Taylor Mehlhaff, Non-Lonesome Kicker
The crux of Rodger Sherman’s 2013 expose on the breeding of kickers is exclusivity within the kicker universe: while kickers look like the other 99% of us who aren’t professional athletes, only a select few of us are willing to pay the price (in time and, far more importantly, the training and recruiting fees) to be elite kickers. It’s not just ability; it’s affordability.
A different part of Sherman’s piece stood out. Like any/every sports journalist, Sherman came from Northwestern and student-reported on their football team, taking note of a splinter group:
One cold day, I assumed I’d find the team practicing in their toasty indoor facility. But when I opened the door, the team wasn’t there — just the kickers were. They were all alone on this field, nobody watching but one another as they honed their craft. Kickers and punters, I realized, exist in their own self-contained sphere, from their isolated practices to their secluded spot on the sidelines during games.
Their secluded spot on the sidelines.
On October 13th, 2007, my wife Sarah and I watched the Wisconsin-Northern Illinois game from field level. Sarah had scored us access as part of UW’s guest coach program, despite us being neither guests nor coaches.
Wisconsin won 44–3. My day was made when I barked “What’s the word, Bar?” at Barry Alvarez, and he informed me that the Huskies’ return man had broken his leg near an artery and could face amputation. (Strangest first conversation ever. I’m not even sure if that’s a valid medical observation. He could’ve sold me real estate on Mars in that moment.)
As guest coaches, we didn’t run clipboards into huddles, flash hand signals at the quarterback, or pass water bottles. Not a single ass was slapped courtesy of our hands. We were cordially penned inside a three-foot square just past the end of the bench.

Directly in front of us? The kicker’s net.
In 2007, the Badgers’ kicker was Taylor Mehlhaff, an all-Big Ten selection who would earn All-American honors that year and get drafted by the New Orleans Saints. Mehlhaff didn’t appear intimidating: uniformed, yes, but at 5' 10", he split the height difference between me and Sarah. As Sherman said, he looked like the other 99% of us.
Then he started kicking.
During televised broadcasts of football games, the cameras will find the kicker’s net only in the moments before a critical kick: the kicker tries one or two boots, then trots onto the field. What does kicker do the rest of the time?
If you’re Taylor Mehlhaff, you keep kicking.
Starting well before the opening kickoff, Mehlhaff silently obeyed a rhythm: kick, retrieve, tee up. Kick, retrieve, tee up. Over and over. And over. After each extra point or field goal was done, it was a quiet beeline to the net: kick, retrieve, tee up. Mehlhaff is from South Dakota, but if you had told us there was a suffocating language barrier between him and his teammates, we would have given understanding nods.
Somewhere between 60 and 2,000 uniformed Badger football players stood on that sideline, Mehlhaff kicking by himself, to himself, with himself.
“Directly in front of us” may have undersold our closeness to this show. Parents helping their kids ride a bike are further from the metalworks than we were. Each kick hit the back of the net so violently that the entire apparatus jolted off the ground. Forget focusing on the game action; it was like someone repeatedly taking defibrillator paddles to your attention span.

It was almost exactly ten years after Adam Sandler stigmatized the profession with The Lonesome Kicker; can you help but spot kickers’ socializations, or lack thereof? For halftime, a coach walked Mehlhaff to the locker room, his first obvious contact with another human. (He stayed with the team for all of halftime, noteworthy because prior Badger kicker Vitaly Pisetsky would roam through the marching band’s halftime performance and launch moonshots at will.)
We may have seen Mehlhaff kick several hundred times, maybe even a thousand. Each time as quiet as a monk — oh, that our future emergency medical providers would have such focus.
Adam Sandler: of course kickers have friends. What does a friend bring you? Solace, affirmation, and respite. Mehlhaff’s closest friend that day was kick, retrieve, tee up, and that’s better companionship than many of us get from our social net. We’d all take the peace of a ritual like that over half-assed text message affectations, wouldn’t we?
Mehlhaff was cut by the Saints in 2008 when he couldn’t beat out Martin Gramatica, but was re-signed when Gramatica suffered a season-ending (and, lo, career-ending) groin injury. His Saints career (and, lo, NFL career) lasted three games, wrapping with a field goal and four extra points in a 37–32 win over the San Diego Chargers in London.
Four extra points, but not five. In an era where London games were rare and missed extra points even more so, he shanked one during the Chargers game, and the networks happily hopped over to Game Break it. Never mind his ability to hit 77-yard field goals; this one was enough to send Mehlhaff packing two days later. It would be his last in-game action as a pro.
Twenty-six days after Mehlhaff’s NFL career ended, the 2008 version of the Badgers hosted another late-season non-conference game, this time against Cal Poly. Despite missing two extra points in regulation, Cal Poly took Wisconsin into overtime and scored a touchdown on the first play — only to clank the extra point off the upright.
The Badgers coolly marched downfield and scored their own touchdown, leading to the most curious of sports moments: the walkoff extra point. A freshman kicker named Philip Welch booted it through the uprights.
There’s no word on if Welch, or his heir apparent Kyle French, or his compatriot Jack Russell, or their supplanter Rafael Gaglianone are monastic like Mehlhaff. (Let’s face it: Gaglianone has already shattered that illusion.) Mehlhaff is back with the Badgers as a special teams coach. We can assume what Wisconsin kickers are now doing when the camera is away: kicking, retrieving, teeing up.
In a profession where an All-American only earns three games as a pro and everyone assumes they can do your job because you look 99%-ish, kick, retrieve, tee up is a fine friend to have.