San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gould will kick with fire — when he finds it
Kicker Robbie Gould celebrates the 49ers’ 23-17 win over the Dallas Cowboys in an NFC wild-card game on Jan. 16. Gould was perfect, making two extra points and three field goals.
When Robbie Gould thinks about kicking off his 18th NFL season Sunday — against his former team, in front of his wife and kids and tens of thousands of fans who miss him, in the city he still calls home — he finds it impossible to suppress a smile.
After all, Gould, still the Chicago Bears’ all-time leader in scoring and field-goal percentage, expects a convivial reception at Soldier Field, even while wearing a San Francisco 49ers uniform.
“Because of the Green Bay game (in last January’s playoffs) and because of how my career has gone since I left Chicago, I’m expecting a really warm welcome from the fans,” Gould said this past week while sitting in a Levi’s Stadium club area. “I love the Chicago Bear fans, and I love the city of Chicago. It’s fun for me to be able to go back to a place that has given me so much.”
It’s a heartwarming story, except for this tiny complication: By the time Sunday’s season opener begins, Gould will inevitably be in a bitter mood, having seized upon some sort of perceived slight to stoke his competitive fire.
“I’m the kind of guy that has to find something to make me mad in order to play better, as weird as that sounds,” the 6-foot, 190-pound kicker explained. “I’ll find something nitpicky during the week or pregame or whatever. It just makes me focus more; it makes me play with a chip on my shoulder and play a little bit edgier.”
Sometimes Gould’s motiva
tion comes organically. In 2017, his first season with the 49ers, he returned to Soldier Field as a disgruntled former employee and left in style, making his fifth field goal of the day with four seconds remaining to give San Francisco a 15-14 victory. Having scored every point in Jimmy Garoppolo’s first start for the franchise — and having made his point to his former bosses, who’d released him just before the start of the 2016 season — Gould underscored the post-kick celebration by trash-talking the Bears’ sideline.
In January, Gould was similarly aggrieved upon arriving at Lambeau Field, home of the Bears’ archrivals, for a divisional-round playoff game. Some 49ers felt that Gould’s Green Bay Packers counterpart, Mason Crosby, had showboated after nailing a 51-yard field goal to win a Week 3 game between the teams at Levi’s, setting the stage for a potential payback scenario.
“In full transparency, we had had a meeting the night before” the playoff game, Gould recalled. “Obviously we lost to them (after going ahead) with (37) seconds left, on a 51-yard field goal. And I remember (then special teams coordinator Richard) Hightower saying, ‘We’re gonna go down and we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna celebrate the exact same way that they did, when we beat them.’ ”
Sure enough, with the score tied at 10, the visitors moved across the Frozen Tundra and into field-goal range. Even
Robbie Gould (9) exults after making the game-winning field goal in the divisional playoff game at Green Bay in January.
with the snow falling, the 49ers rightfully believed that given their kicker’s unrivaled playoff pedigree, they were Good as Gould.
After booming the ball through the uprights from 45 yards, Gould — who has never missed a field goal in 21 postseason attempts and has made all 34 extra-point tries — mimicked Crosby’s celebration, holding out his arms while facing the Niners’ sideline and running toward the end zone tunnel. Nearly eight months later, he has zero regrets. On Sunday, Gould can look to the opposing sideline and see Hightower, who’s now the Bears’ special teams coordinator. It’s a role that has had its share of challenges since Labor Day weekend six years ago, when Gould was informed that he was being released after 11 seasons with the franchise. He got the news at 9 p.m. in a nearly empty Halas Hall from then-general
manager Ryan Pace and thenhead coach John Fox, and it wasn’t the fondest of goodbyes.
“It’s funny, in the National Football League, they have to give you a reason why they’re terminating your contract,” Gould said. “They send you a letter, and my letter was ‘based on performance,’ which is basically them telling you that you can’t do it, right? Was the timing unusual? I don’t know. In this league, you’re never safe. You can never rest on what you did the year before, or the week prior. Every day you’re trying to build your resume. For me, I’ve always taken that very personally.”
Gould ultimately landed with the Giants in 2016, helping them to the playoffs. The following March he signed with the 49ers and has since performed at a higher level than any kicker to wear a scarlet-and-gold jersey, including a franchise-record streak of 33 field goals made during his first two seasons. That run included those five particularly sweet field goals at Soldier Field in December 2017, the last of which prompted his post-kick flex.
“You get to go play against the people who cut you, and obviously as a competitor you want to show them that you still have it, right?” Gould explained. “Usually I’m not one to show a bunch of emotion, but I just think that everything that had happened with, I guess, two regimes ago, just kind of came out. For me it was a Cinderella story, and I love to win and I love to be competitive and compete against people who thought I couldn’t do it.”
He has since let go of most of those feelings, even as the Bears have struggled to find a suitable replacement. Before current Bears kicker Cairo Santos brought some stability to the position in 2020, Chicago cycled through Connor Barth, Mike Nugent, Cody Parkey and Eddy Pineiro, none of whom came close to matching Gould’s performance. Gould was actually at Soldier Field for the infamous “Double Doink,” Parkey’s 43-yard attempt that bounced off the left upright crossbar in the final seconds of the Bears’ 16-15 playoff defeat to the Eagles in January 2019. And, no, he didn’t celebrate that miss.
“I bought tickets and was sitting in a suite, literally across from the right upright,” Gould recalled. “It’s a fraternity, and as a kicker, you obviously want him to make it. Those are games that as a kicker, you have to live for.”
Though perfect in the postseason, Gould, who kicked in Super Bowls for the Bears and 49ers 13 years apart and is coming off his fourth NFC Championship Game, is still driven by the quest for a championship. Three months shy of his 40th birthday, and in the final year of his contract, he’s also philosophical. He said he’s focused more on enjoying his situation — especially the times when he gets to bring sons Griffin, Gavin and Grayson into the 49ers’ locker room — than on outcome.
“For me it’s not necessarily about how many games you win, but how many experiences there are where I can teach my kids things like the value of hard work,” Gould said. “Just trying to relax and enjoy every moment as opposed to worrying about what’s next or what has happened in the past.”
That said, as Sunday’s kickoff approaches at Soldier Field, Gould will find a way to fret about … well, he’s not sure what, but give him time.
“I’ll find he said, laughing. “There’ll always be something that’s gonna bother me. (Maybe) it’s gonna be the Gatorade, or it’s gonna be it raining, or it could be the field. (Or) some player will say something pregame. I know what I’m looking for, and I can kind of feel it happening as it happens. I just can’t say (yet) what it’s going to be.”