I did not like the coach, so I left the football team in my senior year in high school. The following fall (1965) I registered at the college premises in my hometown of Burlington, IA primarily to prevent recruitment and the inevitable trip to Vietnam had been drafted me. At that time, students who attended college were exempt from conscription.
In the fall of 1965, while attending Burlington Junior College, I met the basketball coach, Ed Sparling, a man very quaint in its own right, and I became one of his students managers. We had amazing athletic talent and highly successful basketball season. In the process, the coach Sparling and I became friends.
In the spring (1966), sometime after the basketball season was over, one of the players (Rick Lowery) happened to mention to the coach that he had been a placekicker on the local high school football team. Now, Coach Sparling took pride in making sure all of his players received scholarship offers after their playing days at Burlington. And luckily for me he included one of his managers students in the production efforts grants him.
Coach Sparling writes a letter
Even though he had never seen me kick anything, Coach Sparling wrote a letter praising my spot-kicking ability and sent it to a dozen football coaches throughout the Midwest. I never saw the actual letter, but whatever it said, it was good enough to get the attention of Howard Fletcher, the head football coach at Northern Illinois University in the spring of 1966.
Fletcher coach gives me a football scholarship
Fletcher said the coach invited me to visit the campus. My father and I drove to NIU. We spent an hour or so touring the campus with coach Fletcher. Then, without ever asking me to kick a soccer ball one, he offered me a scholarship covering tuition and books to play football at NIU. To say I was excited beyond belief more is an understatement. I quit my football team and suddenly the institute offered me a scholarship college football? But this is just the beginning!
square toe shoe
Following our visit, my father, who was also an innovator, took a pair of my old soccer shoes to the local shoe repair shop in downtown Burlington and asked the owner to invent a square toe on the edge of the shoe. right foot. shoe. Yes, back in 1966, soccer balls being kicked were still white with INSTEAD toes and insteps, just like soccer-style kickers do today. This area increased area and improved the odds of kicking the ball through the goalposts.
The first play from scrimmage touchdown
I practiced regularly throughout the summer with my new headdress shoe with square toe, and in the fall I went to NIU. After a couple of weeks early practice, we had our first game. And I’m here to say that on the first play of the game, quarterback Mike Greisman dropped back and threw a touchdown pass of 75 yards to a small racing car named Jerry Sandberg. That said, the second play I witnessed as a member of the NIU football team was really yours kicking the extra point through the goalposts. It happened so fast I did not have time to get nervous.
The touchdown scoring machine
That first game was an omen. In the end it turned out, Fletcher was a very offensive-minded coach and this team was effectively a touchdown scoring machine. That meant he had boatloads of opportunity to earn extra points. In fact, we have scored so many touchdowns that records set of school for most extra points in a season and the extra points in a single game. This was not because I was better than my predecessors. He had only so many more chances to kick extra points. I was even named player of week after that single game record including a photo action shot that appeared in the Star of the North, the school newspaper.
A full sports scholarship
Purpose DESPITE all my good fortune, SEVERAL weeks after the season ended, I was homesick and had decided to tell Coach Fletcher that I would be returning to Burlington Junior College for the second semester. As I was walking towards the stadium, I ran into the coach. And before he could deliver my disappointing news, he informed me that he had just placed me on a FULL SPORTS SCHOLARSHIP! I would pay everything for my university education from the second semester. I was speechless. Did I mention I was quitting football my senior year of high school?
my luck is gone
In my first year NIU joined the Midwest Athletic Conference, a much higher level of soccer than it had been used to the previous year. Our touchdown scoring machine sizzled along with my own kick production. Actually, I just remember that second season (junior).
The summer before my senior year spent too much time practicing water skiing on the Mississippi River, which lies just to the side of my hometown. At the end of the summer I spill and tore me right groin muscle. Needless to say that inhibited my ability to boot. My last year was a complete failure. I played not at all. It seemed that my luck was running out.
And then a phone call from the NFL
Then in the spring of that year (1969), out of nowhere, I received a phone call from a gentleman who informed me it was headhunters Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League. He said he had heard that he was interested in a test of the NFL. I never knew for sure, but this call must have been the result of the coach Sparling still supported me from the shadows.
Regardless, he had not touched a football in months. And my senior season had been a complete and total failure. But I said yes, I’m interested in doing a test in the NFL. When you want to get together? He said he was in town as we talked and asked when he could get to the stadium. I told him I would be there in about 30 minutes.
DeKalb wonderful winds
I arrived at the stadium only to find that there was a strong wind blowing from east to west. Sitting among thousands of extremely flat fields of corn, DeKalb was famous for being windy most of the time. I put the shoe tip square foot on soccer balls kicked … and proceeded with the wind. I was 30 yards to 40 yards to 50 yards, and, pounding each kick as well oiled machine. I mean realistically all I had to do was kick the ball in the air and with the help of this wind tunnel soccer traveled long and straight, and directly through the post time of the goal, after a while, after a while. Talk about being lucky! You can not make this stuff up.
The Atlanta Falcons contract
The scout chartered every kick and a week later I received a piece of mail containing a standard Atlanta Falcons player contract signed by coach Norm Van Brocklin, who at the time was already a member of the NFL Hall of Fame. fame of his quarterbacking days with Los Angles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles.
For some reason Coach Van Brocklin was happy with his current kicker, a gentleman named Bobby Etter from the University of Georgia and a math Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky at the time. There were three kickers competing for the job. It lasted me a couple of weeks before being cut by Van Brocklin who was very kind in explaining my release. Bobby knew Etter was the better kicker.
Fifty odd years later
To put a finishing touch to this unlikely tale of good fortune, I recently (50 plus years after the fact) corresponded with a friend from high school named Bob McLaury, who just happened to be the headliner for me when we practiced extra kicking my junior point. . year in high school. Someone took a picture of Bob holding me and pretending (we were actually posing for the camera) kicking the soccer ball and published it in the school yearbook in the spring of 1964, my junior year. That photo had to have been the source of Rick Lowery’s comments to Coach Sparling. Lowery was a year older than me, and he had no way of knowing that he had ever kicked a football for anyone.
In that conversation with McLaury, I asked him if he remembered us ever kicking extra points or field goals in a real game. I’m sure we had practiced kicking. But he didn’t remember kicking anything in a game. McLaury confirmed that he didn’t remember us doing anything like that. So chances are a simple photo in a high school yearbook prompted Rick Lowery to tell Coach Sparling that he had been a placekicker in high school. This despite the fact that he’s probably never even kicked an extra point in a real high school football game. That conversation prompted Sparling’s letter and everything else that followed.
A seemingly inconsequential conversation
It’s interesting to think how someone seemingly inconsequential, off the cuff, from a basketball player to their coach, could change the direction of someone else’s life so completely and totally. If it hadn’t been for that little conversation, I most likely would never have heard of Northern Illinois University, let alone had the opportunity to play college football, set school records that lasted more than a decade, receive a full athletic scholarship (ironically, I was never really much of an athlete), had some contact with the NFL, met my beautiful and talented future wife, had two unspeakable children that my wife and I are incredibly proud of, etc., etc. ., etc.
Yes, you can call me Mr. Lucky!
And this story of football is only one case in which I have been more than a little luck throughout my life. It is the most dramatic. But it is a long way from the only story I could say the same lines. There are many, many more, but I will not bore you with them at this time. Suffice it to say that I have never even once complained about being lucky. I’ve had more than my share of good luck. If you need you can call Mr. Lucky!