.
His performance was unaffected, though. He played for the NSW and Australia as a winger, he played for NSW and Australia as a backrower.
He won a premiership with Penrith as a winger, a premiership with Cronulla as a backrower.
Slater is from the other great NRL breeding ground, country Queensland. His father Ron is, quite literally, a former sugarcane cutter from Innisfail.
Slater’s first game for Melbourne was at centre but he shifted quickly to fullback.
Now, 16 seasons later, he is still fullback but the position is played completely differently, moulded in his image. Nowadays, every NRL fullback has to be as busy and as creative as Slater.
For all their differences, though, what they share in common is much deeper, and rarer.
They turned up ready for work every day.
Their preparation was always number one.
Slater’s football intellect is highly regarded.
He changed the way fullbacks play through the thinking he brought to the position.
Lewis’s football intellect is under-appreciated. Few in the game have as good an understanding, tactically, on what’s necessary to win a game.
The subtlety of Lewis’s game, the precise lines and sharp decision making, is often missed, masked because he is an all-effort player.
Slater has come through two major shoulder surgeries and his body is being held together by plaster tape and rubber bands.
Lewis has battled calf and other lower leg injuries all season.
There are many reasons footballers get old and decide they no longer want to play the game even though, for many of them, it is all they have ever known.
The last reason they should want to retire is because they have lost their love of the game.
Sadly for some, tired of the inspection and scrutiny, it is the first.
It is no small irony that Lewis and Slater leave because their body abandoned them first.
They have preserved their love of the game because, in all their actions, they protected their love for it.
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