thatrapsfan
Superstar
Great Marquette King profile. Marquette King Is the N.F.L.’s Only Black Punter. How Come? - The New Yorker
Marquette King remembers being astonished the first time he stepped onto an N.F.L. field. Even though it was only preseason, there seemed to be about a million more people in the stands than he had ever seen at his tiny alma mater, Fort Valley State University, in Georgia. Trying to remain calm, he kept his head down, and cast his eyes safely on the grass at his feet.
He jogged to the line of scrimmage, hoping to look like he belonged. He wasn’t just playing football, he was competing for a job. And even though he had experienced success at every stage of his career, had excelled at tryouts, had dominated pro-days, and impressed scouts who appraised him quietly from behind visors and sunglasses, he knew how merciless N.F.L. camps were for unproven rookies. You could have been the best at every place you played. You could sweat, and bleed, and run yourself ragged, giving every ounce and pushing far beyond your own limitations, and still, at the end of the day, an assistant might greet you at your locker with a sombre look and the words no hopeful wants to hear: “Come with me. And bring your playbook.”
King knew that if he failed to execute the next fifteen to twenty seconds of his life with absolute perfection, this could be his last chance to play professional football. As he had done countless times before, he lined up at his spot and prepared to yell out the snap count. But before he could open his mouth, a player on the opposing team, the Dallas Cowboys, took one look at him and shouted.
“A black punter?! It’s a fake! It’s a fake!”
The opposing players, equally eager to impress their coaches by seeming on top of every nuance of the game, scrambled into new positions, King told me, guarding against the possibility that this black guy, inexplicably lined up at the whitest of N.F.L. positions, was really some backup quarterback or receiver—a speedster who would fake a kick and instead run for the first down, catching their whole defense unaware. Clearly some trickery was afoot.
For King, it was a gift. He actually laughed out loud. Even black players didn’t believe that he was a punter. It wasn’t the first time he had been viewed with suspicion, and the comedy of the situation calmed his nerves. He called for the snap, took three precise steps, and dropped the ball perfectly toward his rising right leg. The ball, as it did nearly every time, rocketed into the air, nearly disappearing in the late afternoon sun. He was knocked to the ground as he finished his kick, but when he got back up, the ball was still in the air and his teammates were pounding him on the back.
Ask anyone who knows the N.F.L. well and they will tell you that the twenty-seven-year-old Oakland Raider Marquette King is one of the most impressive punters in professional football. Videos of his performances at kicking camps have almost mythic status among special-teams devotees. And he has increased his consistency each of the three seasons he’s played, gradually mastering a precision with his kicking to match his tremendous power.
“Marquette King has one of the purest, strongest legs in the league,” John Middlekauff, an Oakland sports-radio host and former N.F.L. scout, told me. Much of the positive reaction to King has centered on his obvious strength. The performance of punters is judged by two principal measurements: distance and hang time. Hang time is crucial, because the longer a ball stays in the air, the more time the defending team has to get down field to guard against a return. While a typical N.F.L. punt will last about four and a half seconds in the air, King, in workouts, has reached the unthinkable mark of 5.85 seconds. He does well with distance, too: his longest punt in a game is seventy yards, managed against the Ravens, and footage exists of him kicking as far as eighty-seven yards in practices.
King spends considerable time in the weight room, a place not necessarily frequented by members of the kicking squad, and his collegiate forty-yard dash time was less than two-tenths of a second behind that of his team’s fastest runner, the wide receiver Amari Cooper. The joke about punters is that they usually look like someone from the accounting department who accidentally ended up on the team—in other words, like a pasty white guy who improbably found himself in the company of football men. King has the opposite effect: he is an athletic black man in a spot usually reserved for pasty white guys. It would probably be uncomfortable, if he weren’t so used to being different.
YouTube video; screams of shock and amazement can be heard as soon as the ball comes off his foot. Word began to spread among the tightly knit kicking community and eventually among N.F.L. executives. After graduating, he was invited to Raiders camp, where he impressed coaches so much that, despite injuring his foot during the preseason, he was given an unlikely roster spot, and placed on injured reserve for the 2012 season. The next year, he beat out veteran Chris Kluwe in camp, and was given the team’s starting job. He became the only black punter in the league, and just the fifth black man in the history of the N.F.L. to be a specialist at the position.
It is difficult to explain why African-American punters are practically unheard of in a league that at any given moment is roughly two-thirds black. It seems possible that many scouts haven’t even considered the question. “Honestly,” John Middlekauff said when I asked him about the subject, “I hadn’t ever thought of it in those terms. I just think most guys, most talented players, when you grow up wanting to play football, obviously kicker and punter are the last two things you want to do … and if you are the kicker or punter, and you’re the best player on the team, then that means you’re also quarterback or running back. You’re just also athletic, and you don’t necessarily want to do that as you try to get a scholarship to go to college.” What’s implied in this, of course, is that punter is not a position you choose, but one you get stuck with because you are not fast enough or strong enough to play elsewhere on the field. The other assumption here is that black football players always have better speed and strength than their white counterparts.
cost as much as four thousand dollars for a week of private lessons and film studies, and even with such training, an N.F.L. career will remain a statistical improbability. There are thirty-two teams in the league, and they each typically employ one player at placekicker and one at punter. There are, then, about sixty-four jobs to be divided among thousands of kids who train for this one thing. Kickers commonly earn more than two million dollars per year, and they rarely suffer the kind of high-speed collisions endured by those at other positions. At any given time, the oldest player in the league is almost always a kicker. (Currently it’s Adam Vinatieri, the forty-three-year old placekicker for the Indianapolis Colts. Morton Andersen, a placekicker for multiple teams, had a career that lasted twenty-five years, an astonishing number when you consider that the average career, according to the N.F.L. Players Association, lasts a little over three years.)
All of this helps explain why a lucrative cottage industry has sprung up catering to parents looking for a way to help their kids pursue N.F.L. dreams by becoming kickers. The Web site for Kohl’s Kicking lists more than a hundred and fifty camps scheduled for 2016, and a quick Google search will point you to similar camps that make tremendous promises for the futures of young kickers. For such an experience, families and loved ones can expect to pay anywhere between three hundred and twenty-five dollars and six hundred dollars per day for attendance, a price tag that does not include travel, merchandise, instructional DVDs, equipment, or other extras. And yet this is a typical path for a young N.F.L. kicker. Which makes King even more of an outlier. He taught himself, and was invited to his first camp free of charge in his senior year of college. But for those not possessed of his astounding drive and talent, the very possibility of a career in kicking or punting is tied to the financial means of your family. In other words, if you want to play this position, with its low physical impact, you have to be able to afford it.
Greg Coleman came along before the rise of specialized kicking camps. He was drafted in 1976, by the Cincinnati Bengals, and though he exclusively punted in college, he was expected, at the Bengals camp, to try out for receiver and running back spots before kicking. He balked at this, but, being an unsigned rookie, he had little leverage. As he describes it, when he finally got around to taking kicking reps in front of coaches, he was winded and consequently underperformed, thus losing his chance. He was cut before the season began. He took a job teaching high-school history, in Florida, but maintained a practice routine, learning more about both the craft of kicking and the business of the N.F.L. He got another shot the next year, signing with the Cleveland Browns on January 1, 1977. Cleveland coach Forrest Gregg, like the Bengals coaches before him, wanted to use Coleman as a running back, but the young kicker, now a year wiser, took a stand: he told his coach to either let him kick exclusively or cut him from the team. Gregg gave him his chance. The next year, though, Gregg was fired, and Coleman was let go, replaced by a younger, white draft pick. By week nine of the ensuing season, Coleman was still living in Cleveland, out of work, and his wife was pregnant. Then he got a call from the Minnesota Vikings. He spent the next nine years punting in Minneapolis, racking up impressive numbers in his career as a precision punter.
Greg Coleman was the first black man to play exclusively at punter in the N.F.L., in the late seventies. “For a long time,” he said, “I kept my helmet on, hoping folks would think I was a dark-skinned white boy. You got stuff thrown at you. The adjectives that were hurled … monkey. The N-word.”PHOTOGRAPH BY NFL PHOTOS / AP
Not everyone was happy to see him on the field. “For a long time,” he told me, “I kept my helmet on, hoping folks would think I was a dark-skinned white boy. You got stuff thrown at you. The adjectives that were hurled … monkey. The N-word.” It’s remarkable to hear stories that evoke Jackie Robinson integrating baseball in the fifties from a football player who’s talking about 1978. Some of the same fans shouting racial epithets at Greg Coleman were cheering for the black running backs and receivers on their own teams. It wasn’t a question of integration in football; it was merely the sight of a black man taking space where a white man should be. “It’s something that I have not talked about a whole lot,” Coleman said, “even after all of these years.” Coleman is from a generation that was largely taught to handle racism with a quiet dignity. Keep your chin up, and your mouth shut. Do better than they expect you to and silence them with your greatness.
short video he recorded for the Vikings, the pain is very much on the surface. In the video, he talks about the time his black Pee Wee football team won the city championship—the team, remarkably, featured four future N.F.L. players—and was nonetheless denied the chance to compete in the state’s Gator Bowl. Even as a man who prides himself on inner strength, it is clear that being excluded as a nine-year-old because he was born black is a pain that is simply too severe to get over.
Whether or not anyone wants to talk about it, there are races attached to some positions in sports. Running backs and cornerbacks are typically black. Punter, kicker, and quarterback tend to be seen as white positions. Like many aspects of race in 2016, this is changing, but in uneven ways. When Super Bowl 50 begins, Cam Newton will become just the sixth black quarterback to start in the N.F.L. Championship Game. What explains this? Is it a lack of ability to read defenses and study playbooks on the part of African-Americans? Or is it because the preparation, training, and cultural markers associated with the quarterback position have historically been inaccessible to aspiring black athletes? If the latter is true, then the six men that have achieved this have done so by walking a path that defies probability. The same may be said of black punters. If being an N.F.L. punter can be a lonely proposition, then being a black N.F.L. punter can be a downright desolate one. This may be one reason why, despite the relative longevity and safety of the position, so few African-American players have taken up the mantle. Even in a league that prizes mental toughness, the feat requires a whole other degree of it, one that enables you not only to compete with others but with yourself, with systems, and with isolation. You have to be, as John Middlekauff puts it, “A different type of guy.”
Marquette King remembers being astonished the first time he stepped onto an N.F.L. field. Even though it was only preseason, there seemed to be about a million more people in the stands than he had ever seen at his tiny alma mater, Fort Valley State University, in Georgia. Trying to remain calm, he kept his head down, and cast his eyes safely on the grass at his feet.
He jogged to the line of scrimmage, hoping to look like he belonged. He wasn’t just playing football, he was competing for a job. And even though he had experienced success at every stage of his career, had excelled at tryouts, had dominated pro-days, and impressed scouts who appraised him quietly from behind visors and sunglasses, he knew how merciless N.F.L. camps were for unproven rookies. You could have been the best at every place you played. You could sweat, and bleed, and run yourself ragged, giving every ounce and pushing far beyond your own limitations, and still, at the end of the day, an assistant might greet you at your locker with a sombre look and the words no hopeful wants to hear: “Come with me. And bring your playbook.”
King knew that if he failed to execute the next fifteen to twenty seconds of his life with absolute perfection, this could be his last chance to play professional football. As he had done countless times before, he lined up at his spot and prepared to yell out the snap count. But before he could open his mouth, a player on the opposing team, the Dallas Cowboys, took one look at him and shouted.
“A black punter?! It’s a fake! It’s a fake!”
The opposing players, equally eager to impress their coaches by seeming on top of every nuance of the game, scrambled into new positions, King told me, guarding against the possibility that this black guy, inexplicably lined up at the whitest of N.F.L. positions, was really some backup quarterback or receiver—a speedster who would fake a kick and instead run for the first down, catching their whole defense unaware. Clearly some trickery was afoot.
For King, it was a gift. He actually laughed out loud. Even black players didn’t believe that he was a punter. It wasn’t the first time he had been viewed with suspicion, and the comedy of the situation calmed his nerves. He called for the snap, took three precise steps, and dropped the ball perfectly toward his rising right leg. The ball, as it did nearly every time, rocketed into the air, nearly disappearing in the late afternoon sun. He was knocked to the ground as he finished his kick, but when he got back up, the ball was still in the air and his teammates were pounding him on the back.
Ask anyone who knows the N.F.L. well and they will tell you that the twenty-seven-year-old Oakland Raider Marquette King is one of the most impressive punters in professional football. Videos of his performances at kicking camps have almost mythic status among special-teams devotees. And he has increased his consistency each of the three seasons he’s played, gradually mastering a precision with his kicking to match his tremendous power.
“Marquette King has one of the purest, strongest legs in the league,” John Middlekauff, an Oakland sports-radio host and former N.F.L. scout, told me. Much of the positive reaction to King has centered on his obvious strength. The performance of punters is judged by two principal measurements: distance and hang time. Hang time is crucial, because the longer a ball stays in the air, the more time the defending team has to get down field to guard against a return. While a typical N.F.L. punt will last about four and a half seconds in the air, King, in workouts, has reached the unthinkable mark of 5.85 seconds. He does well with distance, too: his longest punt in a game is seventy yards, managed against the Ravens, and footage exists of him kicking as far as eighty-seven yards in practices.
King spends considerable time in the weight room, a place not necessarily frequented by members of the kicking squad, and his collegiate forty-yard dash time was less than two-tenths of a second behind that of his team’s fastest runner, the wide receiver Amari Cooper. The joke about punters is that they usually look like someone from the accounting department who accidentally ended up on the team—in other words, like a pasty white guy who improbably found himself in the company of football men. King has the opposite effect: he is an athletic black man in a spot usually reserved for pasty white guys. It would probably be uncomfortable, if he weren’t so used to being different.
YouTube video; screams of shock and amazement can be heard as soon as the ball comes off his foot. Word began to spread among the tightly knit kicking community and eventually among N.F.L. executives. After graduating, he was invited to Raiders camp, where he impressed coaches so much that, despite injuring his foot during the preseason, he was given an unlikely roster spot, and placed on injured reserve for the 2012 season. The next year, he beat out veteran Chris Kluwe in camp, and was given the team’s starting job. He became the only black punter in the league, and just the fifth black man in the history of the N.F.L. to be a specialist at the position.
It is difficult to explain why African-American punters are practically unheard of in a league that at any given moment is roughly two-thirds black. It seems possible that many scouts haven’t even considered the question. “Honestly,” John Middlekauff said when I asked him about the subject, “I hadn’t ever thought of it in those terms. I just think most guys, most talented players, when you grow up wanting to play football, obviously kicker and punter are the last two things you want to do … and if you are the kicker or punter, and you’re the best player on the team, then that means you’re also quarterback or running back. You’re just also athletic, and you don’t necessarily want to do that as you try to get a scholarship to go to college.” What’s implied in this, of course, is that punter is not a position you choose, but one you get stuck with because you are not fast enough or strong enough to play elsewhere on the field. The other assumption here is that black football players always have better speed and strength than their white counterparts.
cost as much as four thousand dollars for a week of private lessons and film studies, and even with such training, an N.F.L. career will remain a statistical improbability. There are thirty-two teams in the league, and they each typically employ one player at placekicker and one at punter. There are, then, about sixty-four jobs to be divided among thousands of kids who train for this one thing. Kickers commonly earn more than two million dollars per year, and they rarely suffer the kind of high-speed collisions endured by those at other positions. At any given time, the oldest player in the league is almost always a kicker. (Currently it’s Adam Vinatieri, the forty-three-year old placekicker for the Indianapolis Colts. Morton Andersen, a placekicker for multiple teams, had a career that lasted twenty-five years, an astonishing number when you consider that the average career, according to the N.F.L. Players Association, lasts a little over three years.)
All of this helps explain why a lucrative cottage industry has sprung up catering to parents looking for a way to help their kids pursue N.F.L. dreams by becoming kickers. The Web site for Kohl’s Kicking lists more than a hundred and fifty camps scheduled for 2016, and a quick Google search will point you to similar camps that make tremendous promises for the futures of young kickers. For such an experience, families and loved ones can expect to pay anywhere between three hundred and twenty-five dollars and six hundred dollars per day for attendance, a price tag that does not include travel, merchandise, instructional DVDs, equipment, or other extras. And yet this is a typical path for a young N.F.L. kicker. Which makes King even more of an outlier. He taught himself, and was invited to his first camp free of charge in his senior year of college. But for those not possessed of his astounding drive and talent, the very possibility of a career in kicking or punting is tied to the financial means of your family. In other words, if you want to play this position, with its low physical impact, you have to be able to afford it.
Greg Coleman came along before the rise of specialized kicking camps. He was drafted in 1976, by the Cincinnati Bengals, and though he exclusively punted in college, he was expected, at the Bengals camp, to try out for receiver and running back spots before kicking. He balked at this, but, being an unsigned rookie, he had little leverage. As he describes it, when he finally got around to taking kicking reps in front of coaches, he was winded and consequently underperformed, thus losing his chance. He was cut before the season began. He took a job teaching high-school history, in Florida, but maintained a practice routine, learning more about both the craft of kicking and the business of the N.F.L. He got another shot the next year, signing with the Cleveland Browns on January 1, 1977. Cleveland coach Forrest Gregg, like the Bengals coaches before him, wanted to use Coleman as a running back, but the young kicker, now a year wiser, took a stand: he told his coach to either let him kick exclusively or cut him from the team. Gregg gave him his chance. The next year, though, Gregg was fired, and Coleman was let go, replaced by a younger, white draft pick. By week nine of the ensuing season, Coleman was still living in Cleveland, out of work, and his wife was pregnant. Then he got a call from the Minnesota Vikings. He spent the next nine years punting in Minneapolis, racking up impressive numbers in his career as a precision punter.
Greg Coleman was the first black man to play exclusively at punter in the N.F.L., in the late seventies. “For a long time,” he said, “I kept my helmet on, hoping folks would think I was a dark-skinned white boy. You got stuff thrown at you. The adjectives that were hurled … monkey. The N-word.”PHOTOGRAPH BY NFL PHOTOS / AP
Not everyone was happy to see him on the field. “For a long time,” he told me, “I kept my helmet on, hoping folks would think I was a dark-skinned white boy. You got stuff thrown at you. The adjectives that were hurled … monkey. The N-word.” It’s remarkable to hear stories that evoke Jackie Robinson integrating baseball in the fifties from a football player who’s talking about 1978. Some of the same fans shouting racial epithets at Greg Coleman were cheering for the black running backs and receivers on their own teams. It wasn’t a question of integration in football; it was merely the sight of a black man taking space where a white man should be. “It’s something that I have not talked about a whole lot,” Coleman said, “even after all of these years.” Coleman is from a generation that was largely taught to handle racism with a quiet dignity. Keep your chin up, and your mouth shut. Do better than they expect you to and silence them with your greatness.
short video he recorded for the Vikings, the pain is very much on the surface. In the video, he talks about the time his black Pee Wee football team won the city championship—the team, remarkably, featured four future N.F.L. players—and was nonetheless denied the chance to compete in the state’s Gator Bowl. Even as a man who prides himself on inner strength, it is clear that being excluded as a nine-year-old because he was born black is a pain that is simply too severe to get over.
Whether or not anyone wants to talk about it, there are races attached to some positions in sports. Running backs and cornerbacks are typically black. Punter, kicker, and quarterback tend to be seen as white positions. Like many aspects of race in 2016, this is changing, but in uneven ways. When Super Bowl 50 begins, Cam Newton will become just the sixth black quarterback to start in the N.F.L. Championship Game. What explains this? Is it a lack of ability to read defenses and study playbooks on the part of African-Americans? Or is it because the preparation, training, and cultural markers associated with the quarterback position have historically been inaccessible to aspiring black athletes? If the latter is true, then the six men that have achieved this have done so by walking a path that defies probability. The same may be said of black punters. If being an N.F.L. punter can be a lonely proposition, then being a black N.F.L. punter can be a downright desolate one. This may be one reason why, despite the relative longevity and safety of the position, so few African-American players have taken up the mantle. Even in a league that prizes mental toughness, the feat requires a whole other degree of it, one that enables you not only to compete with others but with yourself, with systems, and with isolation. You have to be, as John Middlekauff puts it, “A different type of guy.”
