Zendejas Gets His Kicks From Perfection : Pro football: Ram can become the first to go through a season without missing a field-goal try.

It might be the quietest quest for football history ever undertaken.

Although muffled by the Rams’ dreadful season, Tony Zendejas has been staging a weekly assault on NFL kicking records.

All he has to do is stay perfect at a position where it has never been done and his name goes onto the honor roll. But if you haven’t been paying attention, you might not even know he was there.

According to the Elias Statistical Bureau, no NFL kicker has gone a full season without missing a field-goal try in a minimum of 15 attempts.

Zendejas, whose two-for-two outing last Sunday raised his total to 14 without a miss, has inched himself into position to be the first.

With three games to go--the final two in domes--and his kicking as crisp as ever, Zendejas acknowledges that he has a chance at making history.

“I think there’s a good shot of doing it,” Zendejas said Wednesday. “But you never know what can go wrong. If things keep going the way they are, I think I have a decent shot at it.

“It’s very difficult to do. You’ve got to be in the right situation. You’ve got to be pretty lucky--you don’t try any field goals before the half, no 60-yarders or stuff like that where you don’t have a chance to make or you’re kicking off the mud or the snow, long field goals. That kills the percentage. It has a lot to do with luck.”

With the Ram offense in a stall all season, Zendejas has been asked to try only one 50-yarder and one 40-yarder. He has tried for three or more field goals in a game only twice, and he hasn’t attempted field goals in four games.

He hasn’t won any last-second games, hasn’t had many fourth-quarter pressure kicks to try to put the Rams ahead, mainly because the Rams have usually trailed by a lot more than three points in the fourth quarter.

Ram Coach John Robinson suggests that Zendejas’ main contribution has been his consistently deep kickoffs, which have enabled the coverage team to hold returners to an average of 17 yards a kick--almost four yards fewer than the average Mike Lansford had for the Rams last season.

But any way it’s viewed, 14 for 14 is perfect, a major departure from the 15-for-24 collapse of Lansford last season--and three weeks away from something truly special.

The league’s best mark for 15 or more tries is 20 for 21, by Mark Moseley of the Washington Redskins in 1982 and Eddie Murray of the Detroit Lions, who did it twice, in 1988 and ’89.

So, as the Rams wind down their season of blatant imperfection, Zendejas, a Plan B signee in the off-season to replace Lansford, is their only example of success.

“I didn’t know about it until Eddie Murray mentioned it to me (two weeks ago),” Zendejas said. “He said, ‘Hey, man, stop, or you’re going to break my record.’

“That would be great if that happened.”

But the season record is not the only one that Zendejas’ dance with perfection has brought within a few games’ reach.

He has been true on 20 consecutive field-goal tries dating to last season with the Houston Oilers. That puts him only four away from tying the record of 24 field goals without a miss set by Chicago’s Kevin Butler in 1988 and ’89.

Would there come a moment in the final three weeks when Zendejas might welcome the coaching staff’s protecting him by not asking him to try a difficult kick?

“I don’t even think that they know about it, and I don’t really care if they do or not,” Zendejas said. “You start thinking, ‘I don’t want to kick a 55-yarder, it’ll mess up my record,’ then I am going to mess it up. The best thing is to stay positive and kick whatever they give you.”

After he broke his left leg and missed the final nine games of 1990, Zendejas was left unprotected last spring despite a consistent six seasons with the Oilers.

His replacement in Houston this year, Ian Howfield, was waived before Zendejas had missed any sort of kick with the Rams--he missed an extra-point try Nov. 10 against the Kansas City Chiefs.

In his last year with Houston, Zendejas was seven for 12, and the Oilers considered him at the end of his usefulness.

Zendejas, 31, said his stumble came because of all the changes the Oilers made in snapping and holding duties, and his revitalization with the Rams is largely because of the steadiness of his snapper, Mike McDonald, and his holder, Mike Pagel.

“I feel very good, very comfortable,” Zendejas said. “The whole key is that I’ve never had this good a snapper or a holder as I do now. People don’t believe it, but you ask any kicker in the league, you take away one of those guys from him, and it’s a big difference.

“It’s like in golf. If you’re hitting a moving golf ball, you’re not going to hit it good. It’s the same thing that happens when you don’t have a good holder or good snapper. You’re always hitting a moving ball.

“With Mike McDonald and Mike Pagel, I mean, that ball’s standing still. All I have to do is kick it.”

Jerry Glanville, Zendejas’ coach at Houston and current coach of the Atlanta Falcons, the Rams’ opponents Sunday at Anaheim Stadium, makes it clear that he believes Zendejas is one of the top clutch kickers in the league.

“He’s a guy who’s going to win games for you, bottom line,” Glanville said. “People tell me percentages, and they tell me this or that; all I ever do is check when we kick the ball and win the game on the last play, and he did that a lot more.

“He made me look a lot smarter than I would have looked if I didn’t have him. Because he won a lot of games on the last kick and we’d go home, and five days later you’ve got a win and nobody remembers it was the kicker that won the game, they think the coach actually had something to do with it.”