Ben Grahams efforts today...

Article in the sydney teletrash the other week. good read.

BIG BOOTS
By Dermot Purgavie

Gridiron may not be our most popular sport, but this Aussie is showing the Yanks how it's done. Dermot Purgavie meets the former Geelong Cat who proves there's life after AFL. Photographed by David Perez Shadi

Sixteen thousand kilometres from Geelong, Ben Graham and his wife, Katie, are tucked into a booth in a suburban American diner working on lunch - a salad big enough to choke a bulldozer - and reflecting on their new life. "I miss my house, my kitchen, my garden and the beach," says Katie, "but we love it here. We're slowly fitting in and becoming an American family. Mind you, I've had my meltdowns - three so far. One was in Wal-Mart. I was buying clothes - we came with virtually nothing because we didn't know if Ben was going to make it - and I was suddenly overwhelmed by what we'd done and the gamble we had taken."

What they'd done was gutsy and chancy. After a dozen years as a star in the Australian Football League, Graham quit the Geelong Cats, uprooted his family and travelled to the other side of the world in the hope of extending his sporting career. It was an implausible mission - playing a different game on another continent where he was unknown and untried and, at the age of 31, hardly prime sports flesh.

Beset by difficulty and doubt, he auditioned for four American football clubs and, in a sport where everyone's a specialist, he eventually won a job as a punter. Impressed by his boot - seasoned in 219 games of Aussie rules, it can launch a ball almost 100 yards -- the New York Jets signed Graham to a cautious, one-year, "show us what you've got" contract, making him the oldest rookie ever to start a season with the National Football League.

It turned out to be a dismal year for the Jets - devastated by injuries, they won only four games while losing 12 -- but Graham emerged from his American season with a solid record and a blossoming reputation as an accomplished athlete with skills that might enliven the game's traditional choreography. In the rankings, he ended up one place ahead of the league's highest-paid punter. His kicking abilities have astonished the coaches and delighted the fans - even when losing, the Jets pull crowds of 75,000 - and his technique seems to exert some sort of ball-wobble voodoo that confuses opponents into fumbling his punts.

The Jets, who have been through five punters in five years, now hope that the 196cm-tall kicker from Oz may become the Bigfoot of the NFL and have signed Graham, now 32, to a long-term deal that will keep him playing football for at least another six years. Or, in field time, another 10 hours or so.

Unlike AFL, where you play a full 120 minutes and may run as much as 12km, American footballers have specialised roles that require their presence in the game and on the pitch only some of the time. And the punter just comes on to kick, working in two-second shifts. That's about how long he has to get his punt off unless he wants to be hammered into the subsoil by a fearsome horde of big, fast, kicker-hating opponents charging from 15 yards away. Graham made 74 punts last season and, with his other duties (holding the ball for the field-goal kicker) he reckons that his actual playing time for the whole 16-match season lasted less than a single AFL game - maybe 100 minutes.

"Back home, people will say, 'Isn't he bored?' 'Doesn't he miss the AFL?' My answer: this is my new game, my new job, my new focus. This is what is expected of me. The only skills I bring to the NFL are my punting and it only happens about four times a game." And, under the terms of his new six-year contract - worth $6.76 million - it works out at more than $15,000 a kick based on last year's performance. If he survives the perils.

continued next post

 

"What I love about this game is that something is riding on every play," says the former Geelong captain. "The AFL is challenging because it's exhausting. In the NFL, the challenging part comes from the size, speed and power of the players who are trying to prevent you from doing what you do. The risk of damage is considerable. American footballers are quick, skilful, tough, strong and smart, and it's alarming to see the rushers coming at you when you have less than two seconds to get your kick away. But in Aussie rules, people are coming at you from all directions. You have to be aware of what's going on around you at all times and you develop good peripheral vision and, so far, I haven't had a punt blocked or taken a hit." That's nice. Last year, 411 NFL players each weighed in at more than 135kg, without their armour.

Australian athletes have been trying their luck in America since at least 1884, when Joe Quinn arrived in Missouri to play baseball for the St Louis Maroons, the first of eight clubs he turned out for over 17 years while working between seasons as an undertaker. Several other Australians have played in the NFL in recent years - Colin Ridgway, Colin Scotts, Mat McBriar - but the man who nourished and encouraged Graham's urge to make it in America was Darren Bennett, who played in the AFL for a dozen years before finding a second career as a record-setting punter for the San Diego Chargers and Minnesota Vikings.

"Darren beat me to win the longest kick competition in 1992," says Graham. "The prize was a trip for two to Los Angeles, and he used it to explore the playing opportunities. Rules is a young man's game - the average career is about five years - but Darren played in the US until he was 40. If he hadn't paved the way, it would have been very easy for me to dismiss playing American football as a pipedream. If he hadn't achieved what he did, it would have been easy for me to stay with Geelong."

Graham's interest in gridiron was first fired by a visiting New York Jets assistant coach who, at the urging of a brother living in Melbourne, went to see Graham play in 1997, filmed him punting and told him he could become a kicker in the NFL. The timing was wrong - he had just re-signed with the Geelong Cats - but he studied the American game, learned the rules and visited the US to see matches. Last year, with his AFL career winding down, he finally decided to come to America and see where his boot would take him.

Graham was hardly a hardship case - in Australia he's a celebrated, prosperous sporting hero with investments that extend from a nursing home to a fish-and-chip shop - but his made-for-Hollywood story is appropriately pathos-tinged. He went alone, leaving his wife and two daughters, Sophie and Rosie, now 6 and 5, behind. "We were apart eight weeks and it was really difficult," says Katie. "The girls missed him so much. In the end, we decided that whatever was going to happen to Ben, we would face it as a family."

After tryouts with the New York Giants, the New England Patriots and the Minnesota Vikings, the Jets invited him to their pre-season training camp and the opportunity to compete for a spot on the squad with a five-season kicker called Micah Knorr. "It was very worrying time," says Graham. "I didn't even have a car, my family was living in a basement flat, I was new to the game and up against a veteran for the job."

On top of that, he was grappling with the immigration bureaucracy to get a work visa, worried by the memory that, in these terror-sensitive times, Molly Meldrum had arrived in Los Angeles with insufficient paperwork and been handcuffed and detained until he could be deported to Melbourne. The visa process, he says, was "a real nightmare".

Then, one Sunday night last summer, he took his wife out to the movies. "When we got out, there were five messages on my phone saying that Knorr had been cut, leaving me with the job." He came, he kicked, he conquered. "Given what we've been through as a family, it's been an amazing journey. It was tough but very worthwhile. It's still hard to believe I'm sitting here now," he says.

Now they live in a rented house on Long Island, a 45-minute train ride from New York City, and have been eager tourists, rubbernecking in Times Square, picnicking in Central Park and taking boat trips around Manhattan. He enjoys his anonymity here, although, at the Statue of Liberty ferry terminal, he was recognised by Russell Crowe, who announced himself a Jets fan. But for Sophie and Rosie, there is something even more thrilling than movie stars - snow, and lots of it. "What keeps our minds off missing Australia is that the kids are so happy here," says Katie.

After a month's holiday in Geelong, Graham is now in pre-season training getting the strongest left leg in the league back into game shape, and preparing for the Jets' 2006 NFL season debut against the Tennessee Titans next Sunday. All the while, he's working on the physics of punting a 0.4kg ball into the capricious winds generated inside the Jets' bowl-shaped stadium. While quarterbacks track the stock prices, kickers monitor The Weather Channel.

The ball used in the NFL is a different shape and more difficult to kick than the one in AFL, although he can boot it an impressive 85 yards, which is 10 yards shorter than he can kick the bigger, rounder, softer AFL ball. However, in the punting business, there are factors other than distance. One is hang time. The longer your kick stays in the air, the further your team-mates can rush downfield beneath it to pressure the other side's punt receiver and his protectors. The hang of one of Graham's kicks has been timed at an astonishing 5.6 seconds, and Mike Westoff, the Jets' special teams coach, pronounced it the finest punt he had ever seen in his 23 years in the NFL. "You can break a punt down like a jigsaw," says Graham. "If you make all the pieces come together, you get a perfect punt."

Besides the hang time, opposing receivers have also had problems catching his punts. "My punting style and my technique seem to put a different spin on the ball than they are used to and they have had trouble handling my kicks," he says. "In my first nine games, they fumbled eight of my punts."

"It's an amazing story when you think about what he's done and accomplished so far, and he's only going to get better," says the team's former head coach, Herman Edwards, who planned to use Graham as a not-so-secret weapon because of his abilities beyond the average punter's playbook.

But at the end of a disastrous season ("We got smashed in Kansas City in the first game and never seemed able to get back into it"), Edwards and the Jets parted company. Then, in a vintage Hollywood ending, Edwards was replaced by Eric Mangini, the 35-year-old defensive coordinator of the New England Patriots and the former Jets' assistant who had filmed Graham in Australia and urged him to come to the NFL years before.

"It's almost mystical," says Graham. "I said to Katie, how unreal would it be if Eric was appointed coach by the Jets. I've been in contact with him for the last nine years."

Finally, they're together, the league's oldest rookie and its youngest head coach, preparing for a new season of combat in a rugged and unforgiving sport. "It's been very satisfying," says Graham. "But you've got to prove yourself in every game. It never ends."

 

check out nyfooty.com or afl.com.au for highlights or rules/explanations of the game....however the best way to understand it is to watch it and work it out that way.