The Placekicker

Although this story contains things from the world in which we live, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The events that take place in this story are entirely the product of my imagination.

The year was 1988. I was a freshman at a different university than the one I would later transfer to, and in the last week in October we traveled to Oak Ridge to play the team I had grown up rooting for. They had not offered me a scholarship due to the fact they had several kickers already on the payroll. Back in those days, my school was one of the doormats of our conference; our opponent was ranked in the top ten in the nation; we were 3 and 5 and dwelling in the cellar of our conference.

I think they actually took it easy on us because they beat us only 45–10. I hit an early field goal from 40 yards on fourth and goal after our inept offense went backward after having first and goal at their 2-yard line, and we scored a late and meaningless touchdown against their third-team scrubs. This was actually a pretty decent accomplishment because their scrubs would easily have been our starters. At my school, which actually had real entrance requirements and prided itself on academic prowess, the scrubs on the other team might have flunked out after finals, but as long as they went to class they would have been our starters. So after we punched it in with two minutes left and the stands half empty, I scored the last point of the game with the point after. I had contributed almost half our points to go with fullback John Hall’s 3- yard plunge.

After time ran out, I made the familiar walk of the losing team across the field to congratulate and shake hands with their players, specifically their punter and kicker, Mark Holmes and Randy Reynolds. There was a sort of fraternity between the kickers and punters in the conference; we were part of a very small group of specialists. Our jobs were difficult although we made the skill look very easy. We were all under-appreciated and too often criticized. Unlike any other person on the field, our performance was under ridiculous scrutiny and our treatment by fans tended to be black or white; it was feast or famine. A quarterback could throw interceptions, running backs could fumble, linemen could miss blocks, and defensive backs could get burned deep for touchdowns, and fans just acted like they had made a little mistake and something bad had happened to them. “He was trying.”

But if a kicker missed a field goal or a punter shanked a kick, it was like he was being lazy and not trying and was a piece of shit. I tell people now life as a kicker boiled down to this simple fact: depending on how well you kicked, you either got all your beer paid for (if somebody actually recognized you) or you received death threats. There wasn’t much middle ground. But we kickers knew better. And so did our teammates and most of our coaches.

To be sure, there were always a few knuckle-dragging coaches who yelled at us like they yelled at linemen for being lazy, but most coaches respected us and knew the pressure we played under was greater than any other player on the field. Our teammates always encouraged us and would always tell us they would never want our job. In my four years playing D-1 football at two universities in a top conference, I never once got criticized by a teammate for missing a kick or shanking[1] a punt. Not once. My teammmates were solid, and would defend me to the death when we were together in public and some asshole made a disparaging comment.

So as kickers we always greeted each other during warm-ups and congratulated each other after games. We never pulled against another kicker. We never rooted for him to miss or shank one. If the opposing punter killed a punt inside our five yard line or put a ball into the “coffin corner” and pinned us at the ten, we silently applauded.[2] If the other place kicker beat your team on a last second field goal, then in a secret way you were thrilled for the entire fraternity of kickers; your attitude was, “well, more power to him. We should never have let the game get to the point where he could beat us with a field goal.”

And so I greeted Holmes and Reynolds at midfield and we shook hands and wished one another good luck for the rest of the season. Both of these guys were future All-Americans and would play on Sundays. I then found Coach Harkins and we exchanged pleasantries. Harkins had been a teammate of my father’s when both played on the team back in the seventies. He had not recruited me because he already had the two future All-Americans, and anyway most programs felt it a waste to give a kicker a full scholarship when the position was fraught with uncertainty. If a coach already had two good kickers on his roster, it was unlikely he would give a scholarship to anyone else until the two starters had graduated.

Most kickers started their careers as walk-ons.[3] And this was because kickers, unlike most other positions, did not always carry their high school prowess into Division 1. There was a big difference between kicking in a small high school stadium with the other team making little effort to block the kick and kicking the ball in huge, 70,000 seat stadiums, with unpredictable and swirling wind currents and thousands screaming in your ears and other millions watching you on television. So if you got a scholarship offer as a kicker, you were not likely to turn it down in order to walk on at some other school. And if one were fortunate enough to get that offer from a good academic school that had a poor football program, one did not refuse it. One did not look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. Such was my case.

The reason kicking scholarships were few and far in between was great kicking in high school did not always translate to great kicking at the Division 1 level. In high school, if one went to a 5A (highest classification at the time) Texas high school like I had, one could kick in front of at most 15,000 people every Friday night. On Saturdays in college at the D-1 level in the SEC, you were performing in front of possibly 80,000. This fact tended to tighten a person up both mentally and physically, especially if you were a kicker on whom every eye in the place was focused each time you took the field. This fact alone made kicking unlike any other position on the field.

As the reader will acknowledge once he or she gives it thought, on every play, fans follow the movement of the ball; you watch whoever is handling the ball. Thus, the observer never saw what an offensive or defensive lineman was doing and missed the numerous errors in blocking or tackling those guys committed. Even quarterbacks, running backs and receivers got a break when they threw interceptions, or fumbled or dropped passes, respectively.

Defensive backs seemed to have it the best. Defensive backs routinely screwed up their responsibilities in coverage, bit on a pump-fake and got burned deep for a touchdown, and then immediately looked at a teammate as if it was the other guy who had screwed up, or dropped a possible interception that hit them right in the chest after which they would pound the ground or their own heads in apparent disgust with themselves. Nobody ever screamed at or got mad at those guys. Part of the reason for that was those guys were some of the best pure athletes on the field and typically had the best speed and reactions of anyone on any given team. You try hanging with someone who knows exactly where they are running at top speed without allowing the guy to get some kind of separation from you. So they were typically forgiven for not having the slightest ability to catch a football.

But on kicking plays, it was just three actors really involved in the play, the snapper, the holder and the kicker, and their performance of their respective duties was under a microscope. No one watched to see if the linemen or guys on the edges made their blocks. No one faulted any of the defensive players for not blocking the kick.

The snap was made by a guy who used both hands to essentially throw the ball through his legs a distance of seven yards, to a target approximately three feet in diameter. If he got it anywhere within that circle, the holder (typically a backup Quarterback or another player with good hands, like a Wide Receiver) would handle it. The snapper worked on this skill all day at practice, like some golfer hitting wedges to the 100 yard marker on the driving range. That was all he had to do. He would do this inane skill for hours. All he had to worry about was getting dizzy from too much bending over and looking through his legs at practice and of course getting blown up by the nose guard during games. Yet it was a rare skill to possess. Long-snappers could be any size — skinny and tall, short and stumpy, it didn’t matter — as long as they could whip the ball on a line back to the holder or punter. The opposing fans could always tell who the long snapper was running out on the field because he was usually the one guy who stuck out when compared to everyone else: “Hey, who’s that real skinny dude wearing number 62? Oh, he’s the deep snapper.” But guys had earned full rides on this skill alone. Several were my best friends in college.

The holder got to sit on one knee, and his job was to catch this seven yard snap (that was coming to him spinning like a pass) and place the ball vertically on the ground in front of him. The one added skill he needed to master, once the ball was placed down on the turf — one which was integral to a successful kick and immortalized in the movie Ace Ventura — was to rotate the ball ever so slightly enough so the laces were not facing the kicker. This was because the part of the ball that had the laces on it was a dead part of the ball. If you kicked that part of the ball, you lost a lot of distance and could not get the ball elevated. So the holder tried to make the laces face the goal posts, but as long as he got them away from your foot you had to be satisfied, even though I learned early in a career of over 100,000 kicks that the ball would drift in the direction the laces were facing; if the laces were facing left, the ball would drift left and vice versa. But the shorter the kick, the less this mattered. Even if the holder screwed up and you kicked the laces, it wouldn’t usually matter on an extra point. But if the kick was of some distance, the ball would die or start to turn left or right, and when you were kicking into the wind, any ball that started to drift one way or the other would keep drifting — wide and sometimes short of the goal posts.

The uninitiated — meaning all fans and most of the team — didn’t realize this all was supposed to happen in less than two seconds from the time the ball was snapped until your foot hit the ball, so the holder did not have the luxury of taking his time. Still, the holder had a pretty manageable job on field goals. The only time he would be in trouble was if he dropped a good snap, but strangely, if this happened, he never faced the vitriol a kicker faced after a missed field goal. I say “strange” because catching a football in two hands from seven yards is much easier than kicking a field goal.

So what did a placekicker do? The kicker had to focus his eyes on the spot where the ball was supposed to be placed down by the holder. Before the ball was snapped you were looking at the holder’s finger marking the spot where he planned to place the ball. You only knew the ball was being snapped when you saw the holder’s hand come up and you saw movement out of your peripheral vision; the ball was never snapped on kicks at the sound of the cadence like an offensive play; it was snapped when the snapper was ready to snap it. The instant the ball was snapped you had to start approaching the imaginary spot. You just carried through with your approach to the spot and trusted that the holder would have the ball there when your kicking foot swung through the area. In many ways, this was the same thing little league hitters do when facing a freakish pitcher; they have to start their swings as soon as the ball is being released or the ball will be in the catcher’s mit and the hitter will be late.

When the ball appeared there on the ground you aimed at a spot about two to three inches along the bottom side of the ball and you made your motion, much like a golf swing. The NCAA ball — unlike the NFL ball — had a white stripe on each pointed end, and this made it easier for the kicker to hit the spot. A right-footed kicker stepped off first with his left foot, took a quicker and stronger second step with the right, and planted the left foot next to the ball. You kicked through that spot, kept your head down, and followed through with your leg and only looked up after the ball was long gone. There were countless times when I was on the spot and had actually swung my leg back and wondered if the ball was going to be there, when at the last possible moment the ball would appear, sitting there for a nanosecond before I hit it. If the ball was late for some reason, there were times when your brain actually had several successive thoughts blasting through it as you approached the ball, like “where the hell is the ball?” or “why the hell is this taking so long?” or “This is gonna be like Charlie Brown and I’m gonna fall on my ass!” to “Did Coach call for a fake and they didn’t tell me?” But usually the ball would eventually appear on the ground.

Before you did all of the above, you had to measure off seven yards from the ball, step off three steps back and two over to form your approach angle and, lastly, take notice of what the wind, if any, was doing. The wind did matter, despite what most coaches always claimed. Sometimes you felt the wind at your location doing the exact opposite of what the flags on top of the goalposts were telling you. You selected a target somewhere way up in the stands or on the scoreboard beyond the goal posts; if the wind was right to left, you moved your target right, and vice versa. The longer the distance, the more you moved your target out to the right or left.

This is the same thing I would learn years later when training with long-range rifles in the military. Footballs and rifle rounds are both affected by wind. It’s a fact of life, a fact of physics. But our football kickers and our military snipers make it look so damn simple. You did all of this mental calculating while the play clock was winding down and your linemen were getting set, and the defensive players were yelling profanities about your mother or girlfriend, and telling you that you were going to miss it. As long as they did not hit you when you were deemed “defenseless” while in the kicking motion, no one ever got a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct for what they said. That was just part of the game and you needed to develop a thick skin. And whether you were playing at home or on the road, the cacophony of sound exploding through your ears was deafening. So kicking field goals was much more complicated a skill than it appeared to the know-it-all observers.

But what fed this misperception was that over the last two decades, kickers had made the field goal a joke of success. The percentage of kicks made had gone up astronomically during the period from 1970–1990, such that the NCAA had gone through a fit of rules changing designed to bring some sense of drama back into field goal kicking. It all started in 1989, when they took away the field goal tee, that little black, square piece of rubber from whence sixty-plus yarders were routinely launched in the 70s on the flat lands of Texas in the wind-driven Southwest Conference.[4] But the result of the NCAA taking away the kicking tee was the percentage of kicks made went up.

So in 1991, the NCAA responded again by narrowing the goal posts from high school width to the width of the NFL goal posts, but they left the hash marks where they were. This made the target smaller and created more of an angle when kicking from the hash marks. The kickers responded to this conspiracy by yet again making a higher percentage of field goals.

We kickers joked that the next thing they would do was limit the number of field goals you could attempt in a game or make us kick them from the sideline. In all seriousness though, I still concluded it was actually more difficult to kick field goals in college because the NFL hash marks were the same width as the goal posts, while NCAA hashes were well outside the goal posts. This was another thing almost all fans didn’t realize. An NFL kicker essentially lined up the same way and at the same angle relative to the goal posts on every kick, regardless of where he was or what the distance of the kick was. An NFL kicker never had to deal with the crazy angles you sometimes were presented with in college, especially when kicking from very close in. From say, 25 yards from the right hash mark, you felt like you were aiming across the field.

Even with all of this, college kickers continued to make a mockery of the NCAA’s efforts, making upwards of 85 to 90 percent of their kicks. So fans got used to this success rate. Kickers made it look so damn easy that fans began to believe it was easy. So when you actually missed a kick, you looked like an idiot. The analogy would be when Tiger Woods hits a drive in the rough, the gallery starts yelling, “What the hell is wrong with him! Dumbass can’t hit the fairway?”

This victim-of-their-own-success situation made kickers on the college level the scapegoats of choice when there was a botched field goal or punt, and it led coaches to be very stingy with their scholarships. Plus, as with the NFL, kicking was the one position where the supply truly did outweigh the demand; there were many more guys out there than open kicking spots on Division 1 teams. One typically had to walk on and show coaches he could handle the stress of kicking on the college level. One felt fortunate indeed if any D1 school offered a scholarship, so when my school offered me one, I jumped at it.

All of this meant there were no hard feelings from me toward Coach Harkins for not having offered me a scholarship. He warmly greeted me, complimented me on my kicks that day, and wished me good luck for the rest of the season. I didn’t know at that time that three years later he would be my head coach after I had transferred from my previous school.

It was strange the way it worked. If you missed a big kick and someone thought it affected the outcome, you could expect to return to your dorm room and see the message light blinking on the phone. In those days before cell phones, the school listed everyone’s dorm room telephone number in a campus-wide directory. The first time it happened, you heard the Jack Daniels-infused cowards cursing your lineage and hanging up. In the internet age, I call them keyboard heroes. You wondered for an instant how they got your number, and then remembered it was listed in the campus directory. Of course, none of these guys ever left their names or actually came to your door to voice their criticisms of your performance. If it happened again, you just deleted everything without listening.

On the other hand, these same people would come out of the woodwork and want to buy you drinks after you made a game winner. They would want their pictures taken with you and be slapping you on the back. And all you really wanted was to be left alone.

I had no respect for either group. I didn’t need their accolades and I did not want their criticism. They were those cold and timid souls Teddy Roosevelt so eloquently said knew neither victory nor defeat.

To be continued.

[1] “Shank” means to hit the ball off the side of your foot, making it go way wide to the side of your kicking leg. Just like in golf, if you are a right handed golfer and you hit a shot straight right, it is called a shank. I point this out because I routinely hear fans use the term to describe any bad kick. A shank goes wide to the side of the kicking leg; a “pull” is a miss to the opposite side. Even veteran announcers mess this up.

[2] The “coffin corner” was a term used in my day to describe a punt where the punter would either aim left or right and purposefully kick the ball out of bounds as close to the end zone as possible to keep the kick returner from fielding the ball and running it back. This required more skill and precision than the modern day technique of the so-called “rugby kick,” where a punter today will drop the ball and kick it with the point of the ball hitting the top of his foot to get a backward rotation, making the ball hit the turf and either hop straight up or actually bounce backward; for instance, if you aimed left and you shanked it, it went into the end zone for a touchback, and if you pulled it, the opponent got the ball well up the sideline from where you were aiming.

[3] The term walk-on is used in sports, particularly American college athletics, to describe an athlete who becomes part of a team without being actively recruited beforehand or awarded an athletic scholarship. This results in the differentiation between “walk-on” players and “scholarship” players.

[4] In 1976 in one game, Tony Franklin of Texas A&M kicked two field goals of over sixty yards (64 and 65) , shattering the record for longest field goal in NCAA history. The next season, Russell Erxleben of Texas nailed a 67 yarder, which was equaled two weeks later by Arkansas’ Steve Little. 67 yards still stands as the longest ever D-1 field goal nearly 40 years later. In a 1976 D-1 AA game, Abilene Christian’s Ove Johansson kicked a monstrous 69 yard field goal. In fact, Franklin and Johansson’s kicks all came on the same day, October 16, 1976. All these kicks came from a tee and were made in the state of Texas, except for Little’s kick in Fayetteville. In fact, Franklin, Erxleben and Little all had multiple 60 plus yard field goals on their resumes.

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