Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app today. What happens when the world's best journalists come together? Write a prescription for the healing of America. We're retired and this is our paradise. No, it's gone. You get the stories of America every night. You get the all-new CBS Evening News starting Monday.
Get ready for epic family fun at Capital One Arena. January 24th through January 26th, it's the monster jam. Bigger trucks, bigger stunts, and even bigger thrills. Then on February 14th, WWE takes over with electrifying action and your favorite superstars
live in the ring. Don't miss the Harlem Globetrotters on March 8th, a slam dunk of fun for everyone. Tickets are on sale now at CapitalOneArena.com. Don't wait. Grab your seats tonight and secure memorable moments for your whole family.
60 Minutes is preempted on television this weekend for CBS's broadcast of the AFC Championship game between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs. So we decided to dig into the 60 Minutes archive and share three football-related stories with our podcast listeners. First up, 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft's profile of Drew Brees, the then-star quarterback for the NFL's New Orleans Saints. From September 26, 2010, this is 60 Minutes.
is Cool Breeze. In the annals of professional sports, few athletes have ever been as loved, admired, and respected by their hometown fans as Saints quarterback Drew Breeze. In New Orleans, they call him Cool Breeze or Breezus for resurrecting a devastated city, reviving a half-dead franchise, and leading them to the Super Bowl championship.
And at a time when a few high-profile NFL stars are serving jail time or suspensions for criminal or unacceptable conduct, Brees' activism and philanthropy has served to remind critics of big-time sports that the news is not always bad.
In a nine-year NFL career, Brees has often been underappreciated and overlooked, but he's finally being recognized for what he is, an undersized athletic freak who in the past four years has completed more passes and thrown for more yardage than Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, or Brett Favre. Who's the best quarterback in the NFL? Is this like if you're voting for, you know, student council president and you can't...
Can't vote for yourself, you gotta vote for someone else. No, you can vote for yourself. Drew Brees is much too smart to answer the question, but he is clearly pleased to be finally included in the conversation. And you can hear talk around the league that he's not only the NFL's top passer, but maybe its best player. And the person who seems to be the least surprised is Brees himself. I'm a very modest person, but I'm also extremely confident and
If you put me in the situation or in the moment, I'm going to have some swagger. I'm going to have some cockiness. And, you know, there's not anything I don't think that I can do. In fact, he's pretty much proved that everywhere he's been. But it's taken a long time to convince everyone, and there were lots of obstacles to overcome.
At six feet tall, football experts always considered him to be too short to be a big-time quarterback, not big enough to see over the onrushing linemen and to spot receivers downfield. I just, I don't believe that. I don't believe that you can be too short as a quarterback. It's not about height. It's about what you have here and right here. And in his case, it's about a lot more than just heart and brains. It's about agility and accuracy.
Last year, the program Sports Science ran a segment showing him throwing 10 passes at an archer's target and hitting the bullseye dead center all 10 times. But most of all, it's about Breeze's athleticism and a skill package that's allowed him to master every sport he's ever tried. You're a pretty good tennis player, right?
I played. I did. Against people that turned out to be very good professional players. I was going to let you bring it up. I know Andy Roddick's probably tired of me talking about how many times I beat him when we were kids. I beat him the first three times, and he beat me the last time in a pretty convincing fashion. So I knew that my direction in life was going elsewhere. When you grow up in Austin, Texas, the only sport that matters is football.
But after Brees led Westlake High School to the state championship, not one of the big-time Texas universities offered a scholarship. So he went to Purdue, where he was a two-time All-American and Heisman Trophy finalist and shattered virtually every Big Ten passing record on the books. Do you get some satisfaction out of that? There's always a little bit of personal satisfaction when you prove something wrong. In the NFL, there were more doubters.
Even after he was drafted by San Diego in 2001 and led the Chargers to the playoffs three years later, the team snubbed him by signing 6-foot-5-inch Phillip Rivers to be their quarterback of the future. The next year, in the final game of his San Diego contract, his career nearly ended.
His throwing shoulder had been dislocated and his rotator cuff and labrum torn, but it was the beginning of a wonderful story. There were people that said that this, you know, that it wasn't operable, that it couldn't be fixed in surgery, that there was a chance you'd never play again. Oh, it's career-threatening, a career-threatening right shoulder dislocation, which for a quarterback is...
you know, the worst injury besides a broken neck that you could have. After an extremely complicated surgery, only two teams came calling: the Miami Dolphins, whose doctors placed Bree's chance of a full recovery at 25 percent, and the hapless New Orleans Saints, who had more faith. If someone was going to be able to come back off of that injury, it was going to be someone like Drew Breeze. Green right slot, hound two, wide bingo, X smash, I want it.
The Saints' brand new head coach, Sean Payton, had done his homework on Breeze and liked what he saw. But convincing him to come to New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina was not going to be easy. The Superdome at that time had half a roof. There was uncertainty whether this team was going to be here for the long haul. There was a lot of uncertainty. You think they were more desperate than anybody else? Well...
I think that they were. Breeze, who could barely raise his throwing arm at that point, decided to visit the city that was barely above water. Coach Payton was assigned to show him and his wife Brittany that the city was livable. Instead, Payton got hopelessly lost amidst the rubble. So here we are driving down roads, seeing homes literally moved off of their foundations.
cars that are flipped upside down in people's living rooms, boats on top of roofs. I mean, it was the worst of the worst. And I thought to myself, I might as well just drive him right to Miami. We have no shot at signing him. In fact, it had exactly the opposite effect. To see those areas and to see people's lives being affected like that really, I think, helped us make the decision. In what way?
What most people might see is devastation and, hey, I want no part of this. I think we saw as an opportunity and a challenge. You sound like missionaries, almost. I wouldn't go that far. Like it was like, you felt some calling here. We did. We absolutely did.
It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful relationship. New Orleans needed a hero and Drew Brees needed to be needed. This was the only team that really looked at me and said, "We trust you. We have confidence in you. We believe in you."
And sometimes all you need is just for somebody to believe in you in order to be able to accomplish maybe what you never thought you could. Just six months later, he led the Saints to their best season ever, all the way to the NFC Championship game, one victory short of the Super Bowl. That season not only marked the rebirth of Breeze's career, for many in New Orleans, it marked the rebirth of the city. It was so needed. I mean, the cars were going the other direction. They weren't coming in. They were leaving.
And so here came hope. That will never go away with what he did. And it was more than just winning football games. No question. Off the field, Breeze and his wife helped galvanize the relief effort with more than just photo ops. They committed or raised $6 million through their foundation to help rebuild homes and refurbish parks and schools. Even New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who we met at a luncheon for the Saints, knew who the most popular man in town is.
you wouldn't want to run against him never i'd give it to him if you wanted it you know he'd be a great man by the way you could feel it as we took the speed walk through the french quarter on a quiet august night
The reception he received was the acknowledgement of two dreams that came together last February in Miami. In an epic game against the Indianapolis Colts and Peyton Manning, Brees conjured up one of the greatest individual performances in the history of the Super Bowl. It's all just kind of a blur. You know, it all runs together.
At the time it was very much one play at a time. This next play is the most important play of the game. I mean, that was my mindset. We completed almost every pass. I mean, every play we ran was a successful play for the most part. I mean, we just operated. Brees would complete an incredible 32 of 39 passes and walk away with the game's Most Valuable Player Award. The sight of him alongside the Lombardi Trophy and holding his son, Baylen, became the enduring sports images of the year.
It also effectively put an end to all the questions about his stature as a quarterback. What makes him so good? Let's forget for a second the intangibles, the work ethic. Let's forget the mental toughness, the intelligence, this unbelievable competitive spirit. It's the first time for me to be around someone that driven and it motivates you.
it motivates you as a coach. Before games, a lot of NFL quarterbacks wander off to be by themselves and collect their thoughts.
Not Drew Brees. He is the one stoking the fire. A job usually performed by someone much bigger and more intimidating. It's not that often though you see a quarterback in the middle doing that stuff. No, that's the first time ever in my football career. It's a little different, but you know what? He's all into it. We spoke to Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma and tight end Jeremy Shockey.
hoping they would give us some inside information on Breeze, some chink in his armor, a piece of dirt, even a speck of lint. He's a bad drunk. He's a bad drunk? No.
They're gonna keep that one. Just as good as the player on the field, he's a better player off the field. Better person off the field. I will say he's not the best loser, I'll give you that much. He's definitely a sore loser. We saw it ourselves after a long practice session. We asked Breeze if he would give us a demonstration of his passing accuracy for our cameras and he accepted the offer.
We got to make this good for TV, don't we? The challenge was to see how many times he could hit the eight-inch goalpost crossbar, which is 10 feet off the ground, from a distance of 30 yards. On this afternoon, Brees wasn't perfect. He hit the crossbar a number of times, and his misses were not very far off. But he failed to live up to his own expectations. Not my day. All right. Not bad. No, it was terrible. You got me on a bad day. I'm going to lose any sleep over it. Yeah, I will.
You know, he's his own worst critic. It's just nonstop. I mean, after the Super Bowl, like, oh, you know, it's a great celebration, and, you know, that one ball that got away or that, you know, one that sailed on him or, you know, if he could have gotten it out just a little faster. You know, those kind of things. That attitude has gotten him through some tough times. Just before the start of his Super Bowl season, his mother, Mina, in the throes of legal and emotional problems, committed suicide.
Their relationship had long been a difficult and contentious one, with periods of estrangement. And Brees blames himself for not recognizing the signs of distress. There was feelings of sadness, guilt, just thinking about, you know, what could I have done differently? Could I have prevented this?
That pain has been eased somewhat by his devotion to his own son and by the news received days after the Super Bowl that another boy is on the way. A couple weeks. Yeah, a couple weeks left. Mid-October? The 18th. And Drew has an away game on the 17th, so we'll see. So what happens if you get a call on the morning of an away game? He's not going to get a call. He's not going to know. If I go into labor, I'm going to...
get the drugs and just pretend like everything's fine. So I go play the football game and I come home and there might be a new baby boy there waiting for me, who knows? Whatever happens this season, on the field or off, whether he meets his own expectations or not, Drew Brees has already achieved sainthood in New Orleans and he has delivered the miracles to Ernie. This must feel pretty good. Yeah, it does. It does. Everybody says that if you love New Orleans, it'll love you back. If you hate New Orleans, it'll hate you back. But I love New Orleans.
UFO lands in Suffolk and that's official, said the News of the World. But what really happened across two nights in December 1980 when US servicemen saw mysterious lights in the forest near RAF Woodbridge and claimed to have had a close encounter with an actual craft? Encounters, a new podcast available exclusively on Wondery Plus, takes a deep dive into one of the most famous and still unresolved UFO encounters to ever take place in the UK.
Featuring shocking testimony from first-hand witnesses, hosts, journalist, podcaster and UFO researcher Andy McGillan, that's me, and producer Elle Scott, take us back to the nights in question and examine all of the evidence and conflicting theories about what was encountered in the middle of a snowy Suffolk forest 40 years ago. Are we alone? Encounters is a podcast which is going to find out. Listen to Encounters exclusively in ad-free on Wondery+.
Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or in Apple Podcasts. Now, here's 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley's profile of NFL super agent Drew Rosenhaus. This is The Player, which first aired on October 9th, 2011. While NFL players have to be ferocious on the field, off the field, their agents have to be just as tough.
Agents go toe-to-toe with the teams, negotiating their players' contracts, and some agents become both brother and father to their clients.
The most memorable agent of all time was the movie character Jerry Maguire, but the stuff that that character was made of was largely based on the super agent Drew Rosenhaus. There are almost a thousand agents in the NFL, but no one represents more players than Rosenhaus, an agent who is at the same time revered, feared, and hated.
And to hear him tell it, he just may be the most important player in all of pro football. I really believe that the NFL would fall apart without me.
That may sound cocky, that may sound arrogant, but I'm telling you the truth. Cocky and arrogant? You? So why would the NFL fall apart without Drew Rosenhaus? In the NFL, we keep things moving smoothly. When it breaks down between the team and the player, the agent is there to pick up those pieces. If a guy says, I want to be traded, I hate this team, I hate this coach.
I say to the player, tell me. Don't tell the coach. I don't want you to ruin your relationship with the team. Come to me. Let me let the audience in on something here. People watching this interview right now are thinking Rosenhaus is turning this on for the camera. He's leaning forward and raising his voice and shouting because he knows he's on TV. You and I earlier today were in your office and you were shouting at me just this way before the cameras were rolling.
Scott, I don't see you just shouting. This is the real deal. You know, this is just enthusiasm. This isn't shouting? No. I think I'm just talking to you. Am I loud? Sorry, guys. Let's turn down the mic. He doesn't drink coffee. Imagine what he'd be like on caffeine. No alcohol either. But he is a workaholic. Real good job today, buddy.
We'll be able to get you even more money. Try and be available tomorrow. Trust me. I live it, eat it, sleep it every single minute of the day. I think about my work. I love it. It's my passion. I enjoy it. So it's not like a job. It's just, it's fun.
His clients include flamboyant wide receiver Chad Ochocinco, star running back Frank Gore, and quarterback Rex Grossman. And two of the league's fastest rising future superstars, receiver Rob Gronkowski and explosive running back LaShawn McCoy.
He works out with his players during the day, parties with them at night, and he is always, always on call. You got it, buddy. If I get a call in the middle of the night, I have to take it. If I'm with a girl, I have to take it. If I'm in a shower, I have to take it. My clients are like my family, like my brothers, literally. So when they hurt, I hurt, and there's a lot of emotion involved. You know, you enjoy the ups,
And man, do you feel the downs. But come on, you've got how many clients now? Approximately 170 active clients. You can't have a personal relationship with 170 guys. Scott, I do. I want each one of my clients to feel
that they are my only client, that they are my most important client, that I love them. A few people watching this might look at you and say, "That poor man." Seriously, no family, no wife, he's 44, he has no life. Well, I love the NFL. I've given my life to it. My girlfriend of two years, we broke up, she said I worked too hard. I cared more about my business than I did her. She was right. She was. She was.
At least now, she doesn't have to drive with him. I'll drive, text, and be on the internet at the same time. And it's dangerous. Now, I assume what you're doing here isn't strictly legal. It's totally illegal, what I'm doing. I always use two phones. This phone is for phone calls and texts. This is for emails, the internet. There it is again.
Hey, I'm with someone. Try me again. Bye-bye. How many calls in a day? A few hundred. The calls started when he signed his first client while still a student at Duke University Law School. At age 22, he became the youngest agent ever in the NFL.
How did you know that you wanted to do this work? I had to be maybe eight, nine years old and I said, "Whoa, it would be cool." You know, I think I saw a couple clips of agents on TV and I was like, "Man,
Wait a minute, you wanted to be a sports agent at the age of eight? Very early on, I was just a real football, I'm going to use the term, geek. When the Dolphins won, Scott, I was the happiest guy on the planet. I was a huge Dolphins fan growing up here in Miami. When they lost, I literally was in tears. He was also in tears because he got bullied in school.
So his father enrolled 12-year-old Rosenhaus and his younger brother, Jason, who's now his business partner, in a karate school run by a master named Young Soo Do. Do transformed Rosenhaus. I went from a guy that was a mama's boy, who was soft, who was maybe a bit of a baby, to hard-nosed, to tough, to exactly the opposite. He taught me about discipline.
conquering your fears, battling adversity, to push yourself to become the best. Young Sudo turned me into a man. A man who has now built a family business into the biggest agency in all of football.
Marcus, say hello to Dante Stallworth, one of my clients. We were with Rosenhaus on the NFL's draft night this year. He was in Los Angeles with his top draft prospect, cornerback Jimmy Smith. Smith was surrounded by family, friends, and ferocious tension. Thirty seconds, hang in there. His financial future was on the line. The earlier he was picked, the more money he would make. But Smith was not an easy sell.
he tested positive for marijuana so Rosenhaus had to take him on a tour to visit coaches to convince them that Smith had matured. On this night they expected the Baltimore Ravens to pick Smith in the first round but when the Ravens turn came
They didn't pick anybody. Look at Rosenhaus. If he has doubts, he will never show them. They're going to take you. Just stay positive. All right, bud? Look like you're happy. Smile like something good's going to happen. I'm trying to get a hold of the Ravens. Hang on, guys. After eight agonizing minutes, Smith got a call. It's going to be us. Yeah!
He'll make about $8 million over four years, plenty to celebrate. Rosenhaus signs 17 clients in this year's draft, of course, more than any other agent.
You know who doesn't like you so much? The other agents. The other agents. That's great. You've been called a sleazeball. I have. You've been called a thief. Keep it coming, man. I love when agents talk badly about me. The rap on you is that you steal other guys' clients. I've heard it. Yeah. And it's so false. But 80% of your clients had other agents first. I think that's right. I think that's correct.
Other agents have filed almost 50 grievances against Rosenhaus with the Players Union. His competitors claim that he has stolen the clients that they have under contract, but so far, Rosenhaus says he has won every case. It's kill or be killed in this business, and I intend to do the killing. When I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, they said the most hated man in pro football, B.S.,
I wasn't the most hated man. The players like me. I think the owners, the teams like me. The agents don't like me. That still stands today and it always will. Part of that is resentment of Rosenhaus' success.
When the NFL lockout ended this summer, Rosenhaus says he negotiated more than 90 contracts in just over one month. Contracts worth about $600 million. Rosenhaus' take is $18 million. That's 3%, the maximum that the players' union allows.
How do you earn that kind of cash just by talking? Well, watch what we saw in a hotel room when Rosenhaus called a series of general managers. What you're offering me is a joke. The price is just going to go up. You're blowing it. I'm bringing you a player. You're going to look like a genius. A one-year deal for $5 million is a steal for him. He's worth at least twice that. What do you mean he's been hurt a lot? The concussions are a thing of the past. On top of that, he's got a new helmet.
That's not even close. What do you mean we're too far apart? Come on, you're killing me here. You're taking a huge risk by letting me get off the phone, because when I get off the phone, I'm calling another team. Yes. Good man. If all that looks familiar, well, it should. When Tom Cruise played Super Agent Jerry Maguire, Maguire's persona was based largely on Rosenhaus. He said, I don't know what it's like to be a black person. I'm Mr. Black People. No, baby!
Congratulations, you're still my agent. Do you have to keep these guys out of trouble? Sometimes, yeah. You put clients in rehab? I have. Bail clients out of jail? Of course. I've gone in the middle of the night to do that. I've visited clients in prison. I mean, that's brutal. There's nothing tougher than that.
His most famous prison client is star receiver Plaxico Burris. Burris served more than 20 months for shooting himself in a nightclub with an unlicensed handgun. When Burris was released in June, Rosenhaus was there with his typically understated welcome. Good thing he's not a 300-pound lineman. He hit you pretty hard. I'd have been running out of the way.
You're in prison. You've shot yourself in the leg. What kinds of things was Rosenhaus telling you? You know, just to stay strong. You know, stay strong. He was like, you know, our day to shine is coming again.
and he's going to keep me upbeat. He's that kind of person, that kind of personality. What did it mean to you that Rosenhaus was reaching out to you and telling you that you were going to be okay? To be honest, I didn't expect anything less because I know him as a person and where his heart is. Burris had missed two seasons, but Rosenhaus talked the New York Jets into a one-year, $3 million contract. Drew's a
I mean, that's what he does. When he called you and said, "I've got to deal with the Jets," you thought what? Championship. Championship. One thing is certain: a Rosenhaus client will play in this year's Super Bowl because he has clients on every team but Atlanta. That's the result of his obsessive, single-minded discipline he traces back to his taekwondo training as a boy.
Whether to impress his clients or his competitors, Rosenhaus didn't want us to get away without seeing a concrete example of his force of will.
Nine bricks, it's the most I've ever done with the fire technique. It's got to be very quick, very explosive, very powerful, very fast, otherwise I'm going to get burnt very badly. I've broken my hand, I've gotten stitches. You have to hit it, though, as if it's not bricks, as if it's a pillow. You have to hit it with all your heart, with all your might. And consider, that's his texting hand. Does that hand still work? Yeah, it was perfectly fine.
A Miami columnist once wrote about you. His words, not mine. Only a few things will survive a nuclear holocaust and they are: Cockroaches and Drew Rosenhaus. And Twinkies.
Are you more the cockroach or the Twinkie? Oh, geez. If a cockroach is strong and a survivor, then that's okay. Every day I get a client that's injured, that's hurt, that gets cut, that gets traded, that has something arrested. Tragic, stress, panic, paranoia. But I embrace that calamity. I'm comfortable in that chaos.
Our final story tonight is 60 Minutes correspondent John Wertheim's profile of NFL kicker Justin Tucker. From January 9th, 2022, here's The Kicker. The NFL playoffs start next weekend, and here's one safe bet. At least a few games will come down to football's great secret hiding in plain sight. We speak of kickers who score about a third of the points in the NFL, but only get a small fraction of the respect.
It was Buddy Ryan, the hard-boiled coach who once growled, "Kickers are like taxicabs. You can always go out and hire another one." Sure enough, this season, almost half the NFL teams have replaced their kickers at least once. But then onto the field jogs Justin Tucker of the Baltimore Ravens, who cleaves the uprights with a mix of power and precision.
The Ravens had a rough season, but Tucker is on a trajectory, end over end, to go down as perhaps the greatest NFL kicker there ever was, in turn elevating the entire position.
If there were one signature moment from the NFL this season, it might be this. Detroit Lions 17, Baltimore Ravens 16, three seconds left. Justin Tucker, the Ravens' 32-year-old kicker, lines up beyond midfield, beyond the tail of the Lions' logo. End action. I felt the thud of the ball. I knew it was going to have a chance, but I didn't know for sure until...
I saw the ball hit the crossbar. I think that's when we all knew that we had just been a part of an historic moment. Note the reaction of his coach, John Harbaugh. Tucker's teammates were equally giddy. What made it remarkable? For one, the sheer distance. By a matter of inches, the 66-yarder set a new NFL record for longest field goal ever.
But also, since when have you heard this kind of swooning over a kicker? He's the best ever. Best ever? Best that's ever done it. John Harbaugh says it's not just because of Tucker's record breaker in Detroit.
What is his secret kicking sauce? You know, he's a very talented guy. Leg strength, accuracy, all the numbers are there. But to me, the biggest thing is just the way he approaches it. I mean, his demeanor, persona in the biggest moments, the biggest kicks under the most pressure, that's what makes him the best ever. He's not fired up when you say that. Well, I'm fired up that he's our kicker.
makes us a better football team. Tucker weighs only 180 pounds, but he's often rescued the Ravens. Going into this weekend, Tucker had made 57 straight field goals in the fourth quarter or overtime. He wasn't
He wasn't drafted. He's scored more than a third of the Ravens' points since he's gotten here. Is he worth a first-round pick today? He is, absolutely. He would be. Here's the real kicker, as it were. Across the NFL, more field goals are being made from longer distances with greater accuracy than ever. But then there are wacky Sundays like the one in October, when normally reliable kickers for the Packers and Bengals combine to miss fielders.
five field goals in the last 10 minutes. And the extra point, once almost automatic, has become more of an adventure since the NFL extended the distance in 2015. All those games hinging on the smallest guys on the field, splitting or missing those two uprights, the outcome will depend as much on the mind as on the foot.
Even for Justin Tucker, nerves come into play. If you're not feeling just like a little something, like, you know, are you even really living? You know, that's part of the challenge of playing this position at this level is thinking about all that, processing it, compartmentalizing it, putting it away, and then still going out there and doing your job.
Tucker's teammate, 6'8 defensive lineman Calais Campbell, whose job includes blocking kicks, says he can detect fear in kickers when the game's on the line. You know, they can be really good kickers. Until that situation comes and all that confidence goes away, you can see the nervousness in their eyes. And very few kickers have the ability to be able to handle that kind of pressure. You see that on the other side of the line. Oh yeah, all the time.
NFL kicking titan Morton Anderson made 583 field goals over a 25-year career. Anderson says kickers have nowhere to hide. We're very exposed. Our performance feedback is immediate. It's either good or bad. How much of this is mental? I would say 90% of it is mental and the last 10% is mental. See, Yogi Berra does kicking.
You had a kick to go to the Super Bowl. Yeah. Did you feel fear when you walked out? No, because I had in my mental rehearsals the night before in the hotel, I would do three or four scenarios. I would rehearse them in slow motion and real time. So I remember standing on the sideline and all my teammates were on their knees. They were holding hands. And I thought to myself, I remember thinking to myself, you know, they're not driving the car.
I'm driving the car. When Anderson drove the Atlanta Falcons into the Super Bowl in 1999, he was so sure he'd nailed his kick, he didn't even bother to watch. Anderson is the second leading scorer in NFL history, behind another kicker, four-time Super Bowl winner Adam Vinatieri. And yet... You're one of only two pure kickers in the Football Hall of Fame. How can that be? It's a great injustice. One of the greatest injustices in the history of mankind.
I'm kidding. You guys are scoring a third of the points, though. Correct. And if the point of the game is to score more points than the other team, who's more important than the leading scorer on the football team? Kickers have long been seen as something, well, foreign, literally. Guys born in Europe with names like Gogolak and Stenerud.
Maybe it was the barefoot kickers in the snow or Gary O'Premian's lone pass of his career in the Super Bowl, no less, that helped create a perception kickers aren't real football players. And then there is another false perception that kicking a football ain't all that difficult. You ever have teammates say kicking a ball through uprights, how hard can that be? So every Saturday morning we had a walkthrough and all the guys wanted to kick field goals.
And I'm like, don't do it, guys. This is not muscles you're used to using. Anyone actually make the field goal? When they weren't blowing out their knees, it wasn't a pretty sight. And I was just like, you guys are idiots. This is not going to end well. There are seldom backup kickers in the NFL. So look what happened three weeks ago when Carolina Panthers kicker Zane Gonzalez injured his leg in warm-ups. The team scrambled to find any player who could kick, holding field auditions on the spot.
Not surprisingly, the Panthers didn't even try to kick a field goal or extra point that day. Then again, kickers are a special breed.
How many linebackers dare sing opera as a hobby? Justin Tucker was happy to belt out Ave Maria at a Baltimore Christmas concert a few years ago. We heard he's shy about his singing. Yeah, very shy. I mean, he's delightful to party in the locker room every day. Every day, you said? Oh, every day. Kickers avoid football's violence. They even practice on their own field. Sometimes not at all.
We in NFL Kicker tell us all the players want to be us during practice and none of the teammates want to be us with three seconds left in the game. You're smiling when I... It's because I've heard that time and time again from my teammates over the years. You buy it? And it's absolutely true. I mean, we have an obviously lighter workload. We're not hitting or getting hit.
Our practices are much less strenuous than basically every single other person out here wearing a football uniform. Connor Barth kicked for four NFL teams over a 10-year career. I think people want to be us during practice because sometimes we sneak off from camp and play some golf and maybe hit Starbucks. I always say if you make your kicks, no one ever is going to worry about you.
I think I misheard you. You didn't really say that kickers sneak off during practice to go play golf and go to Starbucks. I mean, you can only watch so much film kicking, right? You don't have a playbook with 500 pages in it, so you have some downtime during the day.
But it's not all par threes and pumpkin spice latte. There is a real precision to kicking a field goal, an efficient three-man assembly line with a snapper and holder. How long does it take from the snap until you're booting that ball? Typically 1.3 seconds, give or take several hundredths. 1.3 seconds, that's it? 1.3 seconds. If it's 1.4, what happens? If it's 1.4, you run the risk of getting a kick blocked.
by an edge rush. - Just a little bit of time and someone else is putting their hand up and blocking that kick. - Exactly, you know, that muscle memory that gets developed throughout, you know, years of practice, that's what goes into those 1.3 seconds when they matter the most.
We were also surprised to learn that Tucker and his fellow kickers are striking a football unique to them. That's definitely a K ball right there. A K ball, the K standing for kickers. You can't do too many crazy things, but you want to try to mash the back of this ball and break in these seams as much as you can.
I can't go too deeply into the trade secrets that the measures our equipment guys go to to prep these footballs for game day. Legally, I should add. But there's a brush that has bristles on one side, and that's the only tool that you're allowed to use. So you're brushing... The brush smooths the sides of the ball where the kicker's foot makes impact. I don't think most fans realize that the ball that the quarterback's throwing with is different from the one your kicker was. No, I mean, the K-ball, quarterbacks do not use it.
The rest of the position players do not use this ball. The purpose of this ball is to, you know, send it to the moon with my foot. So anything that you can do to loosen up the leather so when my foot compresses into the ball, it explodes the other way in a way that
You know, this ball just simply would not. You talk about a sweet spot. I try to pick out the dimples on the ball that I'm going to match up my foot to. Really? The specific dimples? I try to. It's a little easier said than done. So maybe an inch under the center of the ball. That's where I'm trying to match that bone coming off of my big toe on the top of my foot. Trying to match it up to about...
Tell me about your footwear here. Connor Barth let us in on more tribal secrets. I take like a machine and grind it down so that my front cleats are completely flat. That way when I swing through the ball, it kind of glides through like a, almost like a golf club. This plants and this slides. This one slides through and this one slides.
is your plant shoe that kind of just catches everything so that you stop and you kick. It's like two different garden tools. It's pretty cool. Barth's shoes are not just mismatched, they're not even the same size. I wear a size 12, but this is a 10 and a half. It's a size and a half smaller than what a... My kicking shoe needs to be so much tighter than my regular. So it's pretty cool, but I think my foot's gotten smaller over the years because I've been jamming my foot into almost a two-size smaller shoe.
We met Barth on his old high school football field in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was warming up by kicking 40-yard field goals with no step. Try that sometime. He is a prime example of the kicker's vulnerability. Barth made 83% of his NFL field goals, but kicking for the Chicago Bears in November 2017, Barth attempted a game-tying field goal at Soldier Field...
with eight seconds left. He walked off the field dejected. The Bears fired him the next day, and his career was over. Did you think your career was in jeopardy with one kick? Yeah, absolutely. I would like to have ended my career on a little better note, so I've never seen more middle fingers in the crowd on the way out of the... Hey, Chicago Bears, hey, Chicago fans are the best fans. Now at age 35, he's thinking of making a comeback...
Given the churn among NFL kickers, why not?
You know, there's been some inconsistencies this year with kickers. We'll go watch some games and I'll have, you know, you'll see misses and all my buddies are texting, you got to go back. You're watching football on Sundays and thinking... I can make some more field goals, yeah. With our game clock down to its final ticking, we figured it was only fitting we summon Justin Tucker to take us out. I'll ask you a question, like how amazing is that? You know, we're sitting here talking about kicking footballs. I'm having the loveliest time right now. This is just, you know...
It's just a wild ride. Through the uprights, man. It's like that old country song. Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life. And here we are, just living life, man. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey.