Nicknames

Having a look through Storm Front (Melbourne Storm's Official Magazine) the other day has prompted me to try and rectify a pretty big deficiency in the team - an abundance of crappy nicknames!

Steven Bell’s nickname is ‘Belly’. Yawn. Alex Chan’s nickname is ‘Chany’. Yawn. Robbie Kearns’ nickname is ‘Kearnsy’. Yawn. Can we see a pattern emerging!? Apart from Sione Finefeuiaki’s (which is the totally awesome ‘C-Dog’), almost everyone has got a moniker that needs changing real soon. A nickname should be a pointer towards the personality of a player, not just an excuse to add an ‘O’ or ‘Y’ to the end of their surname.

Now, the Stomers seem like a pretty bright bunch, so I’ll let them sort out the issue themselves and look forward to reading a whole bunch of new nicknames in the next issue of Storm Front. In the meantime here’s a few suggestions to get the ball rolling…

Matt King’s nickname is of course ‘Kingy’. I think it should be something like ‘Whopper’. To get Whopper I went from ‘King’ to ‘Burger King’ and then their most popular burger popped into my head. Matt’s a big dude and he’s also a pretty humble and straightforward guy, so I think being named after a big, honest hamburger suits him well. Also, yelling out ‘Go Whopppaahhhh!’ is going to be fun.

Ryan Hoffman’s nickname is of course 'Hoffy' (it would’ve been hard choosing between it and ‘Hoffo’!). I’m going to go with ‘Hoof’ for his new one because I like to think of him as a charging bull or galloping horse or some sort of animal with hooves that runs fast. Anyway, hopefully by him becoming 'Hoof' or 'The Hoof Man' even, he'll grow into the role of a big, bad metres-getter.

See? It’s not so hard...