Professional
football is like a religion in many American households, and the upcoming Super
Bowl (Sunday, Feb. 2) in Miami, Fla., is a regarded as a prayerful occasion for
fans of the contending teams.
Places
of worship might want to go with the flow. A suggested Feb. 2 sermon topic
might be Bobby Bare’s country music song from 1976: “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through
the Goal Posts of Life.”
Lots
of preachers, over the last 40+ years, have made the connection for their
congregations. Before one can truly grasp and embrace the religious connotations,
it’s important to understand the significance of a drop kick…and the man who
perfected it.
The
drop kick is defined as “a kick by a player who drops the ball and kicks it as,
or immediately after, it touches the ground.” One method of scoring a field
goal or extra point is by drop-kicking the football through the goalposts.
A
drop kick can also be a defensive play, employed as a surprise maneuver. The
drop kick originated in the sport of rugby.
The
best collegiate drop kick kicker of all time was Forrest Ingram “Frosty” Peters,
who played for the Montana State College Bobcats in 1924. He converted 17 drop
kicks into field goals in a game between the Bobcats’ freshman team and
Billings Polytechnic Institute, leading his team to a 64-0 victory.
During
that era, the shape of the football was rounder on the ends, and the two
professional players who were the most skillful drop kick kickers were John
“Paddy” Driscoll of the Chicago Cardinals and Elbert “Al” Lorraine Bloodgood of
the Kansas City Cowboys.
In
1934, the ball was made more pointed at the ends. This made passing the ball
easier, but made the drop kick practically obsolete. The more pointed ball did
not bounce up from the ground reliably. For field goals and extra points, the
drop kick was supplanted by the place kick.
Technically,
today’s football is a “prolate spheroid,” and a Madden NFL video game software
engineer said that when the ball bounces, it can go dagnabbitly in “30
different ways.” Physicist Toan Pham, the group’s technical director,
laughingly states that on the field it seems “more like 30 thousand; or 30
billion.”
One
football player who seemed to have the corner on “lucky bounces” was Doug
Flutie, who launched the memorable “Hail Mary” pass in 1984 to give his Boston
College team an upset win over the University of Miami (Fla.).
According
to the National Football League Hall of Fame, the last extra point made by a
drop kick in the NFL was booted through the uprights by the same Doug Flutie,
who at age 43 was playing his final pro game as a member of the New England
Patriots on Jan. 1, 2006.
Flutie’s
kick was the NFL’s first extra point via a drop kick since Ray “Scooter” McLean
of the Chicago Bears knocked one through back in 1941.
Bobby
Bare’s legendary drop kick song, with a two-step beat, which was written by
Paul Craft, goes like this:
Drop
kick me Jesus through the goalposts of life
End
over end, neither left nor the right,
Straight
through the heart of them righteous uprights.
I’ve
got the will Lord, if you’ve got the toe.
Dr.
William S. Barnes of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando, Fla., said
the verse he likes best is:
Make
me, oh make me, Lord more than I am.
Make
me a piece in your master game plan,
Free
from the Earthly temptations below;
I’ve
got the will, Lord if you’ve got the toe.
“That’s
what I want God to do with me: to make me more than I am, to ‘make me a piece
in His master game plan’ for life,” Dr. Barnes said.
“I
get all caught up in Earthly things, especially the temptation to trust more in
money and things that I can hold and see than in God,” Dr. Barnes said. “I have
the will to want these things, but as the song says, I need God’s toe. And that
means a good, hard kick in the ‘buts.’”
“Buts”
are feeble, human excuses that attempt to “block that kick.”
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