KSMG Sports
By Nick Walshaw, The Sunday TelegraphJY Bond has a strong message for those NRL pretenders who think they can make it in the US.
They should prepare themselves for a brief conversation that finishes with a cardboard box. Not a big one, either. Just enough space for your cleats, toiletries, maybe a training sweatshirt if you can pinch one. But more than that? “Pal, go line up outside our NFL Team Store with all the other supporters.”
Because, once again, that’s exactly where you live.
“And to describe the feeling? It’s shithouse,” Jy Bond deadpans. “You’re standing inside the locker room, your box tucked under one arm just like in the movies, thinking ‘f…, what am I doing here?’ And I don’t just mean with your football. Suddenly you’re questioning where the next dollar will come from. Where you’ll go that night. You don’t even have a home anymore, but too bad . . . pack your shit and go.”
And for the past three years, this is exactly what Bond has done. This towering, thickset Melburnian – the son of 1970s Richmond star Graeme Bond, no less – quietly humping his swag around the US in a blur of playbooks, punts and promises. A journey of full NFL rosters and empty cardboard boxes.
There are four, maybe five, punters who live within a bee’s appendage of an NFL contract. Jy Bond is one of them.
Twice he has signed NFL contracts. Twice receiving a box before the season even began.
Yet still he persists.
This anonymous 32-year-old toiler, an Australian underdog story right down to the VB bottle opener on his keyring, kicks away knowing he’s only one eye-catching performance from that world where contemporaries drive BMWs, own Florida beach homes and, in the case of the Oakland Raiders’ Shane Lechler, earn $3 million a year.
