kickers are weird
I was a sports broadcaster for 35 years, mostly covering the National Football League. I learned many things in that time, but one thing stands out and I am going to share it with you now:
kickers are weird
Go back and read it again, several times.
I put it in large print for a reason. It is true! And you have to understand it. Kickers are very, very weird people.
Entire generations of NFL fans have grown up not knowing what a “straight up” kicker looks like. Well, a straight kicker didn’t lean into the ball like today’s football-style kickers. He ran right up to the ball and kicked it straight into the goalpost, wearing a shoe with a special hard square toe. I know this is a strange concept to some of you younger ones, but bear with an old man for a moment.
The NFL field goal distance record is still held by a straight kicker who actually had a deformed foot and had to wear a specially fitted shoe: Tom Dempsey of the New Orleans Saints for sixty-three yards (since tied for Denver’s Jason Elam, for stat buffs).
Another former NFL kicker, Ben Agajanian, also had a deformed foot and a special shoe. After his playing days, Ben became a respected master of the kicking arts. One of his students once asked Ben, “How can I get a kicking shoe like yours?”
“Well,” said Ben, “first you have a lawnmower…”
In the mid-1960s, the Gogolak brothers, Pete and Charley, came to the NFL, the first football-style kickers. And unlike the big, straight guys, they were smaller. And foreign. And they didn’t know much about football, American style. Stories abound of how they ran off the field after a successful kick yelling, “I want a touchdown!”
The last of the managers, Mark Moseley of the Redskins, retired in 1986. It has been the football style ever since.
And kickers are weird in more than just the angle they take with the ball. They do weird things with their shoes. He was interviewing Chris Boniol of the Cowboys in the ’90s, and he let slip that he broke his kicking shoes by submerging them in near-scalding water while his foot was in them. This, he said, made the leather conform to the shape of his foot. But that wasn’t the really weird part.
The really strange thing is that Boniol wore size nine street shoes. On the field, he wore a size seven!
“Wait a minute,” I told him. “Do you wear size nine street shoes but do you wear size seven kicking shoes? How do you get your foot in there?”
“You just fit it in.”
“Doesn’t it hurt? Aren’t your toes cramping?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Boniol said. He wanted him to feel like his shoe was just another part of his foot, a skin, so to speak. And given that he co-owned the record for most field goals in a game (seven since then), who was I to argue?