Gahry Forced to Kick in a Foreign Style

When a pair of foreign exchange students showed up at Canyon High this week, Coach Harry Welch immediately recruited them for the football team. Never mind that neither Henrik Lansenfeldt nor Anders Nordlund of Sweden knows an end zone from an end run. These are desperate times for Cowboy football.

“We have never seen a match before,” Nordlund said about football, using competent English but the wrong sports terminology. Welch, an English teacher, can worry about definitions later. For now, the Swedes’ background in soccer is a more interesting subject.

“We may need one of our Swedish imports for a kicker,” he said. “It might be kind of nice to reach across the Atlantic.”

Canyon’s Swedish kicking connection remains in the experimental stage, but Welch’s concern is well-founded. If nothing else, he’d like an insurance policy against Tom Gahry, last season’s place-kicker.

Gahry converted 30 of 34 extra points and his only field-goal attempt--a 31-yarder--last year as a junior. But with two-a-day practices set to begin Monday and the season-opening game against Hart just three weeks away, the left-footed Gahry still walks with a limp and cannot straighten his kicking leg.

Gahry’s 1986 season was cut short Nov. 7 in the game that ended Canyon’s winning streak at 46, a 21-20 defeat at Antelope Valley. After Canyon’s second touchdown in a furious fourth-quarter rally, Gahry kicked his second extra point of the game, but he never saw the ball sail through the uprights.

With his left leg still in the air, Gahry crashed to the ground when Antelope Valley defender Duane Lewis cracked his helmet into Gahry’s knee.

“Everybody was watching the ball,” said Gahry’s mother, Betty, who attended the game. “We were all standing up screaming that the kick was good. Then we saw that somebody was hurt, but I didn’t know who it was.”

Gahry concluded he was down but not out, expecting the pain to subside any moment.

“It hurt a lot and I started crying,” he said. “But I thought it was like when you hit your funny bone. I thought I’d be up walking in 10 minutes.”

Instead, he was headed for a hospital emergency room. Two weeks later he underwent four hours of surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament, the same injury that recently threatened the careers of Bernard King of the New York Knicks and Kellen Winslow of the San Diego Chargers.

“I never thought I’d get hurt playing football because I’m the kicker,” Gahry said. “That’s supposed to be the easy life.”

The surgery involved taking tendons from a muscle behind Gahry’s knee, twining them together like a rope and tunneling them through the knee to replace the torn ligaments, then fastening them with a screw at one end and a staple at the other.

Gahry’s rehabilitation began in January and five months later he was running again. By the end of June, he attempted his first extra point since the surgery and claims he has recovered 90% of the strength in his leg with the aid of a brace he wears whenever he kicks.

“The day before I got injured I kicked a 62-yard field goal in practice. I can’t kick that far now, but PATs are no problem. I think I’m more accurate now,” he said.

Welch seems convinced so far. “I’m anticipating that when we score our first touchdown, Tom will kick the PAT,” he said. “He wants to kick off, too, but we won’t let him. Teams go after the kicker and we won’t expose him to that.”

Gahry admits that when he attempts his first extra point in a game this season he’ll be nervous, but not as much as his mother.

“We didn’t want him to play if he’d be injured forever, but the doctors say he’ll be fine so we think it’s wonderful that he’s playing again,” she said. “I think now I’ll watch him whenever he kicks. No, I’ll watch the other guys to make sure they don’t hit him.”

Canyon blues: The injury wave that has struck this summer is likely to make 1987 Welch’s most challenging season in his five years at Canyon.

Heading the list of wounded Cowboys are quarterback Rod Baltau (broken finger), linebacker Kevin Doss (separated shoulder), tight end Ken Holsenbeck (cut forehead) and offensive linemen Sean Wheeler (separated shoulder) and Dom Spainhower (sprained ankle). Defensive back Curt Gibson was struck in the mouth and has five teeth wired together.

Canyon suffered another loss when Jared Henderson, a defensive back and wide receiver, quit the team Monday.

Welch’s teams are 60-7 over the past five seasons and have finished no worse than 8-4. But this summer Canyon lost a passing league game to Antelope Valley, 56-0.

Said Welch: “I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say the scoreboard is insignificant. It isn’t. I know what my record was last year. But the scoreboard will not determine my success here.”

This season could severely test that resolve.

When Alemany High Coach Enrique Lopez and Athletic Director Dudley Rooney started looking in June for a Sept. 11, opening-night opponent, they knew their search would be difficult.

“We started in the San Diego area, but we didn’t have any luck,” Lopez explained. “So we started looking around San Francisco. Dudley called a newspaper up there and they gave us a lead.”

The school wasn’t exactly located in the Bay Area. Alemany ended up scheduling another team from the Valley--the San Joaquin Valley. Los Banos High is located near the exotic towns of Chowchilla and Merced.

The team will leave early Friday morning for the five-hour drive, play the game, eat, then drive home.

“We’ll probably get home around 3 or 4 a.m.,” Lopez said. “And we coaches will be back looking at films at noon the next day.”

Early indications: The season is still a few weeks away, but the preseason polls are already starting to filter in. California Football Magazine, based in Hermosa Beach, has picked Crespi as the top team in the state.

In the poll, which was conducted in conjunction with Cal-Hi Sports, Hart is rated No. 16 and Granada Hills is No. 20.

The magazine lists running backs Russell White of Crespi, Marc Monestime of Thousand Oaks, Ronald Wilkinson of Reseda and Mike Conover of Canoga Park as players to watch or as key returnees at their position. Jeremy Leach of Granada Hills and Jeff Barrett of Burroughs are listed among quarterbacks; Sean Brown of Granada Hills among tight ends; Brian Jacobs of Hart, Dean Schultz of Kennedy, Jason Silverstein of Cleveland and Tom Curran of Canyon among linemen; and Ron Hardy of Kennedy and David Wilson of Reseda among linebackers.

Barrett, Leach, Jacobs, Brown and Wilson were all listed in the magazine’s Golden 50--the top 50 seniors in the state.

The magazine also predicted that Crespi (Del Rey), Granada Hills (Valley 4-A), Canoga Park (Sunset), Reseda (Pac 8), Thousand Oaks (Marmonte), Calabasas (Frontier), Chaminade (Santa Fe) and Montclair Prep (Alpha) will win their respective leagues.