STAR GILLAN
Scots kicker Jamie tells how luck got him to top of NFL
WE’VE all sat watching players in various sports and thought, “I could do that better”.
It’s rarely true although in Jamie Gillan’s case it’s the attitude that set him on a path to a career in the NFL.
The Highlander is now punter for the Cleveland Browns, rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in American sport.
Not bad for a rugby lad who had absolutely no interest in gridiron when he left Scotland for the States as a teenager.
But that all changed after attending a High School football game and watching the kicker miss a sitter – to put it in real football terms.
He said: “There was a lot of luck involved. I went over to the States because I didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship with my family, a cross-Atlantic relationship.
“I was playing rugby out there but the standard of rugby there compared to Scotland was so different and I wasn’t enjoying it.
“One of my mates saw me kick a ball and he told me, ‘You could get a scholarship’.
“I went to a game and I saw one of the field goal kickers miss one from in front of the posts and the punter wasn’t doing much and I thought, ‘I can do those things’.
“As a fly-half you’ve got to be good at kicking so I went to the coach the next day and he said, ‘What have you got?’ I showed him and he looked at the guy and said, ‘You’re fired’.
“I didn’t know a single thing about American football.
“I played five games for Leonardtown High School. I was sitting on the sidelines bored thinking, ‘What is going on?’ I had no idea when I was going to get called on.
“It was crazy but I rolled with it. I started getting some serious looks and got invited to two all-star games.
“I played in them and got a lot of preferred walk-ons but college in the States is really expensive.
“If I go out of state to some big-time school I’d be paying around $45,000 (£34,476) a year to just attend college.
“In my mind I wasn’t going to be paying them to play for them. That was naive of me but I was thinking, ‘I’d like a scholarship’.
“A Division Two school gave me a scholarship and I pretended to sign the papers but didn’t. My friend had seen on Facebook that Pine Bluff needed a kicker, he put my video on their page and they offered me a scholarship.”
Even Gillan’s elevation to the NFL was partly by chance. He said: “Because I came from such a small school nobody knew who I was until about a month before the draft.
“I signed with my agent and within a month I had about 23 teams calling me. As soon as the draft was over the Browns called me and I signed.”