Paul Kent: Broncos have picked up real gem as Ben Ikin leaves NRL 360 for step back into club world

Fascinated by intelligence, intrigued by alternative thinkers, Ben Ikin has always had an thirst for information. And the Broncos have got a real gem. Paul Kent pays tribute his NRL 360 co-host.

Ben Ikin and Paul Kent

Billy Beane is as good a place as any to start.

Not Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane in the Hollywood movie, which is the way the conversation begins with most when they talk about Moneyball, but before then when Moneyball was a non-fiction book that was challenging the way teams thought about sport.

Recruitment, specifically, and how they assessed talent.

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Ben Ikin and Paul Kent have been great viewing on NRL 360 since 2013.

Rugby league treated statistics lightly at the time so I wrote a column asking could the game ever follow tack, identifying talent as much for the stats they could find that delivered on performance, as what the trained eye could see.

Something in it interested Ben Ikin enough to call, wanting more information.

We knew of each other more than we actually knew each other, but the clue to the future was in the phone call.

He was a man always after more information, as I came to learn. Fascinated by intelligence, intrigued by alternative thinkers, the mind always open.

What followed was a conversation that soon became apparent that, respectfully, there was more to Ikin than the basic footballer.

So when NRL360 was set to film in 2013 and Ikin was thrown up as the co-host, it was a comfortable fit.

He did not come with the normal prejudices.

That’s how it began, and it gets interrupted on Wednesday night, but does not end, when he hosts his final NRL360 program before starting as the Brisbane Broncos’ new general manager of football on Thursday.

Ben Ikin and Paul Kent ham it up for a recent retro round.

Who knows why he took the job, which is tougher than anything experienced here, other than for the search he put himself on sometime after he retired as a player in 2004, still only 27, when he realised there was still a whole life to be lived and he was not going to be defined as an ex-footballer for whatever was left.

From the first phone call, the first show, it has always been about the search for more knowledge, more understanding.

There has never been a spreadsheet he did not like. If he discovers a sheet of paper covered in decimal points, he is fascinated.

How it carries over into a football club remains to be seen.

The slippery world of recruitment and contracts is a dark art and the Broncos’ failure at this over the past five to six years is why they needed to find someone like Ikin to make it right again.

If there is trouble ahead, it is that, as a man of unbending integrity who still believes in truth, he will be vastly outnumbered.

When it comes to retention and recruitment, most lie for practice. If others are caught telling the truth, it’s a fluke.

Into this comes a man of rigid routine, the change to his daily life set to be nothing short of small trauma.

Ikin would make weekly visits down to Sydney for the show.

For nine years he would fly down on Monday morning and check into the Urban hotel, where he now holds the record for most nights stayed, and is treated accordingly, and then a short walk to the office.

Meeting at 11am. Midday lunch at Joe’s at the TAFE next door, always an eggplant sandwich with a long black coffee, three-quarters full.

No more than three coffees a day. Hot water and supplements bought from a witch doctor before he goes on air. How his long suffering wife Beth lives with him none of us will ever know.

He then wrote the show, cramming three hours work into six hours, occasionally popping his head up to ask the best way to ask a question, phrase an interview, before more typing.

Simple stuff.

Back to hotel room after the show, into his button-up pyjamas by 9pm, and reading either a self-help book or a fantasy novel until, sometime between 9.30pm and 9.45pm, he is startled awake by his kindle smacking into his face as he drifted off, telling him it is time for lights out.

Then do it all again the next day.

It went like this for nine years, the only upheaval coming last year when he was late to his desk and called saying his glasses, which we suspect he does not really need, were broken.

Well … yeah?

You should have seen the fallout.

Ikin with future father-in-law Wayne Bennett and Darren Lockyer in 2000.

It raised a five-bell alarm, his routine thrown deeply out of rhythm. There were undertones of panic, a genuine threat he might not make the 6.30pm start.

Quickly the show’s producer and executive producer were seconded to locate an optometrist who could repair his broken frames, unaware that they were unusual frames making it particularly difficult.

Much of Sydney copped a call before an optometrist was found just down the road at, of all places, a St Leonards clinic, who just happened to have the rare replacement part. It was sitting in his drawer and he was thinking he thought he’d never get rid of it.

That’s the way it often is with Ikey. Things have a way of working out for him and the good guys can actually win.

Originally published as Paul Kent: Broncos have picked up real gem as Ben Ikin leaves NRL 360 for step back into club world