‘Doink. Double doink’
Parkey’s worst moment came during Bears-Eagles game. His best moment came after it.
In the biggest moment of his career, with the hopes of teammates, coaches and Chicago Bears fans riding on his foot, Cody Parkey instead became an all-time playoff goat Sunday evening at Soldier Field.
And he did it in the most agonizing way possible: His first attempt at what would have been a game-winning, 43-yard field goal with 10 seconds left sailed between the uprights. But Philadelphia Eagles coach Doug Pederson had called a timeout and Parkey’s redo clanged off the upright. Hopes in Chicago were lifted for a nanosecond before the ball then clanged off the crossbar, lifting hopes again ever so slightly before falling back into the end zone.
Doink. Double doink, as NBC’s Cris Collinsworth put it. The kick was no good. The Bears lost.
Such is the life of a National Football League kicker. Boos rained down on Parkey, whose body of work this season includes the truly unusual feat of hitting the uprights four times on a windy Chicago day in November. This time, though, his extraordinary miss sent the Bears home for the off-season. Parkey pointed to the sky, as usual, but how on earth does a player cope with such catastrophic failure on a grand stage? The 26-year-old had answers.
“One of the worst feelings in the world,” he said after Chicago’s 16-15 wild-card loss (via the Chicago Tribune). “Continue to put things in perspective. Continue to just put my best foot forward and sleep at night knowing I did everything in my power this week to go make that kick and for whatever reason it hit the crossbar and the upright and I still couldn’t do it. I feel terrible.”
With the miss, Parkey joins a club of kickers that includes Gary Anderson, Scott Norwood, Blair Walsh, Billy Cundiff, Doug Brien and any number of others who failed to convert in massive, timeless moments. Like Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley, who refused to be broken by giving up the mother of all walkoff home runs to Kirk Gibson in the World Series, they’ve often offered a refreshing and even lofty measure of responsibility.
“You can’t make this up. I feel terrible. I let the team down,” Parkey said. “It’s on me. I have to own it. I have to be a man. Unfortunately, that’s the way it went today.”
His frank postgame performance won a number of fans, including the Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade. “Most of you have no idea how hard this is to do,” Wade tweeted in solidarity even though the doink cost his beloved Bears. “Cody Parkey way to face the media like a true professional. I’m a fan!”
“We’ve all been here Cody but if you wanna win back the city you gotta get back in the lab and have a historic season next year to bury this one,” Kobe Bryant tweeted.
There were plenty of boos, but Parkey made a few fans, too, both for owning his mistake and for shaking hands with Eagles players and coaches after the game.
Parkey, who had hit three field goals in the first half, admitted, “there’s really no answer to it.” He thought he had “hit a great ball” and replays appeared to show the kick being tipped at the line. In fact, it was later ruled a blocked kick.
Despite the outcome, Parkey has some job security in Chicago. Spotrac figures show that
Parkey, who turns 27 next month, is among the highest-paid kickers in the league and will have a $3.5-million salary next season. During the off-season, he signed a four-year contract worth $15 million, including $9 million guaranteed. It would cost the Bears more than $5 million in dead cap space to part with him.
And so the world, as the former Auburn kicker said, will continue to spin, even if he’s more hated than Steve Bartman in the Windy City for a while. “The sun’s gonna shine tomorrow, life’s gonna go on, and unfortunately it’s gonna sting for a while.”