Chargers' Kaeding explains lonely life of kicker, looks to rebound

"I learned long ago that the biggest room for improvement I have is in your mind," he said. "That's your biggest obstacle at this point. You're strong and healthy as ever, you're technically refined. Now it's just a matter of handling the variety of mental and emotional situations you're thrown as a kicker.

"There was a situation thrown at me I wasn't prepared to handle. That's tough to admit as an athlete, as a person. I wasn't tough enough to handle it on that particular day. There's no doubt in my mind I could step out there and kick a game-winner in the Super Bowl, no doubt in my mind I could make it.

"I've got some room to improve . I'm not afraid to admit that. This is the reality of my current situation. I'm not one to run and hide from it."

That sort of candor is unusual in an athlete, and refreshing. It may not make fans feel any better about "their" team's big defeat, but it should help them understand sports and athletes better. Failure happens. It'll happen again. Michael Jordan famously said he missed 9,000 shots in his career, 26 with a game on the line. It's not easy to determine why athletes fail. But they try to, because their livelihoods depend on it, because it makes them better.

So what did actually happen to Kaeding, psychologically? Why did he fail? I asked David McDuff, a psychiatrist for the Baltimore Ravens who worked for years with Matt Stover, who will be kicking in the Super Bowl for the Colts, for his take. Kicking involves a highly concentrated form of pressure, McDuff said. The time between the beginning of the act and the result "is as compressed in sports as you get. It's almost like someone puts a cylinder of pressure around the person and just cranks it up."

Missing a kick in a big game results in "an exponential increase in the pressure," McDuff said. "Each miss makes you think more about the importance of the misses. It's not three misses. To me it's nine misses."

Many athletes use physical cues to help override mental distractions. For instance, Stover's need to focus on his bent-over, King Tut stance may help shut out mental noise. In his autobiography Open, Andre Agassi writes that he tried to balance caring and not caring. Caring too much can mean obsessing about the situation or the pressure. Not caring enough can mean failing to pay enough attention to the technical aspects of the physical act. On that Sunday, on those kicks, Kaeding cared too much.

After the game, Kaeding went home with his wife, Samantha, and two boys, 20 months and five months old. He couldn't sleep. He returned to the Chargers' facility at 5 a.m., boxed up his gear and had his end-of-season physical. He received dozens of calls and e-mails and texts from friends, "who know more about me than balls going through the posts." Teammates and coaches, including Chargers coach Norv Turner, were supportive. Kickers as good as Kaeding earn respect. And professionals know that failure happens -- and that Kaeding alone certainly didn't cost the Chargers that game.

"The whole team wasn't playing well," said David Binn, the Chargers' long snapper. "If you're a player or a coach or you know football, there was stuff everywhere. The average fan doesn't know that. Most of the media don't, either. The kicker's the easy one to point at.''

Kaeding didn't watch television or read the papers for a couple of days. Chargers fans were predictably, brutally cruel. When Kaeding did turn on the TV, a promo for the local news showed the Haiti earthquake and then cut to a Chargers fan at a Wal-Mart attempting to get a refund on a Kaeding jersey.