{Kic K ing a nd Screaming}
too. “The ramifications of missing a short one are much worse,” she says.
the floating voices of radio announcers can be heard, reporting on other games that day where some kickers are coping with pressure-filled kicks more success- fully than others. Thirty miles away, the Washington Redskins’ Graham Gano gets ready to attempt a game-tying 51- yard field goal against the Green Bay Packers, with about 6½ minutes re- maining in the game. Nowadays, there is not a kicker in the league who hasn’t made a 50-yarder, and expectations have correspondingly grown. Gano misses. “You gotta make that,” groans Red-
M
skins radio analyst Sonny Jurgensen, the Hall of Fame quarterback whose ca- reer spanned 17 years and who played in an era where a successful 50-plus yard- er was a rarity, out of reach for all but the elite kickers. A few minutes later, Gano has another attempt to tie the game, this time from 45 yards. “He wouldn’t dare miss two in a row,”
Jurgensen says, just before the ball is snapped. Gano’s kick is good, and the kicker escapes further wrath, culminat- ing his day by booting a winning field goal in overtime. It comes after Green Bay’s kicker, Mason Crosby, raises eye- brows by missing a 53-yarder at the end of regulation that would have won the game. The ball hits the right upright, a miss of about six inches. That thin line between triumph and
catastrophe preys on professional ath- letes, to the point where some of them admit to vomit-inducing tension be- fore they take the field. But if there is a surprising trait among elite kickers, it’s how much of an adrenalin rush they take from their all-or-nothing moments in the spotlight. “The pressure was what I missed when I was out of football,” Cundiff says. “You have to want to go out there with the feeling that all eyes are watching you.” “I lived for those moments,” says for- mer Redskins great Mark Moseley, who
ost of the other 31 active kickers in the league are grappling with their own tensions at that moment. Around Nicole Cundiff,
kicked in Washington for 13 consecutive seasons, starting in 1974. “I’d put myself right there next to [Coach Joe] Gibbs,” Moseley remembers, laughing, “and he used to tell me to move, to get out of his way, get out of his way. But I just couldn’t wait. I think most good kickers are like that. I wanted the game to come down to me.” But when he didn’t come through,
there was one comfort, he says. “All the good kickers develop short memories.” Still, there is unremitting pressure. “For the young kickers now, it’s
tougher than ever,” Moseley says. “I don’t know if I could’ve made it today. I don’t know if I’d been kept around long enough to prove myself.” Moseley’s era arguably produced the
most talked-about kick in the sport’s history, a game-winning, last-second 63-yard field goal in 1970 by New Or- leans’ straight-on kicker Tom Dempsey, until then best known for succeeding despite having a clubfoot. To this day, no one in the league has kicked a field goal farther. But the mystique surrounding that
feat obscured the general unreliability of kickers in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the league average for success- ful field goals attempts was not much above 50 percent. Most of the kickers, like Moseley, booted in a straight-on style, which presented less room for error than the emerging soccer-style approach, in which the ball came off the instep. The best of the new kick- ing breed was Norwegian native Jan Stenerud, whose brilliance with the Kansas City Chiefs in the ’60s and ’70s, before he moved on to the Packers and the Minnesota Vikings, would lead to his induction into the Hall of Fame, the only pure place kicker ever to have received the honor. Straight-on kick- ers found themselves sharing the stage with a burgeoning vanguard of soc- cer-style wunderkinds slowly pushing conventional kickers out of the game. Moseley, who entered the league in
Kicking coach gary zauner works with swayze Waters on a high school field in Phoenix. Waters had played preseason with the oakland Raiders but was released before the regular season.
16 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | december 12, 2010
1970 and had a lifetime mark of 65 per- cent, observes: “Now, if you don’t hit 85 percent or higher, you’re not going to be even in the top 10 [among kickers in the league]; you might not even make a squad. … There’s no patience. They just cut people; it’s rougher than ever.” In the modern game, coaches’ ex-
pectations are soaring, inflated by three decades of kickers’ increasing proficien- cy. “There are only 32 regular positions for 32 teams for guys to kick field goals, but everybody knows there a lot more kickers than that who can kick well,” says Tim Hasselbeck, a former NFL quarterback who is now a football ana- lyst for ESPN. “If you’re a kicker, you’re all alone. … It still comes down to those one or two kicks in a game. And if one guy fails, there’s always somebody else to take over.” The latest wave of specialists have
been honing their craft since high school, beneficiaries of youth kicking camps, personal lessons and a greater understanding of the soccer-style tech- niques introduced in the ’60s. Even middling collegiate prospects gener- ally make more than 70 percent of their field goal attempts, while grizzled NFL outcasts await second chances that come only when established kickers are
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