Why every NRL player can learn something from Ben Ikin
As Ben Ikin gears up for another season of NRL 360, his co-host PAUL KENT outlines why every NRL player can learn something from the understated Queenslander.
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Oh, you bet he was confident.
Just days before last year’s Queensland PGA Ben Ikin, the father of preparation, went around the Toowoomba course where the tournament would be played in a solid score of just four over.
The score was so solid that when he left the course there was a bounce in him that hadn’t been there since he stepped into the lift in that first Origin camp all these years ago.
Ikin earned his invitation to the PGA on the strength of a Taylor Made ambassadorship and a summer of hard work where he got his handicap down to two. He drove home thinking about the round with a little ace perched in his sleeve.
Four over on the practice round, he knew, and he had gone the entire 18 holes without a single birdie. With a couple of birdies …
“I could win this,” he thought to himself.
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Oh, it was beautiful.
By the second day, well, his goals had changed somewhat.
Kurt Barnes was in the clubhouse and notable only because he was 18-over and in last place.
Ikin got off badly that first day and recovered only briefly so, with Barnes in the clubhouse, he was now 16-over working through his final nine holes.
“Don’t come last,” said the caddie Ben Walker, his former Broncos teammate.
He birdied to go 15-over and Walker kept in his ear.
“You can’t come last,” he said. “Don’t come last …”
Ikin stood at the tee, six holes to play and three shots up his sleeve.
He parred the next two holes. All was looking good.
Then he double-bogeyed the next to leave him just one stroke ahead of Barnes and then, somewhere from green to the next tee, the nerves rattled up inside and found their way into his hands and a simple, short par-four suddenly looked like Augusta.
He took out a hybrid club and barely made contact, toeing the ball about halfway down the short fairway, but at least it was straight.
A quadruple bogey and it was all over. He finished 26-over and eight shots last.
Sometime later Peter Lonard, in his playing group, came in with wise words he didn’t want to distract Ikin with while he was in the midst of it.
“When you struggled, you started trying harder,” Lonard told him.
Golf is counterintuitive. The game rewards cool nerves, not adrenaline rushes, the opposite he ever learned as a football player.
“When that happens in golf,” Lonard said, “you’ve got to try less.”
All of life is a lesson for Ikin.
His story is mostly familiar. He was the schoolboy prodigy who remains the youngest to ever play State of Origin, and Fatty really did mistake him for a fan in the lift that first day in camp and ordered him off the floor.
He went on to play for Australia and win a premiership before he was retired from it all by age 27, injury doing what it often does.
His mind is too active to simply rest for the next 40 years, as some attempt, and so life has been more full after football than it ever was during his career.
That’s how, come March 9, the first Monday of the new season, NRL360 will start its eighth season and Ikin will again sit in the big chair. He earned the role and then ensured he was more than up to it.
And for mine, it is an education to sit beside him.
He should be the blazing example for every NRL player ending their stint in the game and hoping to find one of those breezy media jobs, talking about all they ever know.
He is the anomaly.
He figured out early you cannot bring only game knowledge to the conversation. Well-worn comments, stock quotes, fall on deaf ears nowadays.
Besides, he had more substance than to ever want to deliver merely that.
We barely knew each other when we began on NRL360. He was the ex-player, I was the journo, brought together for the supposed yin and the yang.
From the start we began eating lunch together at Joe’s, who makes him the same sandwich every day, and it soon became apparent this was no simple ex-footballer. He was on a search.
Knowledge excites him. It brings understanding.
There has to be integrity and thought in the comment. New ideas are to be considered and examined and, sometimes, tossed, away.
The prejudices common in the average footballer die quickly with him. A coach whose head was in the noose called one day to background him in the hope of saving his job.
A few knives were unsheathed, not too subtly.
Unless he was prepared to speak openly about it, Ikin told him, then his comment on the show was going to be reserved for what was already in the public domain. He didn’t want to hear backroom whispers.
Hosting NRL360 he realised quickly that truth and transparency are vital not only to the show but for the welfare of the game. Without it, the NRL might as well be rock’n’roll wrestling.
At times it has meant a daily battle with the NRL. Then you just have to roll the sleeves up.
It is all based on a discipline he has brought to his life, in the daily pursuit of his happiness.
A couple years back, in the green room at Fox Sports, Mark Gasnier picked up a couple of red snakes and dropped them in his mouth.
“This is what I train so hard for, so I can eat these,” he joked.
Ikin looked at him.
“That’s why I don’t eat them, so I don’t have to train so hard,” he said.
It was not a joke but, really, a philosophy.
If less is more is a solid rule for writing, Ikin has brought it to his life.
He gave up sugar, alcohol, small sacrifices made daily for a long term benefit. But Wednesday nights, to prove he is no zealot, he will work his way through a pizza and a half, wondering if he could fit in one more slice.
He trains every day but with a mentality to always leave enough so, if he had to train again later that day, he could. Not that he does, but this way it never gets so hard he loses the enthusiasm for it.
Small decisions amount to big results. It applies to every facet in his life.
And so after finishing in last place last year Ikin went away and thought over Lonard’s comments, and about his game for this year’s tournament, and adjusted.
“I started down this path I did last year and realised I needed to get out of my own way and that I need to try to score better with the game I’ve got,” he said.
Every golfer at this level, he realised, had the great shot in them. The one in five from a difficult lie that stops rolling next to the pin. The trick was scoring when they were not coming off the stick so well.
“Sometimes you fall into the trick of trying to play those shots,” he said.
“It’s like a chip and chase in footy. A lot can do it, it’s the big play, but it might work only one in five.
“So instead of making bogey you make triple bogey. Being disciplined in your decision making is imperative in golf.”
It is the same mentality he brings to his life, to NRL360, and that this week he brought it to his golf.
He went around the first two days at five over and 14 strokes ahead of last place. In a 156-man field, and a hell of a long way from last.
Oh, you bet it was beautiful.