For a Long Time, Sun Couldn’t Get a Leg Up in WFL

Tom Baldwin can remember the cities, but not the faces. Perhaps because the legs were so forgettable.

For nearly two years, Baldwin, then an assistant coach with the Southern California Sun in the World Football League, went in search of a kicker--any kicker.

Baldwin laughs now, but at the time it wasn’t so funny, as the Sun’s kicking game didn’t have a leg to stand on.

“I tried out hundreds of kickers,” said Baldwin, now the coach at Costa Mesa High School. “I can’t even remember their names. Every place we went, one of my jobs was to try out kickers. We signed a bunch of them, sometimes one a week.”

The kicker’s duties were considerably reduced in the WFL, which was born in 1974 and died in 1975. Teams ran or passed on conversion attempts, but field goals still counted three points and . . .

“You still had to kick off,” Baldwin said.

But the Sun could not find a suitable kicker. The team went through six before signing a former Stanford player, Rod Garcia.

Garcia had set a National Collegiate Athletic Assn. record with 42 career field goals, and it was his 31-yard field goal in the waning moments of the 1971 Rose Bowl that gave Stanford a 13-12 victory over Michigan.

After he kicked a 44-yard field goal in his debut with the Sun, Garcia was proclaimed the answer to the team’s kicking woes.

He was gone in less than a month.

“He kicked one long field goal--period,” Tom Fears, who was the team’s head coach, said this week.

The search went wearily on.

“When we went on the road, I would get there a day early, no matter where it was,” Baldwin said. “I would advertise and hold tryouts the next day. There must be a million kids out there that can kick 50-yard field goals.”

Until you put one in uniform and added the element of fear.

“There was this one guy I tried out in Philadelphia. I can’t remember his name, but, boy, could he kick,” Baldwin said.

“He came to the tryout and sets up two balls on the 50-yard line, facing opposite directions. He kicked one through the uprights, then turned around and kicked the other through. We didn’t have any money, but I told Fears we had to sign this guy.”

They scraped up the money, or at least a contract, and brought him to Anaheim.

“He gets out on the field during practice at Anaheim Stadium and starts kicking 50-yard field goals. I’m thinking, this kid is it. What happens? He gets in the game, kicks off 30 yards and misses his only field goal. We cut him the next day.”

Things got so desperate that Fears and Baldwin even gave position players a shot as kickers. They held a tryout, and quarterback Tony Adams won the job.

In the next game, against the Detroit Wheel, Adams averaged 20 yards per kickoff and missed three field goals. The tryout system was reinstated.

Finally, after 1 1/2 years, George Dixon, an assistant coach for the San Diego Chargers, called Baldwin to tell him about a kicker the Chargers had cut--Benny Ricardo, who later played for the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings. Ricardo solved the team’s kicking problems for half a season. Of course, that was all the time the team had left before it folded.

“It took us a year and a half, but when we finally found one, he went on to kick for 10 years in the NFL,” Baldwin said.