Sally Jenkins gets inside the head of a place kicker–his premonitions, his inner voice, his getting iced, and the winning kick that takes his team to the Super Bowl.
It was 2:15 a.m. and [Garrett] Hartley couldn’t sleep, because the Inner Voice kept shrieking at him. It was telling him that he was going to face a kick that could cost the Saints the Super Bowl. Not only that. It was giving him details.
“Forty-two yards. Right hash mark,” the Voice said.
Hartley decided he needed to talk to a real voice, so he picked up the phone and called his father, Bill, a retired leasing agent in East Texas.
“What are you doing awake?” Bill asked.
“Dad, I have a feeling I’m going to have a game-winner from 42 yards out, from the right hash,” he said.
For the next few minutes, his father calmed him down.
“You know what to do,” he replied. “You’ve been doing it your whole life. So just get your mind right, and go out there and do your best.” . . .
The motion of a kick takes anywhere from 1.3 to 1.5 seconds. Adam Vinatieri has observed that what separates kickers is, “Can you do it when the lights are on?” Rarely have the lights shone on a kicker the way they did on Hartley with 10 minutes 15 seconds left in overtime against the Vikings. Instead of a 42-yarder, he was facing a 40-yarder.
There were 71,276 people in the Superdome, and yet Hartley was alone. The Vikings called time out to try to ice him. At one point, defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove came toward him, with the intention of saying something comforting. Hartley waved him away.
As he prepared to take the field, he had just two brief conversations. One was with Carney, who reminded him to breathe, and not to think. The other was with Payton. Earlier in the week, Payton had asked the kicker what he needed to hear should things come down to a field goal attempt. “When game time comes, what do you want me to tell you?” Payton had asked. Hartley had replied that he would like to hear something along the lines of, “You belong here.”
Payton found the right words. He gestured at the fleur-de-lis that hung on the facing of the loge section behind the uprights. “Why don’t you just try to hit that little fleur-de-lis,” he suggested.
The kick came off his foot perfect. “I didn’t really feel much,” Hartley said. He followed the flight of the ball for a moment, and realized it was on the right trajectory. He turned away before it had finished its flight. He told his holder, Mark Brunell, “We’re going to Miami.”
“I didn’t even see it go through the uprights,” he said.
via Sally Jenkins – New Orleans Saints’ Garrett Hartley calls on ‘inner voice’ to deliver kick in the clutch – washingtonpost.com.
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