All guts and no glory

“Look out, look out! It’s no good, it’s no good!”

Commentator Jim Nantz saw it early. The coach’s shoulders slumped. Team-mates’ mouths ripped open like torn pockets. Hands reached for heads. With 11 seconds left of last Sunday’s AFC championship game, Baltimore Ravens kicker Billy Cundiff hooked a straightforward 32-yard field goal attempt wide left and Super Bowl dreams vanished.

Minutes earlier, when Cundiff was huddled by the sideline heaters, visualising what he might have to do, he was a respected veteran among a pretty anonymous band of NFL kickers. No household name, but well-rewarded. Relied upon. Trusted.

Then, 1.3 seconds’ work. Five-time Pro Bowl kicker David Akers once likened it to driving a golf ball that’s teed up only when you’re at the top of your backswing.

Snap. Sam Koch held and spun the ball to turn the laces. Only got it half-way but no problem for a swing of a strong, ex-soccer player’s leg. But contact somehow takes too much turf. Big Cas got away with it in Genoa, but not Billy. The head doesn’t need to lift to know he’ll never be regarded in quite the same way again. Wide left.

As he leaves the field, he puts out a hand to block the camera’s intrusion. But there will be no hiding the face of failure. The death threats soon pile up on Twitter. The jokes circulate. A shirt with his number is burned. American sporting lore has another of what it likes to call a ‘goat’. Ace Ventura’s Ray Finkle made flesh.

There are some sporting careers that just don’t appeal to me. Co-driver in a rally car. Left over a crest into short four right, er, do you mind if I turn the radio on? A curler whose talent is with the brush. How would that play when you’re trying to get out of messy jobs at home? Kicking is another crossed off the wish-list early. An individual sport tacked onto a team game; a kicker’s lot is proof that, sometimes, there is an ‘I’ in ‘team’. I miss. We lose.

Unlike rugby placekickers or GAA free-takers, there is no solace in having travelled the same long road as the colleagues you let down. Kickers don’t learn the playbook, kickers don’t run all the wind sprints.

Former Broncos and Falcons kicker Jason Elam described it as “hours and hours of boredom surrounded by a few seconds of panic”. Gavin Hastings couldn’t really handle the idleness when he left rugby to kick for the Scottish Claymores.

And kickers don’t buy, they rent. Cundiff got the Ravens job at the start of last season after years floating between short-term deals. Three misses from under 40 yards had cost him his Dallas Cowboys contract in 2005.

That sent him on the grand tour of kicking auditions, watching the phone until a coach tires of his current incumbent and offers a fresh batch a quick window to impress. Covering injuries. Stopping gaps. Not trusted. Not relied upon.

He kicked for nobody in 2007 and 2008, had a day job in venture capital. Then, in pre-season 2010, he won a kicking contest with Shayne Graham for the Ravens post. Graham, a veteran of the roadshow, had only just unloaded the car on a one-year offer.

Swings and roundabouts, Graham packed for a week or two and swung by Foxborough to cover an injury to the Patriots’ Stephen Gostkowski. Had to buy new clothes when he hit two for two on the first night.

Graham is honest about the individuality required: “You really don’t have loyalty to a team unless you’re on a team. I’ve bounced around from team to team. You have to be able to handle changes in your life. Wherever the wind blows me.” As long as it doesn’t blow one wide left.

Cundiff left that stage of his career behind when he kicked 26 field goals from 29 last season and made the Pro Bowl. The five-year, big ticket deal followed.

All his career now lacked was a story. That wouldn’t have come if he’d knocked Sunday’s kick straight and true. As another goat, Mitch Williams, who cost the Phillies a World Series in 1993, said: “If he makes it, he’s supposed to. The only thing that could happen is bad.”

But Cundiff had made it to the top of one of the most cut-throat businesses of them all. A business long on guts and short on glory. He shouldn’t let one duffed kick define him, but it will be hard not to.