Why are kickers white

He played for the Oakland Raiders for six years before joining the Denver Broncos in After a thigh injury, the punter was released. Now King plays for the St. One reason he gave involved economic differences. Coleman explained that punters who do not break into the league quickly are not paid well and often must fall back on other jobs. There are exceptions, like King, Coleman, and former punter Reggie Roby, but the statistics speak for themselves.

For King, it was a gift. He actually laughed out loud. 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. Videos of his performances at kicking camps have almost mythic status among special-teams devotees. 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. 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.

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.

King grew up in Macon, Georgia, and like a lot of kids his initial attraction to football was visual. His mother, concerned about injuries and academics, would not yet let him play, but King began training on his own, doing two-mile runs around his neighborhood with dreams of being a receiver.

Two years later, he made his high-school team—and quickly decided that after-school practices and position-specific training were not enough to fill his insistent appetite for improvement. Weekend days were spent walking around his neighborhood with a football and a set of cones that he could use to practice receiving routes. He tried to get quarterbacks, receivers, and other teammates to join him for these extra sessions, but he found that most kids, even the athletes, preferred to spend their free time watching TV or playing video games.

When he got bored, he would kick, and he soon became fond of watching the ball rocket off of his foot and into the air. He began to challenge himself.

Could he kick it over this ditch? Could he kick it over this tree? He got his parents to measure how long he could keep the ball in the air. He just liked being really good at it, and getting better. He experimented with different techniques. One day, he said, not long after he began kicking, he was playing football with friends and a pass was thrown way out of bounds.

King went to retrieve it, but instead of throwing it back, he kicked it. A new coach took over his team during junior year, and King told him about his kicking. During his senior year, a friend mentioned offhandedly that he could get paid to kick. King says he legitimately thought the guy was making fun of him. After high school, he went to Fort Valley State, a small historically black college thirty miles from home. Eventually he was told flat out by the coaching staff that if he wanted to keep his scholarship, he had to kick.

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