The kicking community lost a member this past week as former NFL record holder for the longest field goal, Tom Dempsey, passed. Why do I care? In addition to getting my bell rung playing other positions in my youth, somebody had to kick. I wasn't the best but enjoyed it. More on that in a minute but first to Mr. Dempsey.
Queue the way back machine to the 1970's when A.D.D. schoolboy Tim was perusing the library for some books with short blurbs and many pictures; sports-related preferably. I want to say it was 'Time Life' or some name like that but there was a set of 10 or so of these large hardcover black books that had short biographies (the Wikipedia before the Internet I guess you could say) of about 100 athletes per volume. They were awesome and are probably for sale somewhere on here (checked, no luck). One of the athletes covered was Dempsey and they had a shot of his half foot/boot which just freaked me out at that age. I had not seen a missing part before and the 'Tip and Mitten' books made no reference that some folks had missing limbs. He made the best of it though.
Dempsey wasn't the reason I kicked but was one of the first kickers in my memory (besides the Lions Benny Ricardo). Again, somebody had to kick and besides attempting to do it after getting your bell rung on the play before, it was fun. I was part of the inaugural youth soccer league in the area in the late 70's, long before ladies were showing their sport bras to the public after scoring, so I had some experience taking out aggression on a ball. The field goal process, however, is a whole different beast. You are relying on 10 other people for the process, two with extreme responsibilities, the snapper and the holder. I had a good group in high school with Al, Jim and Rob as my team. Gus even has an extra point in the stat sheet as he filled in for me one game. Al threw me a few wild snaps on punts but he gets perfect grades on field goal/extra point attempts. Jim probably wished he had yelled "fire" (call when the field goal is aborted) a few more times seeing me wobble to set up to kick. He and Rob were solid holders though. I think the funnest part of kicking was we got to head out for pre-game long before everyone else so we didn't have to deal with all that "get your pilot light lit" bullshi* the coaches tried to throw at us in the locker room. Everyone gets motivated differently.
I didn't set any records although my longest field goal seems to gain a yard each year as I tell it. We're up to 72 yards this year. Quite a kick.
Trail Head
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| freshman year |
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| referee caption: "no way this is fu**ing making it" |
