Redskin Kicker Steve Cox Is Meeting Success Straight On

Steve Cox, who was working as a bookkeeper in Arkansas when the Washington Redskins called him a little more than a year ago to offer him a job, spent a lot of time by his locker late Sunday afternoon explaining that the longest field goal in team history was not exactly a stylish success.

Cox said his toe got under the ball too much, allowing the wind to play with it. He wasn’t certain if it was going to go straight or not. And he had no idea if it was going to carry all 57 yards to the uprights at RFK Stadium.

“I hate to say I didn’t kick it as I should have, but I didn’t drive that ball,” Cox said. “I should be able to kick a ball 64-65 yards. I don’t like to say that because it sounds cocky, but I feel I have that capability.”

Cox, who has broken the team record twice in four weeks, is half of a peculiar straight-on kicking machine that the Redskins (4-0) have unleashed on their opponents this season. He kicks off, punts and kicks long field goals -- and has done all extremely well so far.

As usual, veteran Mark Moseley is kicking short and medium-range field goals. He has made six of nine this season. All three misses have been between 40 and 49 yards.

This is the same arrangement as a year ago, except that Cox attempted--and missed--only one field goal (48 yards) in 1985. This year has been different. He has captured the imaginations of his teammates and fans with 55- and 57-yard field goals at the end of the first halves of games against Philadelphia and Seattle. He has been mobbed at midfield two more times than Moseley has this season. He has given his team two genuine emotional lifts.

In four years as a Cleveland Brown, before a month of full-time bookkeeping, Cox also kicked incredibly long field goals. He made a 60-yarder, the second-longest in NFL history, in 1984, and a 58-yarder in 1983. (The NFL record is 63 yards by Tom Dempsey.)

“The only difference was the kicks in Cleveland didn’t have the importance these kicks have here,” Cox said this week.

In Cleveland, as in Washington, Cox was and is known first as a punter, next as a utility kicker. But he also realizes that the more he kicks long field goals, the more questions he will stir up about the team’s kicking situation. As in: Could he handle shorter field goals, or even all the field goals?

“Sure, I could do it, but would I be as efficient?” he said. “The situation here is that if you’re the punter, you also kick off. Being able to do these things probably helps Mark. I think we complement each other quite well. I help Mark out by doing long field goals and kickoffs. I take that off his shoulders. For me, he helps me out by advising me, telling me things. I just think it’s a perfect twosome.”

For some, the thought of Cox kicking chip-shot field goals conjures up the nightmare of an exhibition game against Pittsburgh in August in which Cox missed 20- and 23-yard field goals.

“When I got so close, where it looked like I could reach out and touch the uprights, I think I eased up and tried to guide the ball,” Cox said. “I think that was just all in my head.”

Moseley and Cox have an unusual relationship. One would guess they would be fiercely competitive: the 38-year-old veteran hanging onto his field-goal duties as the 28 year old takes more and more responsibilities from him.

Cox said a friend in Arkansas called after Sunday’s game to say he had seen the strangest thing on a replay of Cox’s record field goal. There was Moseley, on the sideline, jumping up and down as if he had kicked that ball.

“It doesn’t surprise me, now that I know Mark,” Cox said. “But if I was a member of the viewing audience, I’d say, ‘Golly, this guy’s got to be nuts.’ ”

The last two straight-on kickers in the NFL, they are hard and fast friends, Cox said. Moseley kicks field goals 52 yards and in, depending on conditions, and Cox kicks the longer ones.

“There’s no controversy in my mind. There’s no doubt in my mind we are the perfect tandem,” Cox said.

Cox learned his craft in the backyards and playing fields of Charleston, Ark. (population 1,700), a town that had one street light until a truck knocked it down. The townspeople never put it back up.

“My father traveled around the state for his job (with a gas company), but he’d always get back home in time to work me out in the afternoon,” Cox said. “One day, he said, ‘ . . . See this Punt, Pass and Kick competition, why don’t we enter it?’ ”

So they did, but Cox, always wearing the uniform of the New Orleans Saints, never won a national age-group title. “I could punt and kick, but I never could throw the ball well,” he said.

When he was 11, Cox met Dempsey, who played with the Saints, in a PP&K; competition. Cox knew then there was one place for him in football. He wanted to be a kicker.

After kicking a 52-yard field goal in high school, Cox first went to the University of Tulsa, then to Arkansas. It was Lou Holtz, then coach of the Razorbacks, who made him a punter. But he never gave up his affection for long field goals.