In my Impromptus today, I’ve got some politics — lots of politics. Some culture. Some photos. The usual, pretty much. I thought I would devote a Corner post to sports — and an interesting discussion I had with Rolf Benirschke.
He was a placekicker — illustrious — for the San Diego Chargers in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, he and his wife Mary are heavily involved in efforts to help San Diego’s homeless, especially the young among them. I met the Benirschkes a short while ago when I went to San Diego to report on just that: the homeless, and efforts to help them.
(For the resulting piece, go here.)
I could not help asking Rolf about placekicking. It is a magnificent art. Long ago, I heard a leading golf instructor (Bill Strausbaugh Jr.) say that golf and placekicking have a lot in common.
True, Rolf?
“The similarity is, they’re more mental than physical. You know, the tee ball is just sitting there. [The ball you are about to drive, in golf, off a tee.] And the football is just sitting there. The difference is, a kick is a little more dynamic, in that there’s a snap, and you have to move. Golf is harder, I would say. Kicking is easier. Golf is such a hard, hard sport. I wish I had learned it young. It would have helped my kicking.”
There’s also this: In golf, “if you want to hit it farther, you don’t necessarily swing harder. You want to be consistent. It’s more about timing. It’s more about a rhythm. Same with kicking.”
Sometimes, “the kicks you kick the farthest are simple 40-yarders. They would be good from 65.” But when it comes time to kick a 65-yarder, “you tend to want to hit it harder. So you’re quicker, you get out of rhythm, out of sync.”
I told Rolf Benirschke that I’m from Ann Arbor, Mich. On our Wolverines, we have had an excellent placekicker: Jake Moody. The best college kicker in the country, according to some. He has now been drafted by the San Francisco 49ers — very high. Unusually high, for a kicker. Will he be good? Or is it impossible to tell?
Rolf gave me a general answer, fascinating:
“There are a lot of people who can kick the ball well, physically. The question is: Can you do it in a stressful situation? What if you’ve missed a couple or three and you have to go back out?”
And “that’s similar to golf. If you make a couple of bad swings, hit a couple of bad shots — how do you get past that? How do you overcome that fear of failure or embarrassment that goes with it?”
Consider this, too: If you’re a placekicker, “your career can get defined by one kick. And you hope it’s a good one, and not a bad one.”
Other players on the field can sort of blend in. Not kickers. They stick out like a sore thumb.
“Everybody in the stadium knows whether your kick is good or not. They don’t have to be an expert on football.” Fans aren’t looking at the blocking or the snapping or the holding or what have you. “They just know whether the kick is good or not. And you have to take responsibility. You can never say, ‘It was a bad hold,’ ‘It was a bad snap,’ ‘I slipped a little.’ No. It is what it is. ‘I missed the kick.’”
Back to golf: “A lot of people can hit it really well. But how do you get to be Tiger Woods? He was so different, mentally. Physically, there were a lot of guys who could hit it well, although you could argue that Tiger Woods is still the best ball-striker. But what separated him was the other stuff.” How do you perform under pressure? That’s the big question.
One more thing — maybe subtle: A kicker has to build relations with his team.
“When I played, we were viewed a little differently. We didn’t go through the physical stuff that they went through. So, we had to work hard to earn the trust of our teammates and the respect of our teammates. And you do that in multiple ways. And once you feel that people are in your corner, that they care about you, you become a better kicker. You’re part of the team. You don’t want to let them down.”
Wonderful stuff.