http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/07/1083911414140.html
Dread Kennedy
May 8, 2004
Powerhouse: Newcastle second-rower Ben Kennedy in action against premiers Penrith in the opening game of this season at Penrith Park. Photo: Brendan Esposito
Ben Kennedy may be fierce but he's not fearless. He hates sharks. He's scared of flying. He can't stand the thought of children getting sick. He fears the salary cap may force him out of Newcastle. Oh, and he hates losing. He definitely hates losing. Jessica Halloran reports.
His imposing figure can encourage unrequited trouble off the field. The sheer size of Ben Kennedy can make boozed-up blokes want to fight him in pubs, just to see what it is like to try to bring down a seemingly fearless footballer.
"It's silly isn't it? Ridiculous," Kennedy says, shrugging his shoulders. "With the fighting and stuff like that, you're used to going to bars. When you were a bit younger, it used to piss you off and that. Now that I have been through it so many times, you just realise that they are losers and it's a better result just to walk away. I guess you show you are a better man."
On the field, there are not too many better men than Kennedy. Especially when he has the football cradled in his arms, sharp blue eyes narrowed, breath being punched in an out of his lungs. He's a 188-centimetre, 103-kilogram cannonball in red and blue.
He's a threatening presence. Just picture the slow-motion replays of him on television, his face screwed up, a waterfall of expletives flowing out of his mouth. Retired referee Bill Harrigan once said the Knights second-rower was one of the game's serial sledgers, likening him to an exploding volcano when decisions went against him or his team.
And it doesn't help that Kennedy hates not being on the winning team. In conversation, he spits the word "losing" out.
"Horrible," Kennedy says of defeat. Any defeat. "In any game, playing cards or anything, even watching my young bloke play footy now, you know, I have to bite my lip. I hate him losing, I hate myself losing, it's just me I guess. Definitely, definitely hate losing."
Despite his imposing size, the dummy spits, the trademark grimace and glare, Kennedy insists he is a shy, passionate and emotional man. The man off the field is quite different to the beast on it.
And despite his fierce looks, Kennedy is not fearless. He hates flying. He strangles aeroplane seat handrests, starts sweating, presses his great frame into the seats, those same sharp blue eyes wide with dread. At the hint of turbulence, his voice booms across the cabin: "Nup, we are gone this time, it's all over."
And he means it? "Tongue in cheek, but yes, I get a sweat up. Everyone sees me and laughs, and I say, 'You won't be laughing when we fall out of the sky'."
He hates sharks. He has tried surfing - once. "I've ridden once, and I never even got up on it. I just can't relax. I see rocks under there, and I'm jumpin' about rocks and shadows. I just can't relax . . . hopeless."
Kennedy talks quite shamelessly of his fears. And quite passionately. So where did the passion come from?
He found some of it at a private school - on the banks of a river at a rowing regatta. For most of his school days in country Casino, Kennedy was a "midget, tiny". But he shot up and after "mucking up" and being a brat at 17, he was sent off to boarding school. At St Joseph's College he found what stirred his passion.
"I'm an emotional, passionate guy, and one of the first things I went to was a regatta, and I'm not even into rowing, the whole school went, the whole school was singing and the songs they sung, how loud they were sung," Kennedy recalls. "The whole school spirit was unbelievable, and that's something I embraced and I am so better off for going to that school. It shocked me in a way. How proud and passionate and emotional these kids were. Shocked me in a really good way. It was great for me to see, and then I got involved in [playing rugby] . . . it probably did make me into the way I am now."
Now, at the age 30, when he walks down the streets of Newcastle where he is the focus of much of the city's passion about league, his six-year-old boy, Bryce, sometimes asks: "Why does everyone look at you Dad?"
"It wasn't smooth sailing to start with [in Newcastle]," Kennedy says of his awkward arrival from Canberra Raiders in 2000 under a cloud of allegations that he took ecstasy. "There were petitions, well from one guy in particular. I'd go out and have a few beers with the boys and there would be remarks. It was pretty hard. One thing I had was the total support of the club."
Kennedy maintains he didn't take the drug and was soon found innocent at a NRL drugs tribunal.
"[Newcastle chairman] Michael Hill said, 'Play like the way you do and they'll end up loving you'."
And so they do. But for how long? Kennedy says he may be sacrificed by the Knights for the world's best player, Andrew Johns.
"Playing in England is a possibility, yeah, it's a possibility. First and foremost, I really want to play here at the Knights. In saying that, we've got Andrew [Johns] coming off contract, a lot of younger blokes. It is going to be hard for them to keep us all together and I totally understand that. One hundred million per cent they've got to sign Andrew Johns and if that means I go, that means I go. But, hopefully, we come to a deal where we stay here. It's not me sacrificing, it's me being sacrificed, but I can understand that."
For the moment, Kennedy is filling in for Johns as captain.
"It just puts a bit more pressure on you, responsibility on and off the field," he says. "I know being captain you really, really, really want to play well, if you are going to have shots at players not playing well."
To get away from league, the fans on the streets, the loudmouths in the pubs, Kennedy gets in his boat and goes fishing. He gets a rush from it, he says wide-eyed. From fishing?
"I do, it's weird," he says. Half smile. "I fish whenever I can. I wish I was [a professional fisherman] . . . Apart from family, the major passion in my life is fishing.
"It comes from the farm. Most nights we'd have a fish. My father lives on the Woronora river in Cronulla, right on the water and [we] cast from his deck. At the farm, we used to dig up a few worms and catch catfish. Grandma would cook up."
While fishing calms him, his family - wife Emma, Bryce, daughter Alex, 5, and Fletcher, 2 - bring him down from footy world to earth.
"Ooh, geez," Kennedy sighs when asked about his family. "I think, you don't realise how much you can love something. I've got a lot of respect for my mum and my family and you realise how much they love you. [Having kids] it's changed me in a way. I can't watch movies where kids get hurt because I always put my kids in that situation. I just can't do it. It really, really, really upsets me to see sick kids.
"I think it puts life into perspective. You know I hate losing, I'm filthy and I won't talk to anyone, but when I get home and the kids run over and give you a cuddle, you think, 'Oh well, I'm all right'."
