Besides showcasing the Tuna’s much-anticipated return to the House that Hoffa Built, Monday’s game and between the Giants and Cowboys brought professional kickers to the forefront of the national sports media.
My lifelong allegiance to the Giants prevents me from yet speaking publicly about the game itself with any shred of civility or reason. I will say, however, that I hope Matt Bryant has a wonderful week practicing squib kicks in Isabel’s harsh wind and oh-so-lonely rain. Now that the air is clear, I turn to the subject of kickers and their unusual place in this great gridiron game.
NFL kickers are a unique species in American professional sports. For starters, they are paid very handsomely to do a single task on the field for an extremely limited amount of time. I don’t have a personal stat boy to verify this, but I can’t imagine that, on average, the game clock runs for more than a minute or two when the kicker is on the field. Moreover, the action of kicking a ball through two posts protruding vertically from the ground is completely foreign to anything else that is ever done in the game. If you were shocked when Damon Wayans pulled a .22 caliber pistol out of his pads en route to the end zone in The Last Boy Scout, then I implore you to think long and hard about the following: In a violent game, was Damon’s fictional carnage really more bizarre than witnessing a 200-pound, 42-year old Danish man with man-boobs kick a ball through an 18”6’ wide set of fluorescent yellow posts? I sure don’t think so. Field goals are as strange as the men who kick them.
If you’re still not convinced, let me turn to Exhibit B: Bill Gramatica. This middle brother of the Gramatica placekicking dynasty (I hesitate to use that word) tore his ACL in 2001 while jumping for joy after a successful field goal attempt. In my ranking of funniest things I’ve seen in sports over the last decade, this celebration-turned-tragedy was surpassed only this summer by a merciless mid-inning attack on a racing Italian sausage in (where else?) Milwaukee.
Besides the quirks of the kickers themselves, what makes this act even more remarkable is that it can and does make and break games, seasons, careers, and sometimes even entire cities. Exaggeration, you cry? Go ahead and ask any middle-aged man working the night shift at the GE Plant in Buffalo how the early ‘90s treated him. He’s sure not going to gripe to you about the pain he suffered by way of George Bush, globalization or Milli Vanilli. He will, however, grab you by the neck, look you deep in the eyes with the fearsome gaze of a rabid street-dog, and tell you to never mention Scott Norwood again … ever. Any true Bills fan will also explain to you how he would have named his first son Jim, but it was a girl so he named her Kelly. (https://skinnyninjamom.com/) That may sound cute, but he’s got her practicing monkey rolls in the backyard with Thurman the family Labrador. At this point, I advise you to smile politely and walk away.
Field goals prove over and over again that football is a powerful and fickle beast. I may loathe Matt Bryant this week (he botched a squib kick for chrissakes!), but if he should hit a winning field goal to secure a Giants’ Super Bowl, I assure you that I’ll mention him in the same breath as Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor. If he misses that kick, on the other hand, there’s a very practical reason why the Giants play their home games in the Jersey Swamp. You got that, Bryant? Fuhgeddaboutit.
