Life is sweet for the Honey Badger ahead of Hong Kong Sevens
Charismatic Nick Cummins brings his brand of one-liners and Aussie humour to Hong Kong
“You’ve got to be body ready for the Sevens, you’ve got to be in the best possible shape or you’ll blow a gasket or twang a hamburgler,” says Nick Cummins, aka the “Honey Badger”.
He’s been pushing the boat out with a punishing training regime in the past few weeks that has included running through deep snow in Norway and living like a Scandinavian Tarzan: “You gotta drill through the ice and wheel out dinner. It’s minus 33 degrees, you’re dressed up like a pet lizard. You can only wrestle so many reindeer,” the lanky winger said.
It was all about the underdog. There is this little animal and it won’t back down from a blue. There is a documented case where it took on a fully grown lion. The Honey Badger clawed the canastas out of the big fella
At polar extremes, he’s been training on an air strip in the Australian outback. “I had a couple of runs at the airport on the red dirt. When they are [planes] coming in you know about it because they come in pretty quick, so you’ve got to dart off to the side before they clean you up.”
Cummins, 28, was on Saturday morning called into the Australian team for the Hong Kong Sevens after 19-year-old Henry Hutchison was ruled out with a minor foot injury.
Despite his maverick regime and training in the Australian base in Narrabeen, Cummins had orginally missed selection for Hong Kong, which he had been “as keen as mustard” to experience again, having last appeared here in 2007.