HEY, ABBOTT! : When at Last He Got the Call, It Was to Follow a Placekicking Legend in San Diego

This is just a little thing, but when you’re Charger kicker Vince Abbott, and it has taken eight years and considerable sanity to find your place, you notice the little things.

Two Fridays ago, the Charger kicker and his wife, Sarah, were sitting in an ice cream parlor.

An elderly man and his 7-year-old grandson were in the next booth talking about the Chargers. Abbott’s wife leaned over, pointed to her husband and asked the boy if he knew who he was. He didn’t. She told him.

The little boy flipped.

“His eyes get real big. He acts like he’s in shock. He can’t say anything,” Abbott recounted. “He’s actually in awe of me or something.”

On the way out, Abbott asked the boy to wait a second. He ran to his car, reached in the back, where several dirty practice footballs had been messing up the seats, and grabbed one of the balls.

He signed it, “To Adam,” then handed the ball to the boy. No reason. At least, no reason that anybody other than Vince Abbott would understand.

“It was the way he looked at me,” Abbott said. “My whole life, I’ve never gotten looks like that.”

Abbott, a 28-year-old rookie who graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 1981, has won two games for the Chargers with field goals--one in overtime, one with 12 seconds left in regulation.

At one point he had kicked eight consecutive field goals, a streak that was broken only when he missed a 53-yard effort. During one stretch, he had eight field goals in three games.

Then last Sunday the true measure of his impact was felt. He failed. He missed from 42, 46 and 48 yards.

The Chargers lost to Pittsburgh, 20-16. Had he made two of them, the Chargers would have won.

But nobody said a word. Nobody scolded him. Nobody blamed him.

“I believe he will be fine,” Coach Al Saunders said. “That was the exception rather than the rule. That was atypical of him. He has a good perspective on what he has to do to come back.”

And what did Abbott think? A long walk on a short pier, perhaps?

“I just kick it,” Abbott said. “Where it goes is where it goes. I can just do my best and hope it gets through the uprights.”

After all he has been through--six National Football League training camps and one season in the United States Football League--did you expect him to say anything else?

For Vince Abbott, this new and wonderful life in the NFL remains more a matter of the little things.

“You know, seeing that little boy’s face that night was the highlight of my season,” said Abbott.

He acts out this new role, pro football player, as if it were any other job.

Abbott is the only Charger who commutes long distance to work because of his wife. She has a good job in Los Angeles, so they live in a condominium in Costa Mesa. Twice a week, he makes the 90-minute trip, one day leaving the house at 5:15 a.m. to make practice on time. On nights he doesn’t go home, he stays in Del Mar with his parents.

“I know it’s a long drive,” he said. “But I miss my three cats.”

Vince Abbott is probably the only Charger whose Christmas tree is decorated with Charger ornaments and little stuffed footballs.

“The money is nice, but what I really like about playing for the Chargers is the trinkets they give out,” Abbott said. “I’ve got glasses and shirts and baseball caps. Those are what mean something.”

Abbott also is the only Charger with a genuine, corny good-luck charm. Before every game, he takes a snipping of an old T-shirt and sticks it in his right shoe.

“He can’t wear the T-shirt anymore, thank goodness, because it finally fell apart,” Sarah said. “Now we have a bag with all the snippings in it, so as soon as one snipping wears out, he can put another one in his shoe right away. I know, people think we’re crazy.”

Abbott prefers a different description.

“If you step back and think about what has happened to me, it’s unbelievable,” he said in his soft British accent.

Born in London, he wasn’t there long. He had attended 16 schools by the time he was 15 and had lived everywhere from Ireland to Australia to New Zealand to the Bahamas.

He went to the University of Washington to play rugby. There were two women suited up for the first practice. He quit the team. “I wondered, ‘How can I get physical with two women?”’

He joined the football team as a soccer-style kicker. He passed the tryout by making 30 of 30 in the rain. He was rewarded with a red shirt, meaning he had to sit out a year.

He quit school because he thought a red shirt meant he could play immediately anywhere else. “That’s the way it is in England,” he said.

By the time he had enrolled at Cal State Fullerton, he realized that he was wrong. He had to sit out a year there, too. “I was dumb,” he said.

He finally graduated from Fullerton as a good kicker lost in the shuffle of a thousand good kickers. He received no pro contract for a year. And then the fun started.

San Francisco. Miami. Chicago. Tampa. The Raiders. From 1982-86, Abbott attended each training camp once. He:

--Loved the drums of ice cream at the 49er camp.

--Thought the Dolphin camp was too humid and unfriendly.

--Went drinking with Jim McMahon at the Bear camp.

--Was frightened by daily lightning at the Buccaneer camp.

--Beat out 60 kickers at the Raider camp, and then kicked 69 in a row while there.

But he was cut. From all of them.

He lost out to such guys as Ray Wersching, Chris Bahr, Donald Igwebuike, Bob Thomas. Lost out so much, so often, that the NFL records even claim he was cut from the Ram training camp. He never spent one night at the Ram training camp.

“The NFL must have figured, he’s been cut from so many teams, what’s one more?” he has concluded.

This is a man who even was barred from pursuing a contract offer from Hamilton of the Canadian Football League because of an unwritten Canadian League rule that all kickers have some Canadian background. And he had even gone to high school for two years in Vancouver, Canada.

“I guess I thought that was Canadian enough,” Abbott said.

During all that time, he made one team, the USFL’s Los Angeles Express. That was in 1983, when he made 21 of 30 field goals.

On the Tuesday before the first game of the next season, at 11:30 a.m., the Express signed Luis Zendejas.

At 1 p.m., Abbott was cut.

“That was nice,” Abbott said.

All of this is why last summer, on the afternoon of Aug. 31, after the Chargers had traded Rolf Benirschke, after Abbott had looked around and realized that he was the only kicker left, this occurred:

“He called me and told me he had been cut again,” Sarah said. “I said, ‘Fine, come on home, whatever.’

“Then he says, ‘No, just joking, I made it.’ And he starts screaming, just screaming.”

Abbott still feels like that.

“Some people don’t understand how hard it is,” he said. “I appreciate what I have more than most, I think.”

Some people also wouldn’t understand that for two years during his string of releases, Abbott kept practicing while his wife supported him. And we’re not just talking about money.

Every night, they would go to some place such as a local elementary school, where, with 12 footballs that people had given him, he would kick until dark.

His holder? His wife.

Said Sarah: “He’s got a great kicking motion. I have long red fingernails, and I haven’t broken one.”

Said Abbott: “The best part was racing her down the field to collect the balls.”

Said Sarah: “Well, we wouldn’t always race. We would try to organize all the neighborhood kids like an assembly line to pick the balls up for us. Today, Vincent has a ton of little kid fans running around out there somewhere.”

When his wife was busy making a living, he was at Cal State Fullerton, searching for another holder and another target.

“If you could realize how many times we had to see him come back here, after all those cuts . . . it’s so good to see him make it,” said Larry Manfull, Fullerton’s offensive line coach. “Frankly, the first thing I look at in the paper now is the Chargers’ box score. Lord knows, Abbott deserves it.”

And it was because of that inner fight that Abbott was able to sell himself to the Chargers and San Diego the week after Benirschke was traded. Against the Jets in the final exhibition game, in his first chance as the regular kicker, Abbott started by missing a 49-yard attempt.

“You should have heard the boos,” Abbott recalled. “I had replaced their hero, and now look what I was doing.”

What happened next was caused by something between persistence and courage. He kicked a 33-yarder. Then a 47-yarder. Then a 29-yarder.

He finished the exhibition season 8 for 11 in field goals, and the questions stopped.

“Then those same people started cheering,” said Abbott, who said he was the wrong person to worry or feel sorry about Benirschke.

“Look at it,” he said. “The man got to play 10 years in his hometown with his family and friends. I can’t feel sorry for somebody who has been so fortunate.”

Abbott now feels that his different background makes him fortunate.

“The reason I am able to kick under pressure is because of all the pressure I have already gone through,” he said. “Making kicks in training camps where, if you miss it, you are cut immediately. Surviving tryouts.

“When you have been on the spot as much as I have, you get used to it.”

After Sunday’s loss, it appeared that Abbott felt back on the spot. He was the first one out of the locker room. He had missed nine points, and the team had lost by four, but he did not bother to stick around and explain.

A couple of days later, after being roasted by the local media and Coach Al Saunders, who requires that his players at least attempt to relate to the press, Abbott explained.

It’s not that he wasn’t dealing with adversity. That is how he deals with adversity.

After all this, Abbott doesn’t have time to accept it, to stand there and explain it and second-guess it. He throws it on the floor with other wet laundry and walks away.

“I wasn’t trying to avoid anybody,” he said. “I was just trying to get the loss and my performance past me as quickly as possible. It’s always amazed me how players have to stand there and explain failure. I think it’s weird. What can they say? They failed. That’s all they can say.

“Me, I got out of there. And in 30 minutes, I had forgotten about it.”

In 30 minutes, he and his wife and his parents were having dinner in a modest restaurant just off Interstate 5, somewhere on the way back to Abbott’s condo and cats, talking about everything but football.

“My friends saw him signing autographs while walking out that night, and they were in awe,” Sarah said. “They thought, this could not be the man they knew who struggled all these years.

“I told them, ‘Hey, don’t worry, he’s not famous. Is he?’ ”