A Kicker Is Nothing Without a Positive Attitude

This is a rehearsal:

The center is snapping the ball; I’m following it through the air.

The holder has it; he’s putting it down.

I’m striding into it; I can feel my foot strike the ball. It feels good. The ball is going through the uprights.

It’s at that point David Treadwell permits his mind to see the truth: Is it just practice or is it the real thing? Look at the scoreboard: Is this San Francisco I see or only Asbury Park?

“I put it through my mind so often that when I line up I’m thinking, I’ve been here before,” Treadwell said. “You do it often enough and you can fool your mind. Your mind doesn’t know what’s reality and what’s not.’

Treadwell is a place-kicker, one of the trio of legs that Dan Reeves brought in as Jersey Broncos and who have become significant parts of the New York Giants’ rise from their own ashes. They’ve already gone far beyond expectations and now they’re going to San Francisco.

And the last time they played a game of any magnitude in San Francisco has its place in the storied history of the Giants. Small children and incoming place-kickers know it well.

“Matt Bahr had five field goals, the Giants won and went to the Super Bowl,” Treadwell said.

Just a minute. Bahr’s five field goals were all the points the Giants had, and they won, 15-13. Not only that, but the last moment ticked off while Bahr’s game-winning kick was in the air. Jan. 20, 1991.

Not only that, but Bahr’s field goal with 7:20 remaining won the Super Bowl and Scott Norwood didn’t win the Super Bowl for the Buffalo Bills as the clock ran out.

“It shouldn’t be his stigma,” Treadwell said. “Scott Norwood didn’t lose the Super Bowl, the Bills lost the Super Bowl. Actually, it should be, ‘The Giants won the Super Bowl.’

“People put too much emphasis on the negative. You watch the news shows and it’s all murders and disasters. Aren’t there any shows about how good things happen?”

He sees Joe Carter’s success and no failure for Mitch Williams. He sees Bahr’s success and not Norwood’s failure. There are heroes and no goats in his programming.

It’s his kind of mind control--call it the power of positive thinking or psychocybernetics, or whatever. “It’s my way of coping,” he said. He tries to convince himself that there’s pressure on every kick and that the kick to win the game is no different than the ones he’s made in his mind.

Is the putt on the 18th at Augusta just like any other? “Not for me, but it is for them,” Brad Daluiso said. “Then, I wouldn’t expect Arnold Palmer to make a field goal at the end of the game, either.”

Daluiso is the one with the really strong leg. He puts kickoffs out of the end zone. He tries outrageous field goals, like the 54-yarder that beat the Phoenix Cardinals.

Mike Horan is the punter who replaced Sean Landeta and has cornered coffin corner.

Treadwell has converted 25 of 31 field-goal attempts this season. He missed a 38-yarder against the Jets; he made a 31-yarder with 10 seconds remaining to force Dallas to overtime on the last game of the regular-season schedule.

In the interval before the overtime, he and Daluiso went onto the field to test their range. “I was thinking, ‘Am I going to get a shot to do my job?’ ” Treadwell said.

Athletes covet fantasy all their lives. “I don’t do that,” Treadwell said. “I constantly put pressure on myself: I know if I don’t make those other field goals, I don’t keep my job.”

Treadwell is the kicker Reeves had in mind when he cut Bahr, to the dismay of a number of Giants who remembered. “Matt understood,” Treadwell said. “It can be a cruel business. I was disappointed when I had to leave Denver, too.”

Treadwell is 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, a reed among the sequoias in the locker room. He sees himself as a football player, not as “a kicker” who goes off to private practice and mystic routines in a tradition founded on left-footed Cypriot soccer-style kickers who handpainted neckties and--legend says--crowed: “I keek a touchdown.”

“I think I’m a football player; I’m part of the team,” Treadwell said. “I think it’s a different approach to the game. For the majority, it’s a physical approach. As a kicker, it’s mental. That doesn’t mean I’m not as involved in the game; it doesn’t mean I don’t want to win as much.

“I have to maintain a level of composure. I don’t crack heads. I’d love to. I’d love to play another position--quarterback or defensive back. My size doesn’t allow it.”

Besides, they’re all soccer-style kickers these days, and Treadwell, like most of them, played soccer in an earlier life.