CHARGER KICKERS: WHO’S WHO : Three Traveled Long, Sidewinding Roads to This Casting Call

The story of an NFL kicker can be one of many twists, not all of them enjoyable.

Kick a game-winning field goal in overtime, and you are carried off on your teammates’ shoulders.

Have a bad game the next Sunday, and the tryout call for your replacement goes out for Monday.

For kickers, patience is not always a virtue, it’s a myth.

Some kickers make a career with one team; some, such as a George Blanda, even become football legends. But most have brief and nomadic careers.

The ones with jobs and the ones without never completely unpack their bags.

They come in all shapes, sizes--short, tall, thin, fat. They kick in all styles and ways--barefooted, straight-on, sidewinder. They hail from all around the globe--Europe, South America, North America.

The position is football’s melting pot.

The three kickers the Chargers have assembled at their UC San Diego training camp are no different.

There is John Carney, a soccer-style kicker who hails from West Palm Beach, Fla., via Notre Dame. Tall and lean at 5-feet-11 and 170 pounds, Carney also bears a facial resemblance to Jim McMahon, the team’s controversial former quarterback. Apparently, no one is holding that against him.

There is Fuad Reveiz, another soccer-style kicker who was born in Columbia, moved to Miami, went to college at Tennessee and does sports television work for a worldwide Spanish network. Strong and compact at 5-11, 216 pounds, he is the most experienced, with four seasons with the Miami Dolphins behind him.

And there is Tom Whelihan, a barefooted sidewinder who was born in Maryland but raised in Texas, which still thinks of itself as its own country. With his size-11EEE feet, Whelihan packs a Texas-sized wallop with his strong leg.

All are trying to fill a spot that has been a point of inconsistency since Rolf Benirschke was traded before the 1987 season. In that time, the Chargers have gone through Vince Abbott, Jeff Gaffney, Steve DeLine and Chris Bahr. All since have been cut, which brings the team to its current state: a league-wide casting call that has been slimmed down to a three-way race.

Coach Dan Henning has given the early edge to Reveiz because of his experience. But Henning has been quick not to rule out the other two.

Each has taken a different road to the Chargers. Here are their stories, in alphabetical order:

JOHN CARNEY

Carney, who came to the Chargers from Tampa Bay in Plan B free agency, might be best known for his final college field goal. His 19-yarder gave Notre Dame a 38-37 victory over USC in 1986 and ended Ted Tollner’s tenure as the Trojans’ coach.

Now, by coincidence, Carney finds himself reunited with Tollner, the Charger quarterbacks coach. He hopes that, too, will not be held against him.

“I saw him in his office back at the stadium, and we had a couple of chuckles,” Carney said. “He said, ‘I remember a few of your kicks, one in particular.’ But I think Timmy Brown did more in that game than I did, for sure.”

Since that game, Carney has worked to find a permanent spot in the NFL. He started with Cincinnati in 1987 but was waived during camp. He joined the Buccaneers’ strike team a few months later. He was cut by the Bucs before the 1988 season but returned to kick in the final four games, making two of five field goal attempts, two of which were blocked. He handled kickoffs in just one game, the next-to-last, for the Bucs last season before he was left unprotected in Plan B.

Carney’s experience bouncing on and off rosters is not unique among NFL kicking aspirants. Neither is the way he spent much of his time between kicking jobs, taking on part-time work to help pay the bills.

He spent one six-month period working for a beer distributor in Florida, servicing bar taps. He had another job doing general work at a Florida golf course, including driving the tractor that scooped up range balls.

“The jobs that are decent jobs are too time-consuming,” Carney said, “or the employer just does not want to take the risk of training you when he knows that in your heart if you get a call for a tryout Monday, you’re going to go.”

Carney is hoping this stop with the Chargers will put an end to that kind of life. He said he decided to sign with the team because of the promise of a wide-open competition.

“That was my primary criterion,” Carney said. “I had an opportunity to go to Kansas City or back to Tampa. In fact, Tampa said they would match any offer. But I just felt this was a great opportunity with them not bringing back Chris Bahr.”

Carney is described by Larry Pasquale, special teams coach, as being the best stylist of the three Charger kickers.

“He has the cleanest kicking style,” Pasquale said. “He gets great lift on the ball. He just sweeps the ball off the grass. He is so consistent. If he kicked 50 balls, they would all land four or five feet apart.”

FUAD REVEIZ

Reveiz has come the longest to get here, but his most important travels were done before the age of 11. That was when his family immigrated to Miami from Columbia.

Reveiz said his mother, who worked in the U.S. embassy in Bogota, got a job with an airline in Miami, and the family followed.

A soccer player since his boyhood, Reveiz was introduced to football in Miami. By high school, he was playing soccer and kicking on the football team.

“I went to American school in Bogota, so it wasn’t so hard to communicate with kids,” Reveiz said, “but what was really hard for me back then was I had a really bad accent. I can still remember, and it brings a lot of pain to me.”

Reveiz was a popular player in Miami, with its large Columbian population, and reported on the Dolphins for Spanish television. But his career in Miami began to come to an end in 1988 when he tore a leg muscle during a mid-season game against the Chargers.

He injured the leg further by returning too soon.

“I remember my first game back was against the Jets, and if I had to try a field goal the fourth quarter, there would have been no way,” Reveiz said. “I finished the last four games in just unbelievable pain.”

When Reveiz was unable to compete for his job in the 1989 training camp, was placed on the injured reserve list for the season.

He said he choose the Chargers over Dallas and Philadelphia in part because he thought the team would be willing to make a choice on a kicker and stick with him.

“Place-kickers are human also, whether people want to believe that or not,” Reveiz said. “But you have got to feel you have some support. If you go to a place where the ax is right over your neck, you better not miss one, or you’re out of here.

“We are all going to be human. Quarterbacks are going to miss a throw, and receivers are going to drop it once in a while, but you can’t do it all the time. You have to create an environment. But how can you create an environment if two weeks down the road, you’re out of that city.”

TOM WHELIHAN

If Whelihan makes it big, it has the makings of a real Hollywood-style tale.

No, Whelihan wasn’t discovered in a drug-store soda fountain but in the press box at the Orange Bowl.

Whelihan, who kicked a 62-yard field goal as a junior at Missouri, had been out of pro football since he was cut by Green Bay during their 1988 training camp. When the Packers went through five kickers that season and never called him back, he became all but convinced his dream of a pro football career was over.

“For a month afterward, I couldn’t sleep,” Whelihan said. “Everything was taken away from me. You realize that it is over. A lot of feelings go through your body. You wonder if you really want to do this again or do you want to get on with your life or do I want to be one of these NFL junkies who are around seven or eight years and at 30 have nothing to show for their lives? All those feelings went through my mind, and I just said, ‘The heck with it.’ ”

Whelihan took a job as a substitute teacher and coach, but when he came across Colorado Coach Bill McCartney at a high school all-star game, the idea of his taking a job as a graduate assistant was discussed.

He spent a season at Colorado helping out, but it wasn’t until he was sent to run some film upstairs before the Buffaloes’ Orange Bowl game against Miami that his break came. There he ran into Bobby Beathard, then working as a television commentator with NBC.

“I ran into him and said, ‘Hey, I know who you are. You’re Bobby Beathard,’ ” Whelihan recalled. “I asked him what I needed to do get back into the NFL. And he was great about it. He told me everything I needed to do.”

When Beathard was named Charger general manager a few days later, Whelihan followed up with a call to the Chargers. When a scout stopped in Boulder to work out running back J.J. Flannigan--eventually drafted by the Chargers in the eighth round--he took a look at Whelihan. The next thing Whelihan knew, he had been offered a free-agent contract.

Whelihan has made an impact.

“Tom has a tremendously lively leg,” Pasquale said. “The ball explodes off his foot. After three kicks, his foot is as red as beet. He blasts that ball.”

Whether that is enough to convince the Chargers to keep him will be played out over the next few weeks. But for now, Whelihan, like the others, is content to know that the job is open.

“You have to realize there are only 28 jobs like this in the world and 75 to 80% of them are sewn up every year,” Whelihan said. “Then you have to realize a couple jobs may be open if the guy has a bad preseason. I really don’t recall many places where they have no one coming back, and they don’t know who the kicker is. It is a big-time golden opportunity.”

Charger Notes

No practice will be held at UCSD today, because the Chargers will scrimmage and drill with the Rams at 7 tonight at Capistrano Valley High School. Mostly rookies and free agents will participate, because neither team has all its veterans in camp. Ram veterans are to report today, Charger veterans Friday. Coach Dan Henning said he expected to hold out several veteran players from the scrimmage, including quarterbacks Billy Joe Tolliver and David Archer, H-back Craig McEwen and running back Marion Butts. Tight end Arthur Cox (heal bruise) also will be kept out.