The Face Of An Educated Toe

Physically as well as financially, professional football has evolved from the bottom up. Think about it. There was a time, back in the Eocene of the game, when it was indeed football. Running, punting, placekicking and even that most difficult of disciplines, dropkicking, were the hallmarks of the great teams. Then (apologies to Desmond Morris), the Armored Ape began his climb. The evolutionary rise went from Grange's knees to Battles' hips to Baugh's arm to Berry's hands to Starr's head to Namath's hair. Along the way, the lowly foot was largely forgotten—except on those grim Sundays when three points, or even one, was the difference between defeat and victory.

Among pro football heroes, only Lou Groza attained true stardom on the strength of his foot alone (although he was a stalwart offensive tackle), and he and his Golden Toe went into retirement in 1968. But in the past few years a whole platoon of "pure kickers" has arrived. Foremost among them is Jim Turner (see cover) of the New York Jets. And the best time to see Turner kick purely is at a kicking practice, where the more expensive, less pedestrian parts of the football animal are not so obtrusive.

Here we are at Hofstra stadium on verdant Long Island, under a scalding sun with the THI up near the agony level. The Jets jog around on their new carpet of AstroTurf, great mountains of flesh and bug bites, their combative grunts and war cries rising on the moist air like voices from a sewer. The mind flashes ahead in time: if there were some way to ration this heat, that fat, those suntans for use in the shivering, shad-belly days of January....

Most of the Jets look dreadful—bulbous, slow, stupid, coming off the snap with glazed, poleaxed expressions as if they'd never before heard a "Hut!" The receivers scamper around with desperately waving hands, yards behind the ball. The quarterbacks watch their passes turn awry and sock their fists into their open palms. The linemen pound into Mona, the blocking bag, mouths curled in little moues of pain and self-pity. Moanin' Mona. Wailin' Weeb. The dumpy little coach appears to grow shorter (if that's possible) as the practice progresses, as if some relentless pile driver labeled Doubt were sinking him into the artificial grass.

But it's a kicking day—one of only two a week—and the field-goal unit is working. Fear not, Weeb, the Tank is here, and his treads are turning just fine. Jim Turner lines up his weapons system. John Schmitt, the massive center, spraddles on the 35-yard line and engulfs the ball. It disappears, except for a tiny cone of brown leather visible aft of his pinkies. Then—wink!—Schmitt flexes his wrists and the ball blurs backward, a crude, almost robotlike gesture that deposits it precisely six yards, two feet and 10 inches to the rear. Babe Parilli, contorted on the grass like an advanced Yoga student, palms the ball with his right hand—laces up—and drops it to the exact spot beside his left thigh and under his left index finger that it reaches 99 times in 100 snaps. No wonder they call him Goldfinger.

Turner, blocky and Indian-eyed behind his plastic bars, his armored shoulders sagging in concentration, takes a heavy step forward. His right leg describes a short, brutal, unaesthetic arc. There is a thump reminiscent of a nightstick on a rioter's noggin, and, startlingly, the ball is aloft—the first touch of beauty in the whole ugly day—spinning back on itself with the busy geometrical action of a satellite in orbit as it arches toward the goalpost. Three points. "Way to kick 'em, Tank," chirps Parilli, and the kicking unit chugs back five yards. Weeb Ewbank smiles through his granny glasses. Gazing down at his elfin countenance, one gains the distinct impression that, yes, Frodo lives.

The Jets, like many AFL teams, take their time getting into condition, but Jim Turner and his toe always seem to be in shape. The seeming, however, is deceptive. Casual observers of the football scene assume that kickers are some kind of metatarsal magicians, blessed with a so called Educated Toe which can guide a football long distances through snow, hail and tricky crosswinds to a three-point landing beyond the goalpost. As a kid in Milwaukee listening to Packer games on the radio, I used to hear WTMJ Announcer Bob Heiss drop his voice in awe when he mentioned Don Hutson's Educated Toe. What did it look like? I wondered. I envisioned it as rather bald and egg-shaped, with perhaps a pince-nez and a mortarboard mounted on the nail. Talking with Turner in the Hofstra locker room after that summer workout, I sneaked a look at his right big toe. It didn't look very smart to me. "You looking at my Educated Toe?" asked the Tank. He wiggled it and gave it a sneer. "I'll tell you where the education in kicking comes from. Right there." He pointed to Parilli—specifically, to Parilli's big, lean and rather soft hands. "The holder is 70% of the placekicking game. Sure, you need a good center, and Johnny Schmitt is one of the best. And you need a damned good offensive line, which we have. But the holder is the guy. He's got to get it down there in the right spot every time, laces forward. And all the while he's got to be exuding this sense of confidence back at the kicker. The whole thing has got to be smooth and confident. Then, if you groove the swing of your foot anywhere like right, your toe will be as educated as it needs to be."

With that gracious bow toward his teammates—and Jim Turner is one of the most gracious teammates—the Tank seemed to be putting himself down. In point of fact, he is far more important to the kicking equation than he lets on. For one thing, he keeps his legs in excellent condition year-round. During the off season he jogs, sprints and pumps out a regular Tour de France on his cycle exerciser. He plays basketball regularly with "the guys," pounding the big muscles of his legs into toughness, stretching the tendons in rebounds and jump shots. And for Turner, at 6'2" and something just under 220 pounds, to jump and rebound is no mean feat. In the first of his six Jet seasons, Turner worked out with weights. "But they tore my legs up," he recalls. "Now I've got me this trunk, which is just about the height of a bed. Now and then I spend a few minutes stepping up and down on it. It's a simple little exercise, but it combines stretching and compression in just the right proportions."

Compression—not just of the muscular variety—is another factor in kicking which Turner has mastered. For most football players, the game is a continuum of action and interaction. For the kicker, it is a few brief but supercharged moments during which everything rests on his big toe (or, in the case of a soccerstyle kicker, the instep of his foot). Since 1964, when he broke in as the Jets' top kicker, Turner has attempted 174 field goals—which ranks him third in that category in the AFL behind Gino Cappelletti (284) and George Blanda (252). Yet when you figure that, from snap to kick, each of those attempts took less than 1� seconds, Turner's crucial playing time amounts to a shade over four minutes in five seasons. (If you add extra points, that time would be about eight minutes.) The great danger in this compression, as Turner sees it, is stage fright of the kicking foot. Like a Shakespearean bit player whose role it is to move onstage, announce a calamity and then retire to the wings, the field-goal kicker is prone to blow his cool, his lines and his three points in the most embarrassing way.

To preclude such fiascos, Turner and most other "pure" kickers must keep themselves psyched up throughout the game. "I'm in the game all the time," Turner maintains. "At least, my head is in there. I watch every play, offensive or defensive, to see where they're chewing up the field. Joe [Namath] is very good about that. He asks me every time he comes in where the bad spots for kicking are on the field. You have to be a surveyor to know where all the holes are." And a meteorologist to keep track of the winds. Turner has become a specialist at that arcane art as well, charting each gust, each swirl, each thermal. "I've got a real advantage at Shea," he says of the Jets' home park. "The winds are tricky there—offshore stuff from Long Island Sound fighting it out with the inland winds, a regular Aeolian battleground. But we do all of our practice there during the season under what Weeb calls 'battle conditions.' We even practice at what would be Sunday game time, just so that all the conditions—wind, light, temperature—will be the same as the real thing." Thus Turner has a sound, basic feeling for the vagaries of his enemy, the wind, when the game rolls around. To chart specific wind changes, he keeps a weather eye on all fluttering objects during the game. "The American flag and the end-zone flags are good gauges," he allows, "and until this AstroTurf came in you could always rip up a handful of grass and toss it in the air." Is there any truth to the rumor that Turner and other kickers sometimes plant special agents with pennants at critical spots in the stands to use as wind gauges and/or "gunsights"? Turner leans back, studies the ceiling and says: "Ahhhh, well, no, there's not a word of truth in that. Besides, it's illegal, right?"