I didn’t like the head coach, so I quit the football team my senior year in high school. The following fall (1965) I enrolled at the local community college in my hometown of Burlington, IA, primarily to avoid the draft and the inevitable trip to Vietnam if drafted. Back then, students attending the university were exempt from the draft.

In the fall of 1965, while attending Burlington Junior College, I met head basketball coach Ed Sparling, a very colorful man in his own right, and became one of his managing students. We had incredible athletic talent and a very successful basketball season. In the process, Coach Sparling and I became friends.

In the spring (1966), sometime after the basketball season was over, one of the players (Rick Lowery) mentioned to the coach that I had been a kicker 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, fortunately for me, he included one of his student administrators in his efforts to produce scholarships.

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.

Coach Fletcher offers me a football scholarship.
Coach Fletcher responded by inviting 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 single soccer ball, he offered me a scholarship that covered tuition and books so I could play soccer at NIU. To say that he was excited beyond belief is an understatement. Would I drop out of my high school football team and suddenly be offered a college football scholarship? But this is just the beginning!

square toe shoe
In the aftermath of our visit, my dad, a bit of 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 forefoot. straight. shoe. Yes, back in 1966, soccer balls were still kicked with the ball of the foot instead of the instep, as soccer kickers are today. This increased the surface area and improved the odds of kicking the ball through the goal posts.

The first touchdown play from scrimmage
I practiced regularly all summer in my new square toe shoe and in the fall headed to NIU. After a couple of weeks of early practice, we had our first game. And I’m here to tell you that on the FIRST PLAY OF SCRIMMAGE, quarterback Mike Greisman backed up and threw a 75-yard touchdown pass to a little speedster named Jerry Sandberg. That said, the second play I witnessed as a member of the NIU soccer team was actually you kicking the extra point through the goal posts. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to get nervous.

The touchdown scoring machine
That first move was an omen. As it turned out, Fletcher was a very offensive-minded coach and this team was indeed a touchdown scoring machine. That meant he had plenty of opportunities to score extra points. In fact, we scored so many touchdowns that we set school records for the most extra points in a season, as well as the most extra points in a single game. This was not because I was better than my predecessors. I just had a lot more chances to kick extra points. I was even named player of the week after the single game record that included an action photo was published in the Northern Star, the school newspaper.

A full sports scholarship
But despite all my good fortune, several weeks after the season ended, I was homesick and decided to tell Coach Fletcher that I would be returning to Burlington Junior College for the second semester. When I entered the stadium, I met the coach. And before I could give him my disappointing news, he informed me that he had just placed me on a FULL SPORTS SCHOLARSHIP! He would pay for everything for my university education from the second semester. I was speechless. Did I mention I would be quitting football my senior year in high school?

my luck is gone
In my junior year, NIU joined the Midwest Athletic Conference, a much higher level of football than we were used to the year before. Our touchdown scoring machine sizzled along with my own kick production. Actually, I barely remember that second (junior) season.

The summer before my senior year, I spent way too much time water skiing on the Mississippi River, which is right next to my hometown. Late in the summer I spilled and tore my right groin muscle. Needless to say, that inhibited my kicking ability. My last year was a complete failure. I didn’t play 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 the blue, I received a phone call from a man who informed me that he was a scout for the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League. He said that he had heard that he was interested in an NFL tryout. I never knew for sure, but this call must have been a result of Coach Sparling still supporting me from the shadows.

Regardless, he hadn’t touched a soccer ball in months. And my senior season had been a complete and utter failure. But I said yes, I’m interested in trying out for the NFL. When do you want to meet? He said that he was in town as we spoke and asked when he could get to the stadium. I told him I’d be there in about 30 minutes.

The wonderful winds of DeKalb
I arrived at the stadium only to find that there was a strong wind blowing from east to west. Sitting amidst miles and miles of extremely flat cornfields, DeKalb was famous for being windy almost all the time. I put on my square toe shoe and proceeded to kick soccer balls… into the wind. I went from 30 yards to 40 yards to 50 yards, and more, hitting each kick like a well-oiled machine. I mean, realistically, all I had to do was kick the ball up in the air, and with the help of this wind tunnel, the ball traveled long and straight and straight through the goal posts over and over. time. Speaking of being lucky! You can’t make these things up.

The Atlanta Falcons contract
The scout fixed every kick, and a week later I received an email containing a standard Atlanta Falcons player contract signed by coach Norm Van Brocklin, who at the time was already an NFL Hall of Famer as a quarterback. countryside. days with the Los Angles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles.

For whatever reason, Coach Van Brocklin wasn’t happy with his current kicker, a man named Bobby Etter from the University of Georgia and a math doctoral student at the University of Kentucky at the time. There were three kickers vying for the job. I lasted a couple of weeks before I was cut off by Van Brocklin, who was very kind in explaining my release. I knew that Bobby Etter was the best kicker.

Fifty odd years later
To put the finishing touch to this unlikely tale of good fortune, I recently (more than 50 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 kicking extra points. 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 other 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 football story is just one example in which I have had much more than a little luck throughout my life. It is the most dramatic. But it is far from being the only story that could be told along the same lines. There are many, many more, but I won’t bore you with them right now. Suffice it to say that I have never once complained about being lucky. I’ve had much more than my share of good luck. You can call me Mr. Lucky!