The true heroes of any revolution often go unremembered in the pages of time. Their contributions may have changed the world, but the details and the moments and the names are often reduced to mere trivia in the hindsight told by history books.
That’s a lot of buildup to tell the story of a placekicker.
But in the grand scheme of the evolution of the NFL, few parts of the game have changed as radically as kicking. As recently as the 1960s, a team’s kicker was often simply their best athlete. He generally starred at some other position and moonlighted at booting the ball only when the situation demanded.
Listed first as their squads’ most talented cornerbacks, quarterbacks, halfbacks, or linebackers, the kickers of yesteryear were often huge, physically speaking. The power required to drive the ball high and far into the air came from larger men, at least according to the traditional technique used for decades.
Actually splitting the uprights with any dependable accuracy, though, was largely still a crapshoot.
And then someone figured out a better way. Practically overnight, kickers looked different. They sounded different. They came from exotic places. They had entirely different athletic skills, because they had spent a lifetime playing an entirely different sport. And when they found the sport of football- or, rather, when football found them- they changed it forever.
This is the story of the unlikely little Austrian man who helped usher that revolution into Dallas.