Those words raced through my mind as I ran onto the field, feeling totally naked and alone in front of 80,000 people in Arrowhead Stadium, while millions watched on television. This is the worst—ridiculous pressure! Too late to turn back now. You don't have a choice. You have to kick... you can't run away and tell the coach you're not in the mood! That would end your NFL career forever!
So shut up, and trust your training!
Whether I succeeded or failed, I had a job to do... and 160,000 eyeballs in Arrowhead Stadium and millions on TV were on me. It felt like all the oxygen left the building. Noisy, expectant silence filled the stadium around the tiny well-lit island I occupied. Succeed or fail. Live or die. There was nothing in between. The highest highs, the lowest lows all crammed into a 30-second frame. I only had a 1.27 second window just a few times a game to be 100% ON. It was never when you expect it. I learned quickly that you just have to be ready for anything, no matter what.
That's the job. There is no position in any sport more intense, more concentrated, and more pressured per split second than that of the NFL placekicker. In 30 seconds, he runs onto the field, picks out his target, and the 3-inch square spot where his holder must place the ball, while somehow silencing the roar of thousands within barely 100 feet, many shouting sometimes not-so-elegant Shakespearean sonnets at him. Adding to that, there are 11 massive opponents—enemies, temporary monsters—frothing at the mouth just 20 feet away, paid millions of dollars to block your kick, humiliate you, maybe even eat you for lunch, doing anything to distract you and take your power and your team's points away.
In 1.27 seconds of laser-focused intensity, honed from over 300,000 practice kicks, the ball snaps back in a whizzing spiral, traveling 8 yards in .75 seconds, caught by your holder, who in .3 seconds spins the laces away from the kicker's foot, placing the ball on a spot he had just taken his eyes off to catch the ball. The foot doing the kicking impacts the ball for 4 thousandths of a second. In those .004 seconds, your kicking foot and your hips and leg having swung their power arc into the ball, all the kinetic energy, direction and command information into the oddly shaped spheroid football is provided. The follow through is crucial, as is keeping your head down on the ball on point of impact and after, just like in golf. If in the urge to see where the ball is going, you pick your head up a fraction of a second early, your accuracy is affected, because your follow-through stops immediately.
Make sense? By attacking our goals with confidence and faith, we connect to a divine intelligence that surpasses conscious thought. As a kicker, the ball (our daily work and short term goals) attacks the winds of adversity fighting our intent with more powerful authenticity.
It took years and deep commitment through hits and misses to get used to that level of pressure; it took unbelievable persistence and a different level of focus, often with the help of superb coaches, mentors, and teachers. And the consistent reminder to myself: "I am the only one who can make myself good enough, the only one to blame, the only one to become the best ever to do this."
Believe me, during the many rejections, becoming the most accurate kicker in NFL History for my 18-year career was far from expected. Just making it was tough enough! During high school and college and in my first nine years in the NFL, Dick Johnson, the "old clam digger from Maine," along with St. Albans Head Football and Baseball Coach Gary Gardiner, helped me appreciate the monumental mental aspect of placekicking—the ultimate individual "specialist" in the ultimate team sport. My four years at Dartmouth College, in the verdant and granite hills of Hanover, New Hampshire, kicking in front of 20,000 people (or 35,000 at Harvard and Yale), only gave me a hint of what I'd experience in the National Football League. Just a hint. The education I got at Dartmouth, St. Albans, and Potomac Schools honed the constant urge to address mistakes and weaknesses in order to get better.
These are universal truths, learned like we all do through the heat of the fire we put ourselves through. Teddy Roosevelt was already a respected national figure when he resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to put together the Roughriders who would storm San Juan Hill in Cuba. It was only when Teddy jumped on his horse, making him an even more obvious target and led his men into machine gun fire in the Spanish American War, that he tasted a different kind of pressure—and sustained his image as a man of real courage and leadership. We test ourselves in different ways. All of us can prepare ourselves for moments of truth. And like Stephen Crane's youthful untried soldier in The Red Badge of Courage, we may think ourselves a coward at first glance, as I certainly did that first game in the NFL on National TV Sunday night in Oakland against the Raiders. But if we allow ourselves, we can grow and prosper into places we never thought possible.
That's why I am writing this book. That's why I am passionate that education is about the entire person—emotional, physical and spiritual, not merely intellectual. Even Ferdinand Ruge, teaching a legendary grammar and expository writing class at St. Albans, helped define that difficult and rigorous concept of the discipline and the often-lonely pursuit of excellence. Critical thinking, a too often demoted class in today's culture, is essential for a lifetime of learning as we attempt to divine our way through so much distorted information. As former Chair of the National Fund for American Indian Education during my Forrest Gump life, I have seen how Native students deprived of encouragement and what most students take for granted in terms of stable learning environments, can turn their internal lightbulb on as they take command of this creative and critical thinking weapon known as the human brain and heart.
With a father whose job was Chief of Station for the CIA in London (literally the American "M" in James Bond terms) who told me he met with MI-5 and MI-6 weekly during the height of the Cold War in the late 1960's, who had to discriminate between Russian misinformation, disinformation and legitimate information, it's in my DNA to see the challenge all of us face today. More than ever, we all face a monumental challenge in this accelerating A.I. generation of false information masquerading as truth. We must figure out who we are, and what is truth. Asking that question, as Socrates did more than 2,400 years ago, will determine the quality of our choices, relationships, and lives.
In the NFL, you're at the pinnacle of a lonely mountaintop—more like a cliff—where it can be you alone if you're not careful, with a public guillotine, a Marie Antoinette-like career death inches and seconds away.
There is no backup; no one behind you. You're totally on your own. You either get it done or you don't. It's not like horseshoes or grenades; there aren't consolation points for hitting the crossbar or the upright. Coming close is still 100% failure, and you have only one chance to get it right. Absolutely everyone sees your success and ESPECIALLY remembers with 4k clarity the ones you miss. They retain the misses for a long, long time. You're signing up for extreme levels of criticism if that bothers you. It's a perfect analogy for leading in a modern world of hyper exposure, hyper public criticism, and targeted potential cancellation—just for having the guts to put yourself out on that plank. Not everyone wants to walk the plank of being a kicker in the NFL. Being average stinks.
Kicking in the NFL is an incredibly powerful training system for managing intense pressure. I believe everybody reading this book—and everybody in general—from the time they leave the womb, will confront those levels of pressure during their lives. Leaders and success stories walk a dual plank of both painful rejection and remarkable celebration every day. They choose both risk and discomfort, and higher levels of joy. They choose a script they themselves have to write with preparation, physically, mentally, and spiritually. They are those who choose to risk defeat and failure in pursuit of greatness in their chosen field. They choose feeling fully alive in the midst of the unknown and great uncertainty. They choose to create their own certainty.
The kicker is a public laboratory of success or failure. My conditioning lab came from 18 seasons in the NFL (not counting 8 years of high school and college) and, counting preseason, 350 games in the National Football League, with 11 painful rejections by 8 NFL teams over two years. Those rejections were at times devastating, but each time, they vaccinated me against the pain, against the doubt that one's lifetime dream was easily torched, immunized against the false flag that threatens the deep roots of our dreams. It helped me refocus more on disciplining my emotional and physical state for those abrupt 30 seconds of truth!
Before I finally made it, I was told I was not good enough—again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. It's harder when your family members probably question your sanity in the process. I didn't exactly know it at the time, but those failures were pouring character chemicals into my personal mental and physical test tube of identity and purpose. Who was I, after all? Was I defined by others, even those experts at the top of the NFL food pyramid? Did they see me as I saw myself? Did I see me as I could be?
They forced me to either give up or to believe that the juvenile dream of a 9-year-old of being a professional soccer and baseball athlete was real, initially molded and inspired by meeting my first pro athlete, the great future Hall of Fame Washington Redskins wide receiver Bobby Mitchell. I remember it well. He was an elegant black superstar in a tailored white suit, speaking to a sea of well-dressed white businessmen and enthralled Potomac School fathers in McLean, Virginia. I was taken by my father, Sidney Lowery, to witness this iconic human being speak both a body language and spoken language of supreme self-possession and confidence.
Six years later, the towering Washington Senators 6'8" 300-pound homerun colossus Frank Howard presented the Boys Club 8th Grade Basketball MVP award to me. I soaked in every detail—his immense size contrasted with his surprisingly high voice. Each professional athlete I later met or admired further stoked my adolescent notion of a dream life, of an athletic gladiator inside me playing and fighting my own battles in those professional coliseums. Each moment meeting them was frozen forever in my memory banks.
So many eight and nine-year-olds, both rich and very poor, dream every night into their imagination pillows of becoming Steph Curry, Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, Travis Kelce, Tom Brady, LeBron James, Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, or in my generation, superstars who defined excellence with every at-bat, every swing, every throw—Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Sonny Jurgensen, Larry Brown, Len Dawson, Dick Butkus, Mark Moseley, Jan Stenerud. The key is discovering that the dream requires something seemingly buried inside you that you have to find, discover, and dig out from a place you didn't even know existed—a spiritual character hibernating in the gut to pursue a dream envisioned ten thousand times, just like so many nine-year-olds have done a billion times all over the world.
Mentors like Dick Johnson keep us returning; they keep us lining up again and again for that painful spiritual gauntlet, because they help us see it is a necessary part of the champion's journey.
In the end, I carved a deeper path toward not only making it in the NFL, but sustaining the initial breakthrough to create much more sublime success beyond just one career. This book encapsulates the fundamental lesson of hanging in there and never giving up through all those rejections and how it makes us a different human being—more focused and tougher and confirmed in our direction and determination. Yet, at the same time, it stripped away the inauthentic "fat" and helped reduce me to my essence. Just as it can for you. So, in some ways I was more myself than I had ever been. It brought out tremendous ambition, overcoming the imposter complex so many of us can feel, coupled with stirring an inner vision, a clearer identity, teaching me a phenomenal amount of focus, and igniting the will to prepare at a level I never thought possible.
Most important, because it can do this for you, the endless rejections taught me how to manage my mind, my heart and the lifetime inner conversation we all have with ourselves and our creator. We can elevate above mere consciousness, confront whether we can still grow, and perform at a level at or better than we ever thought we could. My goal is to help you elevate your being in every moment of truth. That, ladies and gentlemen, is being FULLY ALIVE.
Make moments of truth every moment, every day. Build them into the lifespring within you.
Imagine standing, sitting, stretching, jogging, and kicking into the net after we cross midfield on offense, on a somewhat chaotic, slower-paced, crowded NFL sideline, helmeted and non-helmeted teammates with their enormous shoulder pads stretched far and wide. A few NFL Sports media not upstairs in the press gallery are standing within a few feet, as you go through your routine, divorced from the close by (might as well have been a mile away) violent, speeding collisions on the field. You're paid to do one thing... and to do it perfectly. But unlike basketball, soccer, or baseball and the sports you played throughout high school and into college, there is no chance to get into the steady flow of the game. The temperature can range from 125 degrees in the early NFL season on artificial turf to well below zero in the playoffs. Managing the wind and the weather, one becomes one's own instant weather man. There are so many potential distractions, not to mention the 10,000 eyes within 90 feet, that it always was about my capacity to manage that intense conversation in my head so I could handle my biggest opponent—myself and the perceived (important word) pressure of public expectations (and my own) that lived inside and with me from my first day as a would-be NFL kicker to the end of my career and, really, for all of us, for a lifetime.
There were those who were skeptical that I could succeed under tremendous pressure. Most of the skill was in ignoring everyone who wanted me and my team to fail—starting with the Kansas City Chiefs veterans who loved their elder-statesman Super Bowl hero, father figure, and future NFL Hall of Fame teammate, Jan Stenerud (who I had also always admired).
After enduring 11 rejections, my brand was well-earned Loser with a capital L at the time I made the Kansas City Chiefs. No one knew who I was. Was this going to be just one more stop on my Job-like self-defeating journey (having left a superb job working as permanent staff for the United States Senate with the Commerce Science and Transportation Committee—more about that later)? But I was ready to make a STATEMENT. I had paid my dues. I was laser focused. Best decision I ever made when they cut Jan before the 3rd preseason game was to NOT watch tv or read the newspaper. Probably good advice all the time. I knew the majority were asking the same question: who IS this guy?
I remember the moment I came into a new place, midway through the 4th quarter, tapping Marv Levy on the shoulder of my first game kicking field goals for the Chiefs against the Seattle Seahawks, when we were down 17-13. "Coach, I think I can make this kick," I said. Marv turned around like he was brushing off a mosquito on his shoulder, only to realize it was me, the cause of the huge backlash against him the past 10 days for letting go of the Chiefs' iconic Stenerud, the first great NFL kicker.
Visibly surprised (Marv was normally phenomenally diplomatic, a Harvard-educated future Hall of Fame coach himself, but a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at times on the sidelines), he bellowed, "What?!"
He paused briefly and stared at me as if I was crazy, probably looking for the whites in my eyes, so to speak, then suddenly yelled, "Field goal!"
Suddenly, I was running onto the field, where the ball sat on the 39-yard line, and I was taking my steps back from the kicking spot to the other side of the field, beyond the 50-yard line. I'd have to kick a 57-yard field goal, which would be both a club record and would also set an NFL field goal record (the first time a kicker had made two 50-yarders in one game).
I noticed the wind blowing from right to left on the top of the right upright, so I aimed at the right upright, and sure enough, the ball curved right through... (I would go on to hold the NFL record for most 50-yarders in NFL history when I retired).
I remember the command I felt in that moment, like I owned the field, as if I needed no oxygen, a mastery in that new, very bright spotlight. It was a level of intensity and confidence that was beyond anything I'd ever felt. As if I'd broken through a wall into a new identity for myself. I was completely focused with angry warpaint on my face—what many refer to as "the Zone." I ignored the Seahawks' kicker, Efren Herrera, who was laughing and yelling at how crazy I was for even attempting that kick. Not knowing that I was in another dimension, the fear chains that had been holding me back gone. I tuned out the 20 players who created a guard wall barely 20 feet away, 11 of them paid a lot of money to block my kick.
I nodded to my holder, our quarterback, Steve Fuller, and our snapper, Hawaii's finest Kale Ane snapped a perfect smooth spiral eight yards to Steve in 7/10ths of a second. Steve caught it and spun the laces away from the back, and I proceeded to crush that ball so completely that it hit halfway up the net, closing the score to within 1 point with 8 minutes left in the game. The score was 17-16.
Jack Patera, the Seahawks head coach, told the press afterward that, "It looked like it could have gone out of the stadium." I share this because these are moments when we break through and transcend all of the negativity, the pain, sadness, humiliation, rejection, and doubt, and find an inner sanctuary and power we never knew we had. All because we never give up.
The job of the kicker is more than setting records and kicking 57-yard field goals. Like all of us who aspire to be great in whatever our professions and life roles, the job is also to be dependable and consistent, to be ready for the 23-yarders and the extra points, and all of the other field goals in between. It is to be so good you are, in a very good way, taken for granted, someone the rest of the team doesn't have to worry about.
Manage your own lifelong conversation with yourself and your creator on the field of battle and away from the field of battle, so that you are locked and loaded, ready in your moments of truth. We spend so much time anticipating how we're going to do and what we are going to achieve in that moment, and we wonder if we're going to have the courage to be our own hero. That classic inner conversation of the young Civil War soldier in Steven Crane's iconic book, "The Red Badge of Courage," brewing endlessly how he will perform when bullets and real blood fly on the field of battle. Will we stay resolute and stifle that inner voice that tells us we don't belong... that we're not good enough, an imposter?
There is both an angel and a beast inside all of us—inside each of us is a hero and a coward. They are whispering and sometimes shouting. Who will you listen to?!
That moment of truth isn't physically outside of us; it's inside of us. As my teammate, Marcus Allen, once said, "Act like you've been there." Even before he arrived in Kansas City as my teammate from the hated Raiders, I took his words to heart. When I made a field goal, I wouldn't let myself get too excited. Like John Wooden would say, "Never too high, never too low," I'd raise one hand in a clenched fist of exclamation, like I meant to make that field goal, which I did 80 percent of the time (and 87 percent for 3 seasons when I graduated into my "elderly" third NFL decade in the 90's). This became a beautiful mentoring relationship between myself and the inner conversation of what I thought I could be. Former Olympic sports psychologist Dr. Andrew Jacobs, along with Mr. Johnson, helped me create my own inner teacher, together with the Failure Academy school of 11 painful rejections in the process of confronting my doubts and digging out pieces of greatness I never knew I had.
Yes, I had doubts, and I had fears, but I found a place to put them so my gifts could flourish and find their highest calling. I was able to do that on the football field and then later transitioned it into my post-football careers.
You don't have to be in the NFL to apply the lessons in this book. Everyone can implement them in their careers and many aspects of their lives. I want to make that easier for you!
This is not just a sports book! I hope you enjoy reading the stories that bring color, energy and context to support my message and give credit to those who helped me along my journey. It also isn't just a memoir, a snapshot of my life from birth to the present. This book is a hybrid—part self-help and personal/professional development and part memoir, with some of my poetry injected throughout. The poetry I write is a part of me as my gift of the personal exercise of balancing right and left brain—order and discipline married with the creativity and spiritual side. It is my hope that this book gives you what you need to succeed under stress and pressure, to find your flow in everything you do, whether you need the courage to try something new, or you're trying to stand back up and stay in the game and your dream after suffering 11 rejections. It's absolutely not about a "flash-in-the-pan," short-term "Hollywood" success—you know, the shooting-star shallow breakthrough success that crashes and burns all too often after the first big breakthrough, season, or #1 hit. It's about turning that first fundamental success into a deeper, lifelong success and joy, because it shares your stage, your insights, and your success intentionally with others.
When you do, Never Retire. You are more than one kick, one team, one career, and one dream. Instead, graduate those deeper lessons into a spiritually-aware graduate school of sacred fulfillment. In this world today, where our inner voice must compete with social media voices often feeding insecurity, hate, division, and doubt, we need your voice, and we need your healing powers, the unique and beautiful seeds within you, waiting to be harvested, to blossom!!
Keep kicking with accuracy—nail your field goals—you've got this!
Millions on television and thousands in the stadium watched as I trotted out to kick the game-winning field goal. I had come so far. So many rejections, so many trials, so many doubts, so many people to thank, and so many people to forget who didn't see me as NFL material. But I didn't want to forget them—they fueled my passion. They challenged the very nature of my identity. They stoked an anger, but also my focus. They stoked a competitive resilience with their inability to see that I WAS that good. Maybe only I could see it. Maybe only I had the vision to see past the thousands of footballs I had kicked, past the whoosh of my right leg stroking the ball toward a target only I could see. Because in the end, only I had to see, only I had to feel the connection to that target between and beyond the goal posts.
Only rejection pushes us to question our limits. It was those NO's that made me question everything. So I made doubt my friend. I used doubt to keep pushing. Because unlike the other positions on a football team, the kicker is on his own island, and few can relate. "He's not a real football player." Well, he IS an expert at a fine art of handling pressure corkscrewed into 1.27 seconds... He's like Luke Skywalker, with the mentor figure of Obi Wan Kenobi exhorting him to close his eyes and "Feel the force, Luke!"
Some initiations are a day, some a week—some years. In many ways, we might benefit by seeing every day as an initiation—a new birth into the healthy discomfort and butterflies of feeling fully alive.
So there I was, fresh from Jack Lambert telling me in his direct fashion (no Obi Wan Kenobi, for sure) that I better make the kick or he would rip my fucking head off... trusting the discipline the way any athlete trusts the thousands of hours of preparation just because they DID practice like it was the real game. They did welcome the healthy pressure of the true craftsman. I can hear Dick Johnson's voice, my Obi Wan Kenobi, his tone more than his words a music of embracing the moment. The unspoken in everything that Dick ever gave me was that IF I DO MY PART, GOD WILL HANDLE THE REST. I kept my head down, perfect snap, the line protected as one unit (including Jack Lambert protecting my left side from marauding kick blockers), my holder, Steve Largent (some of the surest hands in NFL history but had dropped the PAT snap earlier), was sure and my kick was true. An ornery SOB one moment, Lambert ran over and almost broke my ribs hugging me and wouldn't let go for a full minute as all my AFC Pro Bowl teammates ran on the field to celebrate.
I learned a lesson that day; I found myself sitting on my locker stool after talking to the reporters and cameras and high-fiving teammates (there were 17 Hall of Famers on the field that day, including Dan Fouts, Earl Campbell, Don Shula, Ted Hendricks, John Hannah, and many more). Lynn Swann had been broadcasting the sidelines and tried to interview me right before the kick (I said, "NOT now!!" lol). I was happily tired from three hours in the Honolulu, Hawaiian sun, and as my Pro Bowl teammates were beginning to leave the Aloha Stadium locker room, it suddenly hit me—that's it?
What was I going to do after the game? What's missing? Who was there in Honolulu to hug and celebrate with? Someone who knew what this really meant, that really knew me? Who could I share this with? Who would have been there, no matter what? Who could I grab dinner with, tell stories with, laugh with, cry with? Who was there who could see this in the context and chronology of the full life that led up to this moment? Who would have accepted the twin imposters of fame and ignominy with equal wisdom and balance?
~ "He has been there, and done that, and walks the talk!"
This book will help you embrace your challenge as your own and fully own the commitment to find a clear, daily sense of purpose that propels you to a new level!!
My story is about success in the journey through a thousand rejections, where people tell you, directly, in body language, in tone, in example, that you can't do it. It happens in school, overcoming the occasional bully, in the locker room, the street, even in your own family's living room, really anywhere, and turning it into a love affair with doing the work necessary to become a transcendent, consistent champion.
My story is about noticing that each step toward my dream to become the most accurate and prolific kicker in NFL history meant confronting the fear of total public humiliation (78,000 in Arrowhead Stadium alone, millions on TV from living room couches everywhere, where those 18-foot-wide goalposts look SO HUGE!)...
...yet discovering that each time that fear was confronted, I became one step closer not only to the dream, but to finding MYSELF. Inoculating ourselves to paralyzing fear is not an easy process; there are many scenes that remind us of haunting, violent scenes from Game of Thrones.
The illusion is that making it in the NFL, or Hollywood, or Nashville—or Mount Everest, the Amazon Rain Forest, the Nobel Peace Prize, or the entrepreneurial lab where you take this book as your personal reference and go on to invent something that heals the world—requires a new person to emerge.
The illusion is you can only find that person somewhere else. I can see myself lining up for my very first NFL field goal, a 45-yard attempt against the San Diego Chargers at the New England Patriots Schaefer Stadium. I was a rookie, nervous as hell, and missed it by a mile (or close to it!). After the Patriots cut me, when that paralyzing fear and voice inside my head telling me that I didn't really belong was endorsed and stamped valid (I thought), I cried and felt betrayed and lost...
But the real secret is that a few days later, another voice ALWAYS starts to reemerge... if you pay attention to what's happening inside you, to your soul, your mind, your body, your emotions. Every time, you face your dream and the chance you might fail, those voices yell how monumentally ridiculous the pressure of the NFL kicking position can be as you are running on the field, and every time, they diminish just a little more... and you notice something each time you stand up and start again.
I noticed a pattern, because the same thing happened when Head Coach Walt Michaels and the New York Jets cut me the first time in training camp. I thought my dream was over... that the "dream" was just that, a dream! And yet, a few days later, the stronger voice, the authentic voice clearly re-engaged that said, "No one else knows what you are capable of"—and asked, "Why Not YOU, Nick?!"
Watching Joe Montana practice with the effortless discipline of a symphony conductor, throwing every pass not just on target but perfectly on target, clued me into how we build the confidence to know that we can do it when it matters. As future NFL Hall of Fame Coach Marv Levy would say, "Practice doesn't make perfect; PERFECT practice makes perfect!"
I realized that "they" (often including me) didn't have a clue! The "THEY" in the NFL, Hollywood, Broadway, Nashville, etc. have no clue what is inside you, or me. We don't know until we jump with both feet into the arena of life. Only we can discover and know that. This book is designed to help you affirm that that beautiful, awkward, seemingly random dance, the chaotic ship of Destiny they call a journey, is within your control to harness and exploit.
We all are riding like Odysseus on our own voyage of discovery. We always had the power. Your power is to be uniquely you—to discover and perfect the 1,000% unique God-given talents and gifts that only you were born with. Whether as a placekicker in the National Football League, a ballerina, an attorney, writer, teacher, garbage man, architect, artist, plumber, software programmer, or entrepreneur, each of us has unique character and talent blueprints and DNA that only we can unbury, tame, and master. Those memory banks, those millions of efforts good and bad, those traumas that have held you back, and those angels and mentors that spoke power and belief into you were mirrors to your own power and purpose!
I'm getting closer to beating out future NFL Hall of Famer Jan Stenerud head-to-head, mano a mano, after 11 rejections. Future Chiefs Dynasty owner Clark Hunt was charting us every practice and every kick at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri in 107° average heat and thick humidity. Under my breath, I'm coaching myself quietly, "Out kick him every day, at everything."
I'd been cut by 8 NFL teams (3 of them twice), but I was confronted by a team that would fly me out to KC from Virginia, give me a $2,500 bonus, and bring me in 3 months early to compete against the greatest kicker in the history of the game... somehow, I still felt something aching—something said keep going. The words of Dick Johnson, my coach and mentor since high school, kept haunting me: "You will always wonder." I decided I owed myself a 12th time.
I gave up an excellent job working as one of only 2 non-attorneys with 11 attorneys and the Senate Commerce Science and Transportation Committee, serving for Senator Bob Packwood and the great state of Oregon, focused on aviation deregulation and safety—a dream job—yet I thought I owed it to myself to try one more time.
I'm lasting late in training camp, and I'm competing every day against Stenerud, who was at that point the greatest kicker in the history of the game and one of the stars of the only Super Bowl Championship the Chiefs had ever won (formerly the old AFL Champion Dallas Texans). He was the first dominant kicker in NFL history.
Clark Hunt, the 16-year-old son and heir of owner Lamar Hunt and future architect of the new dynasty in the NFL, the new America's Team (it's over, Dallas!!) was charting me and Jan every day, every field goal, every get-off time, every single kick.
He told his father that this tall, upstart kicker who'd been rejected so many times was somehow out-kicking Jan Stenerud, and he really believed that this skinny unknown named Nick Lowery was going to beat out Stenerud. The other players like All Pro defensive backs and comedic characters Gary Green and Gary Barbaro (they were a little like Butch Cassidy and Sundance) were seeing this, as well, which I learned years later (loyalty and affection for Jan from former teammates kept it a secret out of respect). I get it: Jan was kind of a father figure—at 36, that was "old" to me compared to an unknown, baby-faced 24-year-old.
One of them was Jack Rudnay, the classic tough "SOB" figure of the movies, the Old NFL—someone you'd want in your corner. Jack was always ready to go to battle for his teammates, whether in a bar or on the field. I was an outsider at that point. The old Chiefs, exactly like the old Raiders, were bar brawlers in temperament; they had each other's back, no matter what. That intense loyalty separates the great teams from the also-rans. Jack was a three-time Pro Bowl center for the Chiefs, with a large nose that had a dent in it that announced his toughness, and a dark, thick beard. He was always full of alternating sarcastic and in-your-face direct verbal jabs. My mother said in her perfect British accent, "He reminds me of Blackbeard the Pirate!" If you believe in reincarnation, that's exactly who Jack was in a previous life. No fear. He united our team the second he came back from injury at the beginning of my rookie year, winning 4 straight after starting 0-4.
Jack was the rugged leader we needed in the wake of a Chiefs team that had descended into mediocrity after the late 60's early 70's dynasty led by Hank Stram, Len Dawson, Willie Lanier, Otis Taylor, Buck Buchanan, Bobby Bell, Emmit Thomas, Johnny Robinson, and Jan Stenerud—all Hall of Famers—glory days of Super Bowl 4. Along with Marv Levy's excellence (later to be Marv Levy 2.0 in Buffalo), Jack could help mold a tough team culture, along with friends and special team stars like Ed Beckman, who smoked unapologetically in the locker room with linemen Bob Simmons and future NFLPA President Tom Condon.
Watching them smoking in the locker room (it stopped a year later), I thought we might as well be in a Western saloon.
Let's say, without them ever admitting it, that it was those renegades that sent a pungent and tangy message to the brash, skinny, perceived as uppity kicker (How dare him think he can outkick the Legend?!!) threatening to take the job of their dear friend, Jan. One day after practice late in training camp, I came back to my room after dinner with my roommate, Paul Dombroski (a proud Hawaiian on a team with five Hawaiians) in Eaton Hall at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. I realize now I spent almost a year of my life in that dorm (ten training camps times five weeks).
As I pulled the covers from my bed, at the end of another humid 107° Missouri summer day, there was my present: five feet of warm, still fresh, disgusting Liberty, Missouri cow manure, with squiggly live worms still in it. It was a temporary out-of-body experience. Paul and I surmised there might be more shit, and sure enough, I opened the chest of drawers to find still more fresh, "live" cow manure.
My initial reaction was complete disgust that anyone would do this. It was Paul's reaction as well.
But later that night, a wry smile came on my face; I realized I must be getting pretty close to be that threatening to them. Maybe this was their dysfunctional way of saying they love me (but probably not!).
I'm saying that facetiously, but it helped me get through it. I knew I was getting very close. Clark told us that week that Marv had told him that any kick slower than a 1.33 second get-off would be considered no good, even if it went through... which did not sit well at all with Jan. (Get-off time is directly related to the chance another team has to block a kick—the less time, the less chance). Not coincidentally as I look back, that next Saturday before our third preseason game against St. Louis, Coach Marv Levy caught Jan Stenerud as he was getting on the team bus. I was sitting on the bus with a prime view from my side window, watching Marv take Jan aside, and I had a feeling something was up. Marv consistently treated players with dignity to a fault when he could. Players remember that—seeds of a Hall of Fame Coach later that decade in Buffalo... I learned soon after that he told Jan away from the team that I would be doing all the kicking in the game—unless I screwed up—the very same words 2 years earlier with the New York Jets when I was competing with veteran Pat Leahy and told I was doing all the kicking against the Chargers—only this time I was ready.
That was the third preseason game of four. This was my chance—the same chance I had blown two years earlier against the Chargers (much more pleasurable to write this so many years later, having kicked five game-winners against the Chargers, including two in consecutive seasons in '90 and '91 that put us in the playoffs).
At that very moment, after two years and eleven so-called failures and rejections, it was finally my turn. That cemented the beginning of my career, and though he hated it then, Jan told me later (we are good friends today—my father loved him) it made him re-dedicate to his craft. Jan played 6 more seasons—some of his finest seasons with both the Packers and Vikings: this wasn't the end. It became a rebirth for both of us, in very different ways.
Many years later, I learned on my Headgames radio show on Sirius Satellite that Phil Mickelson and others in similar breakthrough moments, said when they finally broke through that it felt like it was their own birthday party—and in many ways, enduring and persisting through the "sh--" of life gives birthdays to our best lives. So never, never, never, never give up!! I've signed "Never Give Up" on virtually every autograph since—and add a bushel of gratitude to Dick Johnson and all those who fed me with positivity and persistence.
The day after that St Louis game, the Chiefs announced that they were cutting Jan Stenerud after his brilliant 13-year future NFL Hall of Fame career.
I am deeply proud that I competed against and beat Jan out in the heart of his career. To this day, many people, even the Chiefs superb kicker Harrison Butker told me that they thought I followed Stenerud. To this day, many still don't have their heads around that I took his job fair and square, trading shot for shot, like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, shooting it out against the Clantons and McLaury's at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. As much as he disliked me at first and was angry at Marv Levy, Jan would tell me later that unseating him that year forced him to rededicate himself and dig deeper, and he found a new gear and cemented his place in the Hall of Fame. That's what Champions do—they turn defeat into blessings.
It needed to happen the way it did. I'm very proud of the fact that after two years of rejections, I was able to beat out the greatest kicker at that point in the history of the game and went on to break every single one of his records—some by a lot.
• 67% for Jan, 80% for me
(Jan was 58% at Arrowhead Stadium vs my 85%)
• 8 game winners for Jan—15 for me
• NFL records: Most 50 yarders ever. Most games with two 50-yarders.
• Best PAT % ever (562-568)
• 2 seasons with 21 straight field goals
• Most NFL field goals ever
• Most points in Chiefs history
• Best cold-weather % ever
To this day, the statistics of today's kickers 30-40 years later completely discount the ERA that kicked in. No one was better during those years. Today's kickers are great – don't get me wrong – but several things in particular have changed.
• Domed Stadiums
• Far better field conditions (thanks to legendary groundskeepers like George Thoma and new technologies that make fields chewed up by 6000 pounds of raw human muscle, grit and cleats look and feel like fairways if not putting greens rather than the rough
• Jan told me to tell everyone about how the balls are now broken in – kickers get essentially practice balls now the same way quarterbacks can use their favorite broken-in footballs. In the so-called old days, the fresh new balls were much like new baseball mits…significantly less pliable. If broken-in footballs allow that kicking foot to impact the football for 1 half of one thousandth of a second longer, that's about 12.5% more power – or about 7 more yards of power. During my time in the mid 80's, I had 3 of the 5 longest kicks in NFL History, from 58, 58 and 57 yards. One of those 58 yarders against my former home town and Super Champion Redskins in 1983, remained for 40 years the longest field goal in the first quarter in NFL History.
So while today's kickers like Harrison Butker, Chris Boswell, Brandon Aubrey and Justin Tucker are amazing, they rarely have to kick in horrible conditions and never with rock hard footballs.
Knowing I had to outkick Jan at everything every day would never have been possible two seasons earlier. But by never giving up, by being persistent through repeated failures, by getting back up after heartbreaks of being cut by the New York Jets and then the New England Patriots, tryouts with the Colts, Tampa Bay, the Saints, the Chargers, Bengals, Redskins, I was much tougher mentally, and tougher physically. Persistence equals unequalled growth to places I never thought possible – and will help you go to places you never believed could happen!
My only choice was to dig deeper and find parts of my soul and my character I didn't even know I had.
It will be a beautiful and richly emotional mural of your own stories that in the end will only help others in your life journey do the same.
