MMQB: 3-part series on the lonely life of the kicker

[Prime Time]

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/07/06/nfl-kickers-nate-kaeding-san-diego-chargers

Pity The Kicker
Part I of The MMQB’s special three-part mini-series on the the kicker. Nate Kaeding and the agonizing quest to perfect what cannot be perfected
By Dylan Howlett

Here is a picture, and its thousand words.

Photo: Courtesy CBS Sports

Nate Kaeding, Chargers placekicker, stands on the sidelines after missing his third of three errant field goal attempts during a playoff game. His helmet is on, his eyes are glazed, his mouth is half-agape. CBS flashes a graphic beneath Kaeding’s catatonic stare, because misery needs context. Missed field goals, regular season: 3. Today: 3. A yellow highlighter denotes today’s three as a “career-high.”

The specter that has always tormented him is now too real. It leeched into him when he pulled his Toyota Camry into the players’ lot that afternoon, just as it did before every game: The only way I’m going to be happy today is if I don’t miss a kick. It’s a thought that haunts no other player, he is sure, save the opposing kicker.

His right leg had betrayed him, just as he had always feared. The Chargers would lose to the Jets, 17-14, a margin underlined by his three misses, and their 13-win regular season was for naught. During that 2009 regular season, Kaeding tied for the NFL lead in made field goals (32) and was one of four kickers to make more than 90 percent of his attempts (91.4). That, too, was forgotten.

The specter was now a tangible horror. He doesn’t know now that he’ll never attempt another kick in the NFL playoffs, that there is no atonement waiting for him on another Sunday. This is it: a career high, and a life low.

He is shattered. And so he will remain, the picture says, because how could he not? He’ll always graze the shards of his personal failure. It is forever, as is this picture, a man peering into his new destiny of nothingness. Pity the living, we must. Pity the kicker, we must. Yet we do not.

There was anger—the type of numb rage that has no time for sympathy—the night of January 17, 2010. There was a fan at a nearby Wal-Mart shown on the local news. He wanted a refund for his No. 10 Chargers jersey. Kaeding saw the report live.

There was the Facebook group, “Nate Kaeding needs to be fired.”

Nate Kaeding, I HOPE YOU READ THIS YOU F------ FA----! YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE CITY OF SAN DIEGO, THE SAN DIEGO CHARGERS FRANCHISE, AND THE GAME OF PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL!

KAEDING’S ASS BETTER BE F------ GONE BEFORE THE WEEK’S OUT. IF THAT SON OF A BITCH IS STILL ON THE CHARGERS ROSTER EVEN NEXT PRESEASON THE FANS BETTER TEAR DOWN THE STADIUM IN PROTEST.

There was Twitter, and the suicide barbs.

Heard that Chargers kicker Nate Kaeding tried to shoot himself, but all his bullets ended up either short or wide left.

Did you hear Nate Kaeding tried to slit his wrists with piano wire? He couldn’t get his hands inside the uprights.

There was his vandalized Wikipedia page.

Nate Kaeding is a total f------ fa---- b---- and I hope he dies in his sleep tonight.

“You give up on people feeling sorry for you as a kicker a long, long time ago,” Kaeding says. Maybe because it had happened before, against the Jets, in the playoffs, at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium in 2005: A rookie from Iowa, Kaeding missed a game-winning kick in overtime, and the Chargers lost. Maybe because Kaeding, the sixth-most accurate kicker in NFL history, made only eight of his 15 career playoff kicks. A Chargers fan on reddit reduced Kaeding’s last name to a backhanded acronym: Kicks Ass Except During Important NFL Games.

The full picture. It is Kaeding’s face on the Qualcomm sidelines, his somber look embalmed forever. The picture wants to mourn. What a sad existence, the life of a kicker, always flailing and gasping and motioning for the Heimlich.

But the picture deceives.

“I always like to look at it like—actions on the field and even life in general—you are kind of writing the story,” Kaeding says. “When a chapter or a page gets written that you didn’t intend to have written, that wasn’t part of the plan, it takes you a while to own that story, you know? But you have no choice. Your story’s your story.

“My hope,” Kaeding says, “is that on the third or fourth chapter, my whole professional career, good, bad or indifferent, is just that: It’s just a chapter.”

The picture, then, requires more than a thousand words.

* * *

The primordial ritual of blaming the kicker has no definitive genesis, though it has been around, it would seem, forever. Its uncertain origins might rest in the exasperation of a football coach in Cleveland, a place that is keen on saviors and well-versed in disbelief.

“If you ever come up with the solution to kickers in the National Football League,” said Sam Rutigliano, the former head coach of the Browns, in September 1984, “you’ll be resurrected. You may be the Second Coming.”

The space between then and now is narrower than it appears. Nearly 32 years have passed since Rutigliano begged for salvation on a Sunday afternoon, after his kicker botched a potential game-tying kick. Yet it sounded so much like yesterday, and today, and, surely, tomorrow.

“Get his ass out of here,” said Snoop Dogg, in a 13-second Instagram screed directed toward the now-former kicker for his beloved Steelers last fall. “Bye, bye, b----. You sorry motherf-----, you.”

Forgiveness extends only so far to the kicker, and sometimes it doesn’t extend at all. Here were the perceived wrongs of the men assailed by Rutigliano and Dogg:

Cleveland’s Matt Bahr was the NFL’s most accurate kicker in 1983. He had won a Super Bowl with the Steelers four years earlier. He was the guy you wanted. In Week 2 of the ’84 season, with the Browns trailing the Rams by three and seconds left on the clock, Bahr lined up a 46-yard attempt. He sliced it wide right. The Browns were 0-2 and would soon be 1-7, at which point Rutigliano lost his job.

Bahr’s steadiness prevailed over Rutigliano’s kvetching, and he was still with Cleveland in 1989, going 7-for-7 in the postseason as the Browns made the AFC Championship Game. He returned to training camp in advance of his 12th NFL season when a teammate approached him. “Hey,” he said. “You better watch out. They’re trying to blame you for the playoffs.” Bahr stared at him. “Why?” he said. “I think I made my kicks in the playoffs.” He had, two field goals and seven extra points.

But there was one game, management remembered, that got away. During a late-season game indoors at Indianapolis, Bahr missed two potential winning kicks—first at the end of regulation, then in overtime, both inside 40 yards. The eventual loss in Indy eliminated the possibility of home-field advantage throughout the playoffs for the Browns (Cleveland eventually finished a game-and-a-half behind Denver). Through circuitous reasoning, the training camp whispers suggested, Bahr had squandered the Browns’ Super Bowl chances.

“If you’re having a rough day, you have to stay with it,” Bahr says. “You have two rough days, you’re getting fired.”

Kickers have the longest average career span, 4.7 years, of any NFL position. They are also the most nomadic players. Bahr’s time was up in Cleveland. The Browns cut him that summer, and the Giants picked him up for the 1990 season. In that year’s NFC title game, Bahr scored all of New York’s 15 points, making five of six field goals—including a 42-yard game-winner as time expired—as the Giants upset the heavily favored 49ers at Candlestick Park. Seven days later Bahr and the Giants won Super Bowl XXV.

The ire of Snoop is easier to recall. In last summer’s Hall of Fame Game, the NFL’s preseason opener, Pittsburgh’s veteran kicker, Shaun Suisham, tore his ACL trying to make a tackle on the second-half kickoff. The Steelers traded for Josh Scobee, who over 11 seasons in Jacksonville had become the Jaguars’ all-time leading scorer. He missed two kicks in his Pittsburgh debut, an extra point two weeks later, and another pair of field goals in a crushing Thursday night loss to hated Baltimore.

In that game Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, his team in field-goal range in overtime, a potential 50-yard try for a man who had converted better than 60 percent of his career kicks from 50 yards and beyond, and with the offense sputtering with backup quarterback Michael Vick at the helm, didn’t summon Scobee on a fourth-and-1. Vick misfired.

With Baltimore facing a fourth-and-1 within field goal range eight plays later, Ravens kicker Justin Tucker played the hero with a 52-yard game-winner. Scobee was cut two days later. You sorry motherf-----, you.

Context has no say in the tarring and feathering. It matters little that, in that 2010 Chargers-Jets game, San Diego committed 10 penalties, dropped several passes, committed two turnovers, rushed for only 61 yards and missed key tackles, including on Shonn Greene’s 53-yard fourth-quarter TD run. In the annals of Chargers history, the synopsis of that day will put the burden on Nate Kaeding.

“When you miss a big kick,” says Mike Scifres, the Chargers’ longtime punter and holder, “it’s being able to deal with, ‘O.K., what are they going to think of me because I missed that kick?’ Because everybody’s going to point at somebody. And if it comes down to a field goal and you miss that field goal, well, guess who’s going to get pointed at?”

It’s why, as former Packers kicker Ryan Longwell says, perfection isn’t an ambition for kickers—it’s a necessity. It doesn’t matter that kickers were 53.8-percent accurate on field goals in 1965 and, thanks to the position’s dedicated craftsmen, 84.5 percent in 2015. It matters less that they are, more often than not, clutch. A University of Nebraska-Lincoln study found NFL kickers from 1993 to 2009 made 73 percent of attempts that could tie or change the score in the final two minutes of regulation or overtime—six percentage points lower than the accuracy of all other kicks. Acceptable, but not perfect.

In 2015, 70 of the 267 regular-season and postseason games—more than a quarter of them—were decided by three points or fewer, and/or decided in overtime. A single kick can determine whether a team makes the playoffs, whether a coach keeps his job, whether an owner collects postseason revenue. Second chances are frivolous, if not irrelevant. No other position in professional sports demands such flawlessness. There is no depth chart for a placekicker, no backup spots to be had: only 32 openings in the world for the privilege, or pressure.

“You had to be O.K. with missing,” Longwell says. “You had to be O.K. with being the goat, because inevitably that’s the job. All or nothing. There’s no ‘C’ grades in kicking. It’s ‘A’ or ‘F.’”

Kaeding made 86.2 percent of his field goals over his nine-year career. Only five men in the history of football have been more precise. It was, numerically, a B-plus career. But the kicker is loath to settle.

“I regret missing every field goal I ever missed,” Kaeding says. (It is, between the regular season and playoffs, 36 instances of remorse.) “And that may sound impossible, but I wish more than anything that I could have gone out and made every field goal. It’s not realistic, probably not possible, but that’s how my head is wired.”

* * *

“When you’re out there as a kicker, at least for me—I have a real active brain—there’s a lot of weird s--- that goes through your head,” Kaeding says. “Not a whole lot of it overly positive.” That’s why he wonders whether other guys can turn it off. Whether it’s even possible.

It began, for Kaeding, when kicking was less albatross and more enchantment. He was a freshman at Iowa, having grown up in Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City a few miles up Route 6 from the university. His mom, Terry, served Coralville for more than 25 years as a payroll finance officer. His dad, Larry, worked in nearby Cedar Rapids for the city’s water department.

Kaeding won a pair of state football championships as the kicker for Iowa City West High. The Des Moines Register named him the 2000 Iowa High School Athlete of the Year. Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz successfully recruited him. “I hadn’t really had a lot of, like, ‘F---, I-just-fell-flat-on-my-face’ sort of things, and how do I get up?” Kaeding says.

And then he fell: He missed three kicks in a home loss to Ohio State, and his season percentage dipped to 46.7 percent. “It was really the first time you wake up the next morning and you read the paper and they’re like, ‘This guy’s not very good,’” Kaeding says.

He spent much of the next six nights lying awake in his dorm room. More than 95,000 fans awaited him at Beaver Stadium, where Iowa would play its next game against Penn State. He knew the coaching staff could turn to a replacement if the true freshman didn’t find his way. He knew he didn’t have much time. When Saturday arrived, Kaeding jogged out onto the field as State College met the Hawkeyes with thunderous delirium. “F---,” Kaeding thought. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

He was as uncertain as teammate David Bradley was assured. The punter had become best friends with Kaeding, on whose Coralville family basement couch Bradley crashed during preseason that year. Violent Midwestern thunderstorms spooked the cellar-dwelling Bradley, who had grown up in San Diego’s arid environs. They never startled Kaeding. “I think everybody in their own way is affected by pressure,” says Bradley, who now works for a Los Angeles real estate firm. “I think the president of the United States is affected by pressure. It’s just about how you channel it.

I think Nate was a strong-minded guy at a young age and was mature enough to handle that pressure, and channel it in a way he used it as motivation and positive energy rather than getting clammy hands and shaking in your boots.” Kaeding made four field goals that afternoon at Penn State, including the game-winner in double overtime. In three years’ time, he’d become Iowa’s all-time leading scorer, kick four field goals to win one bowl game and score 13 points to win another.

But success gave his mind little comfort. Such it was for a man trying to perfect something so impervious to perfection. He could never shake the dread of driving into a stadium and wondering whether he’d leave happy. It paraded into his conscience while he sat at his stall before most games. What if you go out and miss five field goals? You’re going to get fired. You’re going to have to move. And your wife… And his kids, then-20-month-old Jack and 5-month-old Wyatt.

He would hold them in his arms, and his thoughts would drift to his plant foot, or his rhythm, or what would happen to Jack and Wyatt if he went out next Sunday and shanked a few wide right. It was there even when times were good, when kicks were straight. He’d talk to his wife, Samantha, whom he met in education courses at Iowa, and she’d have to wave a hand in his face to see if anyone was home.

He was present and absent all at once, because the pursuit of kicking, Kaeding says, was eroding it all: the enjoyment of playing football, an afternoon with his kids, dinner with his wife. He wondered if other guys can shut it off and live unencumbered.

He tried. At Iowa he started his habit of keeping cue cards with scribbled reminders and healthy thoughts. Slow down. See the ball. Rhythm (1-2-3). He’d review his thoughts and weekly goals the night before games, referencing them again in his stall before kickoff or at halftime. He’d stand on the sideline and allow those fatalistic what if thoughts to consume him. Kaeding wanted to acknowledge those.

They were, after all, always there. Then he would do what Bradley says he did so often, and bludgeon the negativity and the pressure and the hypothetical calamity until he was centered once more. O.K., this is an anxious situation. I get it. I understand it. Now I need to get my mind focused on what I need to focus on. I need to calm my mind.

The Chargers video staff created an accumulating highlight reel set to anthemic scores from John Williams and movie soundtracks, showing Kaeding’s best kicks dating back to Iowa City West. He had done this, the highlights showed. He could do it again. During Kaeding’s freshman year at Iowa, a classmate recommended he read “Zen in The Art of Archery” by Eugen Herrigel, a German philosopher and professor who visited Japan to take lessons from an archery master.

Kaeding read it in a day and had an epiphany, which he shares today with a handful of Iowa high school kickers whom he mentors: The result, as the master tells Herrigel, should be of little concern. You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind! You can be a master even if every shot does not hit.

Yet every kick he didn’t make, every time Kaeding had to face his teammates in the meeting room and realize he had let them down—it felt like an arrow to the heart.

 

[Prime Time]

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/07/07/nfl-kickers-ryan-longwell-ryan-succop

A Lonely World
Part II of The MMQB’s special three-part mini-series on the the kicker. From practice fields to post-games, the kicker is often sequestered from the rest of the team... except for those 1.3 seconds when he carries the hopes of an organization
By Dylan Howlett

Garo Yepremian’s Super Bowl VII gaffe did little to burnish the reputation of kickers.
Photo: Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated

The eccentric kicker is little more than an anachronism from the 1960s and ’70s, when an influx of quirky, strong-legged Europeans burdened future generations with their peculiarities. Even Matt Bahr, a Philadelphian, ran afoul of accepted pigskin decorum. At his first training camp in Pittsburgh, Bahr volubly played the banjo one evening when linebacker Jack Lambert rapped on his dorm room door. Bahr opened the door to Lambert, arms crossed, shaking his head slowly. “I realized then,” Bahr says, “I better start to learn guitar to fit in with Terry Bradshaw.”

Norwegian Jan Stenerud, still the only full-time kicker in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, came to Montana State University on a ski jumping scholarship before moonlighting with the football team. Garo Yepremian, an Armenian who grew up in Cyprus, moved to London by himself when he was 17 and worked in a basement warehouse. He won a Super Bowl with the Dolphins and made the NFL’s 1970s All-Decade team, yet he became immortalized by a comical blunder in Super Bowl VII.

The balding, 5'8" Yepremian scooped up a blocked kick and tried to throw a pass, but instead had the ball slip out of his hands straight up, after which he clumsily batted it into a defender’s hands. That defender, Mike Bass, ran it back for Washington’s only points, making an otherwise lopsided game interesting. In the ’70s, NFL teams held open tryouts for placekickers, traipsing across the U.S. and Europe in alliteratively contrived “Kicking Karavans.” One prospective kicker, a bus driver, parked his yellow bus on the tryout field, made his kicking attempts in his driver’s regalia—money-changer jangling at his waist—and drove away.

The stereotype endures in some small measure. Titans kicker Ryan Succop hears friends and teammates crack the occasional kicker joke. “In the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘If they actually knew that dude, that dude’s a stud, and he would whip you.’ You know what I mean?” he says. “People think, like, ‘Oh, the kicker just missed a tackle. I would have made that tackle.’ And I’m like, ‘Nah, bro. You wouldn’t have.’”

“Kickers don’t really come across as the toughest folks, and we don’t look that way,” Nate Kaeding says. “But I think there has to be an element of toughness amongst all those guys. You know, I’d meet anybody in the alley and I’d probably get my ass kicked. I’m not tough on that side of it. But I think when it comes to being resilient, when it comes to dealing with adversity, when it comes to the variety of different kinds of mental and emotional things, there’s not a kicker out there in the NFL that isn’t tough.”

The modern kicker is, for the most part, an athlete who chose to kick. New England’s Stephen Gostkowski was a starting pitcher on the University of Memphis baseball team. Oakland’s Sebastian Janikowski was a talented enough soccer player to make Poland’s Under-17 national squad. Carolina’s Graham Gano won Florida state titles in the 100, 200 and 400 meters in high school, while the Giants’ Josh Brown was a two-time state champion high jumper in Oklahoma.

Succop was a star soccer player his freshman year at North Carolina’s Hickory High when his coach encouraged him to try out for the football team. “Man, I don’t know,” Succop thought. “I don’t really want to be the kicker.” Then he flushed his first kick through the uprights. “It just became something I fell in love with,” he says.

But the love can be laborious, because the kicker is afflicted with chronic idleness. There is waiting. There is standing around. And there is, it seems, no end to either. It is crueler still, considering that the profession keeps the kicker on his feet but not his toes, then heaps upon him the hopes of so many souls. In A Few Seconds of Panic, a first-person account of an NFL training camp by sportswriter Stefan Fatsis, former Broncos kicker Jason Elam encapsulated a kicker’s existence thusly: “Hours and hours of boredom surrounded by a few seconds of panic.”

A kicker in a two-hour team practice might kick—carry out his paid job—for 25 minutes. A kicker in a three-hour game only takes the field a handful of times between kickoffs, extra points and field goals. Former Packers and Vikings kicker Ryan Longwell would daydream on the sideline. He’d become a fan of his team when the defense took over, glancing at the Jumbotron for replays and cheering when warranted. As soon as his offense crossed midfield, he’d turn away from the action and head to a kicking net, where he’d pound three balls to loosen up. If the coach didn’t motion for the kicking unit, he’d return to his wandering mind.

“I mean, it is a lot,” Kaeding says of the idle time. “I’m not complaining. That’s the job, and you get compensated handsomely for it. But you look at the course of the game, the last three hours, and you played for 20 seconds?”

And that blink-and-you'll-miss-it workday doesn't help the perception that kickers, for the most part, do nothing. Kaeding, by his own admission, had moments, plenty of them, that involved nothing. The Chargers didn’t have a dedicated room for their specialists, so Kaeding, David Binn, the Chargers’ long snapper from 1994 to 2010, and punter Mike Scifres, who doubled as San Diego’s holder, hung out in the training and equipment rooms. The trainers noticed. “They all got f------ tired with us,” Kaeding says.

The specialists would play a drop-kick game at practices, earning points on a tiered scale based on where the ball came to rest—if only, as Binn says, to “maybe kind of look like we were doing something.” Kaeding would find a quiet corner of the locker room to read a book or check email on his laptop. He became adept, he said, at “shooting the s--- with people.” When Marty Schottenheimer, an avid golfer, coached the Chargers, he’d regale the specialists with tales of playing at Augusta National or Nebraska’s Sand Hills. Kaeding would steal naps on couches before a full afternoon of kicking, lifting and thumb twiddling.

“I’m kind of here, but not really doing anything,” Kaeding said. “It’s not like I’m making a widget at a factory or doing I.T. I’m here, this is my job, and I’m getting paid to do nothing. And wait, and wait, and wait.”

And work, and work, and work. It is an ethic rarely seen but often ridiculed, because the kicker is most visible in his most sedentary state. Yet he toils. Longwell’s training camp itinerary began at 7:45 a.m. and stretched nine hours. On those old Steelers teams, Bahr would jump in on tackles so he could return to the sideline and look Jack Lambert or Joe Greene in the eye.

The Ravens’ Justin Tucker, the second-most accurate kicker in NFL history behind Dan Bailey, hits 50 balls every practice and lifts weights for an hour. “We don’t spend five minutes out there and then try to work on our handicaps,” he says. “We spend the whole time out there working on football, because that’s what we’re paid to do.”

Kaeding did the same. He made himself seen at the practice facility, practiced his kicks, lugged his fair share of weights, watched film. “And people take notice of that,” he said. “They see that you care and that it matters to you.” That much was plain with Kaeding. Too plain, even. Caring, it seemed, was the matter.

* * *

The first time was no easier than the second. A weak El Niño weather pattern needled Southern California with unseasonable coolness and rain. Something was bound to be askew.

It was Jan. 8, 2005, the Chargers were hosting the Jets in the AFC Wild-Card round. At kickoff it was rainy and cool, about 55 degrees. Yellow and blue ponchos dotted the crowd. It was rookie kicker Nate Kaeding’s first career playoff game. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt. Before kickoff, he hopped up and down in his size-9 Adidas cleats—one size too small, as most kickers prefer—to cajole some warmth into his legs.

The game began, and the Jets asserted themselves. They led 17-7 with 10:43 left when Kaeding curled a 35-yard field goal inside the near upright. He had made 80 percent of his kicks during the regular season. He felt reassured.

With 11 seconds left in regulation, Drew Brees flipped a pass to Antonio Gates for a touchdown. Kaeding thumped home the extra point to tie the game, 17-17. Overtime.

The Chargers and Jets traded three-and-outs, and San Diego had the ball again. A methodical drive balanced by short Brees passes and burrowing LaDainian Tomlinson runs pushed the Chargers into Jets territory, then into field-goal range. On fourth-and-long with the ball at the 22, Schottenheimer beckoned Kaeding. He had 40 yards to win a playoff game.

It was Scifres’ first career postseason game, too, at the close of his first full year as the Chargers’ punter. Binn was the third member of what would become one of the league’s longest-tenured kicking batteries.

“Everybody liked Nate,” Binn says. “I mean, s---, he never missed, really, until a couple of games.”

Binn crouched over the ball. He expected Kaeding—no, “totally expected him”—to make it. Scifres turned to Kaeding. The kicker nodded. The holder turned his head toward Binn, initiating the ritual that starts in a stationary state and accelerates, within 1.3 seconds, to a frenetic rush toward the ball. The snap was true, as was the hold. And the kicker was confident. Kaeding swung his leg through the ball, and Scifres knew, off his foot, that it was good. Except it wasn’t. It drifted wide right.

Kaeding hung his head, looking slowly toward the uprights. Binn and Scifres couldn’t believe it. In the stands, David Bradley, who had moved back to San Diego, sat with Samantha. “Man,” he thought. “This is gonna be a tough one for him.” He texted Kaeding after the game—in which the deciding points were delivered by Jets kicker Doug Brien—and went home, letting his friend be.

Now what? Kaeding had always been an introvert in times like these. He had worked with sports psychologist Mo Pickens, whose clientele features several professional golfers, mostly to refine his healthy thoughts and reminders. He also met with Binn and another psychologist, a friend of Binn’s, after the second Jets playoff game in 2010.

Longwell and Succop both eschewed psychologists for Christian faith. Bahr never used one. Kaeding viewed sports psychologists as only an element of the pursuit, not an essential cleansing of his sorrow.

He retreated. “He basically went underground for three or four days,” Binn says. It was Chargers tradition to meet up for a season-ending gathering at a local bar after players wrapped up their final meetings with the coaching staff. At Kaeding’s meeting, Schottenheimer, was supportive. “I’ve been out there and missed a putt. It sucks,” Schottenheimer said. “But it happens.”

Binn repeatedly called Kaeding, asking him out to the bar, letting him know he wasn’t in this by himself. Teammates Scifres, Tomlinson, fullback Lorenzo Neal and then-backup quarterback Philip Rivers let him know, too. Kaeding didn’t answer their calls. He stayed in his Del Mar home, where he shuttered himself and let it all wash over him. He moped. He ran his hands through his dirty blonde hair. He wouldn’t talk to Samantha about it.

He worried about how the miss was affecting his family and friends, who flooded his phone with more than 200 texts after good games and bad, particularly as fans and the media piled on. “If they only knew how he was already,” Binn says, “I think there would have been a lot more sympathy.” Kaeding was learning, for the first time, the hardest part of all of this.

It wasn’t the public’s scorn, because he understood their fickle nature: They loved him when he was accurate, and detested him when he was not, and there was no upside to subjecting himself to the predictable venom. He found out instead what Longwell learned almost 13 years before.

* * *

Sept. 7, 1997: Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Longwell had already made three field goals that day, scoring all nine of Green Bay’s points, when he lined up for a 28-yard potential winner with 11 seconds left and the Packers down by one. A freak September rainstorm had rolled in, turning the concrete rug that was the artificial turf at the Vet into a curling sheet. Brett Favre passed the rookie kicker as he trotted off the field. “Watch out,” Favre said. “The field is really, really slick.”

Sure enough, Longwell’s plant leg didn’t hold, his body veered right and his leg pushed the kick wide. The miss snapped a nine-game win streak for the defending-champion Packers, one that stretched back to the 1996 regular season and playoffs. On the flight back to Wisconsin, Longwell was crestfallen. What a lousy feeling it was, having to look around at all of the guys who had depended on him.

Favre and Reggie White sat beside him. They reminded him how fortunate, how blessed he was to have such profound disappointment arrive so early in his career. It would all be a faded memory, they promised, if he went out next week and made all of his kicks. Longwell took it to heart, and he spent the rest of his 15-year career feeling liberated from his profession’s brutal extremes. But that feeling of looking around and seeing 52 long faces?

After a crucial miss as a rookie, Longwell delivered big kicks for Favre time and time again over a 15-year career.
Photo: David J. Phillip/AP

“You look at it as a personal failure,” Bahr says. “These are the guys that work so hard to get there, and you had a chance to help the team—and you didn’t. That’s a terrible, terrible feeling.”

“The hardest thing is knowing I let my team down,” Blair Walsh told The MMQB in January, nine days after he missed a 27-yard chip shot against Seattle to cost the Vikings a playoff win. “I get emotional when I think of that. That’s my job, and I didn’t do it. When we all came in on Monday, the day after the game, and I have to look at them, that’s the toughest thing.”

“No question,” Succop said. “It sucks.”

“The hardest part of losing a game when you missed a field goal for me, hands down, was walking into the meeting room the next day,” Kaeding says. “When I look back at my career, the one thing that I really have the most respect for is my teammates and my coaches. I know the kind of work they put in. I’ve never had one negative interaction with a player or coach I had. They’re all incredibly supportive and good people. I’m sure they’ve ‘motherf-----’ me behind my back because, you know, I lost the game.

“It’s not the first process of healing: It’s like the last part of the agony of it. The kick is one thing, but then the last blow is when you’ve got to go in there and be like, ‘F---.’ That’s the very last little punch to the gut. And then you can start picking yourself off the mat a little bit.”

Days after the missed kick that ended his rookie year, Kaeding emerged from his Del Mar cloister, reconnected with teammates and thrust himself into offseason training. But a kicker’s memory is long, and it is devilish, and it pales to that of fans and reporters. In the 2005 preseason opener at Lambeau Field, with Longwell standing on the opposite sideline, Kaeding missed a pair of kicks.

“Everyone was just tripping out,” Binn says. “He’s lost it. He’s not coming back from this.” Writers and fans asked Binn whether his kicker still had it. Of course, he said. It was only the preseason. Kaeding would make 87.5 percent of his kicks in the 2005 regular season, a non-playoff year for San Diego.

“Even, what, six, eight months later, they’re still rehashing it,” Binn says. “Now, you’re only as good as your last game in the NFL, and with kickers it’s even times 10.

“Eight months later, they’re still churning that up, that missed kick, and you can’t get away from it until you go out and get it.”

* * *

Two retired kickers by almost the same name, sharing the same disposition toward the NFL in Placekicking in the NFL, a book by kicking guru Rick Gonsalves.

Gary Anderson, kicker for 23 years: “The basic theory is they don’t want us to do our jobs as well as we do them.”

Morten Andersen, kicker for 25 years: “They just don’t like us.”

The NFL has, in the last 40 years, taken a paring knife to the kicking game. In 1974 the league moved the goalposts from the goal line to the rear of the end zone, lengthening every attempted field goal. In 1994 a rules change awarded the opposing team possession at the spot of a missed field goal rather than at the line of scrimmage.

In 1999 the NFL introduced “K balls,” stiff, unadulterated footballs reserved specifically for the kicking game; kickers could no longer crack, beat or soften the balls to their desired specifications, which they had achieved in the past by using knee weights, hot towels, dryers and saunas, all in an extralegal effort to make balls fly farther. The league also tested narrower uprights at the 2014 Pro Bowl, nudging the standard 18 feet to 14 feet.

In 2015 the NFL lengthened the extra point by 13 yards, stretching the attempt from a near-automatic 20 yards to a pause-giving 33. From 2000 through 2014, kickers in the league had converted extra points at a rate no worse than 98.1 percent. In 2015 kickers made 94.1 percent of all extra points, worst since 1979. Mike Nugent, the Bengals kicker, told the Cincinnati Enquirer in September that the NFL wants “to make guys fail more.”

But there’s another possibility: By making kicking conspicuously harder, tough enough for even the casual fan to grasp, a kicker’s value could spike.

“I just try to view it as an opportunity to prove that we’re just meant for the job and we’re here for a reason,” Tucker said. “And it’s because we’re better than anybody else at doing it.”

Even the extra point, a somnambulant exercise no longer. “It makes the position even more important, because it’s not just a given,” Succop said. “Your job is going to be tested more on every kick.”

Kaeding approves. He’d even narrow the goal posts. Most kickers, he says, practice on arena-league goalposts anyway, to sharpen their accuracy. It would make the field goal more entertaining, and the kicker more precious.

And, possibly, more anxious. On a January 1991 afternoon in San Francisco, as Matt Bahr lined up for a do-or-die kick that would send the Giants to an upset victory over the 49ers in the NFC title game, Pat Summerall—a placekicker himself for nine NFL seasons (career accuracy: 47.2%)—was announcing for CBS, in his flat baritone. “It could be an eternity for Matt Bahr if he should miss, and he’d never know he got on the airplane if he makes it,” he said.

“That is a lonely world, believe me.”

 

[Prime Time]

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/07/08/nfl-kickers-nate-kaeding-retirement-iowa

Makes and Misses, The End and The Aftermath
The final story in The MMQB’s special three-part miniseries on the the kicker. The triumphs, the end and everything after
By Dylan Howlett

How does it feel to stand there, shouldering it all? Your career, your livelihood, the happiness of your family, all at stake beneath a fluorescent glare? This kick can be glory for you, and it can be insufferable pain. “And then you feel like not only is it you and your family and your career, but you have the careers of all your teammates, if you’re going to make the playoffs, the coaches, the city,” says David Binn, the Chargers’ longtime long snapper. “You feel like the whole world is watching.”

When he lies awake at night, Ryan Longwell, ex-Packers and Vikings kicker, can still see the scene: the way the blades of grass looked before him, how the ball wrapped around his right foot at impact. He can still see it flying straight, the trajectory so pure, on his first career game-winner at Lambeau, against Philadelphia. He remembers how his plant foot stuck into the ground.

Ryan Succop, when he thinks of it, can still feel it. Monday Night Football on Nov. 12, 2012: his Chiefs at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field, in a windblown rainstorm. Succop had made a 22-yarder earlier but also missed a 33-yard kick in the third quarter. The Steelers led 13-10 with two seconds left in regulation as Succop jogged onto the muck for a 46-yard try. The wind howled, and so did the fans. The MNF football logo was plastered on the end-zone wall facing Succop. He remembered his third-quarter miss, and the pressure amplified. But Succop’s plant leg withstood the slick turf, and he blasted the game-tying field goal. He had triumphed, if only for one kick.

Once would be more than enough for Mike Scifres. In the Chargers’ 2011 season opener against Minnesota, Scifres, San Diego’s punter and holder, paced on the sideline. The 2009 playoffs hadn’t sent Nate Kaeding disappearing into the ether. Kaeding made 82 percent of his field goals in 2010, and three of his five misses came from longer than 50 yards out. He was primed for another productive year in 2011 when, on the season’s opening kickoff against the Vikings, he tore his ACL. He was done for the year.

Scifres didn’t think Kaeding’s injury was too severe. At worst, he thought, he’d have to spell Kaeding on kickoffs. In the panic following linebacker Shaun Phillips’ interception inside the Vikings’ 10, special teams coach Rich Bisaccia grabbed Scifres.

“You’ve gotta kick the extra point,” Bisaccia said.

“Wait. No. Where’s Nate?”

“Nate’s in the back. He’s done for the day.”

Scifres stared. “What?”

Punter Scifres and safety Weddle made a strange kicker/holder pair after Kaeding’s torn ACL.
Photo: Jeff Gross/Getty Images

He had never been nervous before a punt. This was different. After Mike Tolbert punched it in on third-and-goal from the 1, Scifres walked out to the spot of the extra point with temporary holder Eric Weddle. Oh, goodness. What’s going on here? I haven’t kicked a snap and hold since college. If I miss a 20-yard extra point … oh, man. I mean, I know I’m notsupposed to make it. People on the outside aren’t expecting me to make it. I’m the punter, not the kicker. But you’ve gotta be able to make this. You’re in the NFL! You’re a punter in the NFL! You should be able to kick!

He made the extra point. Not too bad, Scifres thought. Maybe he could do this. At halftime Scifres visited Kaeding in the trainer’s room. Kaeding smiled. “Hey, just let it rip,” he said. “Just have fun with it, and swing as hard as you can.”

With 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter and San Diego down three, a Chargers’ drive stalled in field-goal territory. Facing fourth-and-13, going for it was not an option. Scifres had made a second extra point (and he’d later make a third). Now he had to make a 40-yard field goal to tie the game. Wait a minute, he thought.Just don’t pull this thing into the tunnel of the locker room 50 yards away from the upright. Just get your foot on it and try to kick it. He got his foot on it. And he made it. The next week the Chargers brought in Nick Novak to replace Kaeding for the rest of the year. Scifres’ cameo was over.

“You feel, just for a minute,” Scifres said, “those nerves that those guys feel every time they go out for a big kick.”

He wouldn’t want to do it again, he says.

* * *

On solid ground there is self-belief. Kaeding was 4-for-4 in the 2008 AFC title game in Foxborough. He had made both of his postseason attempts in 2009. He was, during the 2009 regular season, the NFL’s best kicker, leading the league in scoring and and in field goals. He had, in Week 15, laced a 52-yard game-winner with three seconds left to beat Cincinnati. He had made 20 straight kicks to close out the regular season. He hadn’t missed in 69 career attempts from within 40 yards. On solid ground there is conviction. Maybe I’ll never miss another field goal again, he thought.

Beyond that solid ground, there is a precipice that gives way to an abyss.

It’s January 17, 2010, the AFC Divisional round in San Diego between the Jets and Chargers. Late in the first quarter of a scoreless game, Kaeding jogs out for a ho-hum 36-yard attempt. He will put the Chargers on the board and get them rolling. He might never miss again.

A good snap from Binn, a good hold by Scifres. Kaeding thumps it. His torso drifts left after impact, his left arm limply striking his lower back, all following the same direction of the listing ball. Wide left.

Kaeding walks to the sideline, his unbuckled chin strap hanging beside his left cheek. He turns his head and looks at the uprights. How did that miss? “Shades of you know what,” says Josh Lewin, the Chargers radio play-by-play announcer, and the KIOZ 105.3 audience knows what is what.

Kaeding reaches the sidelines. F---. “A shock to his system,” he says. His goal before this season, just as it was in each of his first five seasons, was to make every attempt after a miss. That is the kicker’s lifeblood. Kaeding tries to encourage himself on the sideline, readjust himself to the new challenge of flushing this unexpected mishap. He can’t.

With six seconds left in the first half, the Chargers leading 7-0 and stuck near midfield, coach Norv Turner sends out Kaeding. His second attempt is 57 yards, which would match his career high. Kaeding misses short and wide right. It is not an egregious miss, of course, but it’s another miss nonetheless, and now he has compounding failures in the most important game of the season. He has inched closer to the precipice.

The Jets, as they did in 2005, seize control. They lead 17-7 with fewer than five minutes to play in regulation. The Chargers face a fourth-and-2 at the Jets’ 22. They will send Kaeding out to make it a one-score game. Kaeding stands on the sideline, arms crossed, chin strap dangling like his optimism. He stares ahead.

On the Jets sideline, Rex Ryan radios up to the rest of his coaching staff in the Qualcomm press level. “He’s already missed two,” Ryan says. “Three strikes, homeboy, and you’re out.”

Good snap from Binn, good hold by Scifres. Another thump. Another twist of the torso, snap of the left arm. This time the ball goes right, and everything is equally wrong. Turner taps the top of his head with his laminated play-calling sheet.

“He missed it,” Turner says, incredulously.

“He missed it!” Jets lineman Marques Douglas says, emphatically.

“HE MISSED IT! HE MISSED IT!” Ryan says, euphorically, his arms skyward.

Douglas turns to Chargers guard Kris Dielman as he walks off the field. “Hey,” Douglas says. “Y’all gotta get rid of him.”

Lewin finds a coda. “A nightmare for Nate the Great,” he says. Three hours before, it had been a dream season.

Kaeding returns to the sideline. The cameras capture that picture, the one that says this pain should be forever. Binn walks up to his teammate. “We’ve still got a chance,” Binn says. “We’re still in this. We’re gonna get another crack. We still need you.” The Chargers were still in it, and they would score a touchdown with 2:14 left to cut the deficit to three. But Kaeding wouldn’t get another crack. San Diego’s defense couldn’t get off the field.

It didn’t matter, as Binn says, that there were plays nobody mentions anymore—the penalties, the missed tackles, the drops. It is of little solace to Kaeding. It never was. “I knew that if I would have done my job, then perhaps the result, the score, would have been different,” he says years later. And so he stares.

“Just the beginning moments of internalizing that kind of turn and the new narrative,” Kaeding says. He thought of letting down his teammates, disappointing the people he cared about most. “I think anybody in that situation would have a s----- look on their face,” he said. “I challenge them not to.”

Then there was the matter of tomorrow.

“The trick as a professional athlete,” he says, “is not letting your profession, what you do for a living, intertwine with your identity and who you are as a person. But I think it’s impossible not to let it sort of do that. Whether that’s ego or whatever it might be, it kind of becomes your narrative and your reality. Especially when you’re in the middle of an NFL season: You’re all in, everyone’s immersed in that stuff, and that’s all you know. And here you’re going down one track, and then three hours later the narrative is now something entirely different. That takes some time to absorb.”

This time he didn’t retreat. He met a few days later with Binn and his psychologist friend. He talked with teammates. He had kids now, too, and Jack and Wyatt blunted the pain somewhat. He hopped a plane for Miami and the Pro Bowl and hit the practice field. Soon he pulled his groin and returned home to Iowa City for an MRI. It was an injury, but not an insult. Going through the misery before, he said, had girded him.

“Nate took football seriously, don’t get me wrong,” says David Bradley, a friend and former teammate of Kaeding’s at Iowa. “More than anyone else, he wanted to make those kicks. But also at the same time, the thing that I’ve always admired about Nate is that he has a lot of different interests. And those kicks aren’t going to define his career or his life.

“This isn’t like a Varsity Blues thing where, you know, ‘48 minutes for the next 48 years of your life.’”

* * *

Somewhere there must be proof of why Kaeding missed. The pressure was too much, surely. Kicks Ass Except During Important NFL Games, remember? A psychologist from Palm Beach thinks he has the answer: Maybe Nate and Samantha had a spat before the game, and it lingered with him onto the field. Kaeding laughs when he hears this. He doesn’t understand, if it were true, how it would prevent him from kicking a field goal.

It wasn’t the pressure, he said. He had made six straight playoff kicks before January 2010, and he would have liked another stab at the postseason. Binn wanted to see it happen, too. Maybe another few years, another few late-round games, and the KAEDING acronym would stand for something more triumphant. “I’d like to think if I had more chances that it would get back toward the norm,” Kaeding says. “But I don’t. And that’s just the way the numbers are always going to be, right?”

But this is what we need, Kaeding says: a reason, even a gross oversimplification. Blaming a kicker isn’t so much spite, perhaps, as it is a way to dispense with the uncomfortable hows and disappointing whys without closer inspection.

“When you’re out there and you’ve got 1.3 seconds to get a snap and a hold and a kick off and through a pair of goalposts at the end from 48 yards and the wind’s blowing sideways and it’s 22 degrees outside,” Longwell says, “it’s not quite as easy as it may seem with a remote in your hand, you know?”

There are some elements that can’t be felt from the warmth of a living room or a press box. In Green Bay, Longwell sometimes aimed eight yards outside the uprights to accommodate gusts from Lake Michigan. In the 1990 NFC Championship Game, the Niners iced Giants kicker Matt Bahr with a timeout before his game-winning attempt. It was a gift.

The Candlestick Park grounds crew had recently laid down new sod between the hash marks. During the timeout, Bahr and his holder, Jeff Hostetler, surveyed the turf around them and noticed a seam in the field where Bahr would have planted his left leg. They moved the spot of Hostetler’s hold out of the depression, and Bahr made the game-winner. Or, as Bahr would say, Bahr and Hostetler made the game-winner.

“The thing I believe in my heart of hearts is that kicking is probably the most team-oriented aspect of any play in football,” Bahr said. “Think about it: The defense has to win the ball. The offense has to drive the ball down into a scoring position. Then the nine guys in front of you have to have good blocks. If every one of them doesn’t make their block, then you have no chance of making the kick. It has to be a good snap, it has to be a good hold. The last thing in all of that is the kick.

“Consequently, I always say, ‘We made the kick. We made the field goal. We won the game.’ I think kickers get way too much credit for making the field goal. By the same token, the blame is all deserved, because everyone did their job right, and you failed in your job.”

‘We made the kick.’ Bahr (middle) considers the offense (like Hostetler, quarterback and holder, left), defense (like Lawrence Taylor, right) and special teams unit responsible for every made field goal, like the one that upset the 49ers and sent the Giants to Super Bowl XXV.
Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP

Kaeding, Binn and Scifres operated much the same way: They were a unit, all serving roles of equal heft. Sometimes game film would show a slightly turned ball from the snap, or a missed spot, or an almost inscrutably tilted hold. Kaeding never saw any of it. “The ball was there,” he’d say. “The ball was on the ground. I made contact with the ball. It’s my fault.”

“I’ve heard about kickers that will blame the holder or the snapper, or really kind of look for excuses that way a lot,” Binn said. “I mean, sometimes, yeah, maybe it is. But Nate never blamed anything on us, whether we did or not. He always took responsibility, never looked for any excuse. That’s what makes Nate, Nate. That’s part of the integrity he has, and it’s part of his professionalism. And that’s probably why he was so good, but also why I think he took a lot of those games so hard.”

“My answer was always, ‘I missed a kick, and I’m just focused now on figuring out ways to get better and make the next one,’” Kaeding says. “And that’s really it. Because why even fight that battle with people? What am I going to do, sit here and dive into the reason why? No one gives a s---. All they care about is whether you make it or miss it. “And the fact that they don’t give a s--- is very evident in their response.”

I hope he dies in his sleep tonight … You sorry motherf-----, you. Never mind that Kaeding says he took failure as hard as anyone. It went in, or it didn’t, and everyone could spout a diagnosis. Even a spousal one.

* * *

The end often comes suddenly.

Bahr was cut by two teams he kicked to the Super Bowl, the Steelers and Giants. He landed with the Patriots at the end of his career and in 1996 shared placekicking duties in training camp with an undrafted rookie from South Dakota State: Adam Vinatieri. New England released Bahr at the end of camp, and his career ended.

Succop, the 2009 draft’s Mr. Irrelevant as the last overall pick, became the most accurate kicker in the history of the Kansas City Chiefs from 2009 to ’13. In his final season in K.C., Succop missed a potential game-winning field goal late in the Chiefs’ Week 17 loss to San Diego. (The Chargers won, with a winner from Kaeding successor Nick Novak, in overtime.) It was the Chiefs’ fifth loss in seven games, and Succop was 4-for-7 during the skid. Kansas City would implode in the Wild-Card round against the Colts, in spite of Succop’s 3-for-3.

At the end of training camp in 2014, and a week before the regular season began, the Chiefs cut Succop in favor of undrafted Brazilian rookie Cairo Santos, who had a stronger leg and a lighter salary. Succop signed with Tennessee the day after, and seven days later he landed in Kansas City to play the Chiefs in the season opener. Succop went 4-for-4, Santos missed one of two attempts, and the Titans won.

Longwell didn’t receive a contract offer from the Packers when his contract expired after the 2005 season. He signed with Minnesota, where he sustained his deft form. But his accuracy slipped to 79 percent in 2011. That year he got along with Mike Priefer during the special teams coordinator’s first season in Minnesota. Longwell had researched Priefer, who had coached in Denver and Kansas City and worked with younger kickers. He was a hands-on instructor, Longwell a hands-off veteran.

The Vikings drafted Blair Walsh out of Georgia in the sixth round in 2012. Longwell thought he would have a chance to compete with Walsh, but two weeks later Minnesota released Longwell. “As good as the career was, in a matter of two weeks it was over and done with,” he says. But he understands. His performance wavered, and his coach had other designs. “When those stars align against you, there’s really nothing you can do about it.”

But sometimes it ends well. Longwell grew up a manic Seahawks fan in Puyallup, Wash., going to games at the Kingdome with his dad and idolizing Steve Largent and Jim Zorn. In the 2013 playoffs, Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka injured his calf during a Wild-Card win in Washington. Seattle signed the unemployed Longwell for the divisional round against Atlanta. He made all four extra point attempts, though he didn’t have any field goal attempts in Seattle’s 30-28 loss.

“I don’t think it unceremoniously ended with the Vikings cutting me,” Longwell says. “I think it was a crescendo with the Seahawks when I got that job out there for a week. That was the fireworks going off at the end of the movie for me.”

The end credits for Kaeding were far less theatrical. He had the season-ending ACL tear in 2011, but he came back healthy in 2012, going 7-for-7 in his first three games. Then he tore his groin. San Diego placed him on IR, and they soon released him. He signed with Miami and closed out the year with the Dolphins, appearing in two games and making one of three field goal attempts.

In 2013 he signed as a free agent with the Buccaneers, went down to Tampa Bay to train and tore his groin again. Imaging at University of Iowa Hospitals revealed microtears in the groin of his kicking leg. Doctors told him he’d likely run into recurring issues. Kaeding decided it was time.

“By risking a lot, and the embarrassment for myself and my family when you screw up in front of a bunch of people, and the adversity that kind of comes with that, the reward for me is so much infinitely greater than that,” he says. “To be able to go through and have the sort of memories as a skinny little kid from Iowa playing in the NFL, going to Pro Bowls, playing for nine years, making money beyond how I’d ever imagine trying to do, and have that be part of my life, screwing up and being a part of our team losing games—the reward of taking that risk far outweighs the negatives of it.

“I wouldn’t mind if my kids kicked. I would never encourage my daughter to marry a kicker. I honestly think that’s probably harder.”

Kicking was more relief than joy, Kaeding and Bahr say. They didn’t celebrate with the same euphoria as teammates, leaping around the field or partying at clubs. “You’re like, ‘I can go home, and I did my job,’” Kaeding says, “and I don’t need to feel like s--- because I f----- up.’”

And yet there is joy elsewhere. The ecstasy of celebrating with teammates, said every kicker interviewed for this story, is unmatched. Nothing like returning to a festive locker room and fist-bumping and hugging and slapping high-fives with teammates.

“I love being a part of a winning team, and I love contributing in a significant way,” says Tucker, who has a Super Bowl with Baltimore. “You look at any level of football, your leading scorer is likely your kicker. And that’s something that I’ve always loved about my job description—that while I might not have the same number of snaps as my teammates, every time I trot out there, it’s important.”

“That feeling of hitting kicks in a game, that adrenaline rush that you get?” Succop said. “You can’t get that a lot of other ways. That’s a cool feeling when you go out and perform the way you want to. It is fun. Yeah, there are times when it’s tough, but you do it because you love it, you know?”

“I would say ‘rewarding’ is the right way to put it rather than ‘fun,’” Kaeding says. “There probably will be nothing in terms of pure reward and enjoyment that could trump the feeling of being in the locker room after the game you played a part in winning, and seeing all of those guys, being part of that at the highest level. Yes, that part of it is fun. It’s super rewarding. It’s awesome.”

Maybe it was the appropriate amount of fun. There is little difference between a kicker’s zenith and his nadir.

“If you talked to all of these great guys,” Longwell says of football’s best kickers, “there is a quiet confidence in all of them and all of us, but there is a humility to all of these guys, that we all understand how hard but how fragile the job status is of this position. I think the best of the best understand that and are willing to fight through that, but they’re also not going to stand up in front of a microphone and say, ‘I’m the best ever.’

No one’s going to do that, because they understand the fragility of the job. They understand that the next kick may be the biggest kick of the game, and it may not go your way… False bravado or overconfidence, you don’t see that in the great kickers. You see a sense of humility.”

* * *

A cab driver from Cedar Rapids who goes by JJ turns more formal, even reverential, when he learns a reporter has come to see Kaeding. “Ah, The Kicker!” JJ says, and for once “the kicker” is uttered with a tone of reverence rather than ridicule. JJ’s smile stretches his scraggly beard into a gray crescent. “Tell him that the yellow cab driver John Bean says hi, and that Iowa City still loves its local hero, Nate Kaeding.”

Here is another picture. Nate Kaeding strolls down a sunlit path along the Iowa River. A soft summer breeze nudges the back of his plaid button-down, and the glint from the water’s edge bounces off his sunglasses. The dull buzz of a college town in the summer echoes downstream. He’s animated as he talks of the change, all positive, that has come to the university and town—more resources, more amenities—since he left as an undergrad. He raises his arm and points to a skeletal building on the riverbank. It is the new music school, replacing the old one that had been destroyed in the 2008 floods. The return of harmony to Iowa City, and to Nate Kaeding.

The local hero came home with Samantha after his uncooperative groin ended his playing career. They’re raising four kids, just down the Iowa River from where they took classes together at the education school. Kaeding is a guest speaker, and sometimes guest lecturer, at the university. In April 2015 he became the coordinator of retail development in Iowa City’s downtown district, recruiting clothing stores and restaurants and theaters to build a community rich in arts and culture.

He has, in the downtown’s success, both vested and invested interest: equity in Tailgate, a college T-shirt shop, and several restaurants. A square red sign on an under-construction East College Street property urges interested tenants to call Nate Kaeding.

The Kicker, on this morning, says hello to no fewer than a dozen people. There are the two women manning the counter at Tailgate. There’s an incoming Iowa freshman at Pullman Bar & Diner, an upscale eatery on Dubuque Street that Kaeding part-owns. “Don’t forget to make time for your studies,” Kaeding says. Two young women seated at an outdoor table wave to him when he walks past.

“Did you get the burger?” Kaeding asks. They did. “Good,” he says, smiling. He asks a woman entering Prairie Lights, an independent bookstore, how that event went the other day, and she smiles and says it was wonderful. The kids even wrote her thank you notes, she says.

No one in San Diego was in a gracious mood six Januarys ago.

“The biggest takeaway for me was just learning the importance of empathy,” Kaeding says at Pullman, having finished the Frisco Melt, a cheeseburger on garlic toast. “You do something in front of a bunch of people, and there’s a variety of different things that go into what you do, but everybody has this gross oversimplification of it. You learn to interact with other people, whatever it is in life, whether it’s a parent of another kid that your kids are in school with, or a coworker, or someone that works for you, or someone you meet in the street and talk to.

They all have a story. They all have different things that go into their life, not just a little end result or end product. And I don’t know if I’d have that same sort of perspective in life if I didn’t do what I did previously. It’s kind of higher-level philosophical stuff, but being a kicker in the NFL kind of forces you to be that way a little bit.”

There is San Diego, where the vitriol was so forceful it practically reverberated off his Del Mar home. And here is Iowa City, with its warm embrace and an affection that is not entirely based on how Kaeding used his right foot to lift a ball through the air.

In the midst of his NFL travails, Kaeding came across the following quote: “Criticism is a lot like walking in the rain. Once you get wet, what’s another drop matter?”

“You kind of realize how good life can be,” Kaeding says, “when it’s not raining all the time.”

 

[Selassie I]

Being clutch is difficult. This dude's mind and the pressure beat him.