‘DOUBLE DOINK’
The difficulty of being an NFL kicker
On Sunday the name Cody Parkey was etched indelibly into the annals of Chicago sports infamy. As the whole city knows by now, Parkey missed a 43-yard field goal at Soldier Field that ricocheted off the goal post upright and crossbar before bouncing the wrong way — a “double doink,” according to announcer Cris Collinsworth. The miss cost the Bears, their best squad in many years, a chance to advance in the playoffs and a shot at the Super Bowl.
To his credit, Parkey owned up after the game, “It’s one of the worst feelings in the world to let your team down. I feel terrible. Continue to put things into perspective, continue to just put my best foot forward and just sleep at night knowing that I did everything in my power this week to make that kick, and for whatever reason it hit the crossbar and the upright.”
His teammates were supportive, and he handled it professionally, but given that miss, and several others earlier this year, it would be surprising if the Bears retained Parkey next year, despite his multimillion-dollar contract.
Most NFL players and coaches appreciate the heightened emotional and mental resilience required to placekick. David McDuff, an experienced sports psychiatrist, once explained to Sports Illustrated that kicking involves a highly concentrated form of pressure. The time between the beginning of the act and the result “is as compressed in sports as you get. It’s almost like someone puts a cylinder of pressure around the person and just cranks it up. Missing a kick in a big game results in ‘an exponential increase in the pressure.’”
Kicking in the playoffs is far different from kicking in the regular season. Some of the best NFL kickers have failed memorably in that “cylinder of pressure”. Scott Norwood, whose name is engraved in the annals of Buffalo sports infamy, cost the Bills the 1991 Super Bowl with a last-second miss. In 1998, Gary Anderson, who made every kick all season, missed a 39-yarder late in the NFC championship game that probably would have put the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl.
Nate Kaeding, then the second-most-accurate kicker in NFL history, missed only three field goals in the 2009 season, but missed all three attempts in a playoff game that his team lost by three points.
His first miss was from inside 40 yards after an NFL-record 69 makes from that range. Kaeding, an insightful athlete, admitted, “I just got blindsided. It was going so good for so long it was like the world came crashing down on me with that miss. It was so far out of my belief of what would happen in that game. … There was a situation thrown at me I wasn’t prepared to handle. That’s tough to admit as an athlete, as a person. I wasn’t tough enough to handle it on that particular day.”
Even the best acknowledge extreme pressure. The most successful NFL kicker in history, Adam Vinatieri, is destined for the Hall of Fame, but his career hung in the balance
in 1996. “I thought I was one bad game away, maybe one kick away, from the end of my football career. I was very close to going home to South Dakota, and probably going to medical school.” His New England Patriots coach at the time, Bill Parcells, a man not famous for patience, said, “He’s probably not wrong. You can’t live with his results at the time.” Vinatieri missed his first extra point in that particular game but won the game with an overtime field goal. He is now the career-leading scorer in both the NFL regular season and postseason, and won two Super Bowls with last-minute kicks.
Vinatieri recalled the tactics Parcells employed to Stefan
Fatsis, a sports writer who trained as an NFL kicker for a book on placekicking, “I felt the hot breath of Parcells from the first day of training camp. Training camp went well, but if I missed a kick … he’d say things like, ‘He’s day to day, he’s week to week.’ A couple of times at the end of practice, he’d put this kind of pressure on me: If I made the field goal, no conditioning for the entire team. If I missed the kick, we’d all get twice as much conditioning. Sometimes, he’d cast a shadow over where I was kicking, or he’d get the guys to heckle me. I remember a couple of times, he’d get so close to me or the line of my kick that I almost had to change my motion.”
Parcells said, “I tried to create pressure situations in practice with my kickers. What do you think they’re going to face in games?”
Kaeding admitted that fans have every right to “buy into what I’m doing when it’s going good and sell when it’s going bad.”
That’s the right Bears fans have been exercising with Cody Parkey since Sunday night. The opprobrium from fans is expected, but the “double doink” is a reminder that placekicking is among sports’ most difficult jobs.