Life’s a Kick : Viking Kicker Fuad Reveiz of Colombia Has Nothing but Praise for Adopted Homeland

Fuad Reveiz still hears the guy in the front row.

“The . . . is getting ready to kick,” the guy yells, using a racial slur.

Reveiz still hears his Minnesota Viking teammates from the back of the bus.

“Check the Colombian’s luggage,” they shout with glee.

Reveiz, the leading scorer in America’s favorite game, will repay America for its transgressions this Christmas.

His family of five will load food and gifts into the car and visit a teen-age mother and an infant daughter who have just been thrown out of their house.

Then they will stop at the home of three boys and a mother who cannot pay their phone bill.

A couple of days later, Reveiz will buy tickets for three dozen kids and escort them around the Metrodome field before the Vikings’ season finale against the San Francisco 49ers.

Fuad Reveiz will not curse America. He will praise America. Just as he has praised it every day since arriving in Miami from Bogota 20 years ago when he was 11.

He will trust that one day, the ignorance will end. A kicker with a current streak of 26 consecutive field goals will be known by all as simply a guy with a good leg.

Until then, he will show that being a true American has nothing to do with the color of your skin, your country of origin or the lilt of your voice.

“Sometimes people coming to this country, we get misguided,” he said. “We get sold the idea that America owes us something.”

He paused. “It is the other way around. This country opened its arms for me. It is my responsibility to make it better. There is nothing that is owed. There is much I need to repay.”

As Fuad Reveiz’s accomplishments are celebrated during the end of this NFL regular season and the playoffs, he stands as proof that not everyone plays professional football in hopes of smashing someone.

Sometimes, as strange as it may seem, a guy plays in hopes of thanking someone.

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During Reveiz’s current streak of 26 consecutive field goals--three short of the league record--he is approaching another mark of sorts.

Most consecutive field goals without raising an eyebrow.

His purple uniform not only engulfs his chunky 5-foot-11 frame, it also swallows his smile.

His expression--which is no expression--does not change until he is back in his wool slacks and sport coat, preparing to meet his family or his son’s soccer team or the numerous fans who have caught the hint that Reveiz is the most approachable pro athlete on the planet.

Only then can you see the brightness in the eyes of an immigrant who understands what is important.

And it’s not those 26 field goals.

“My father and mother brought us to this country with only a couple of suitcases--my father drove a forklift and now he owns his own business,” he said. “Building yourself up from nothing, building a family, that is real life.

“What I do on the field, it is only a game.”

After struggling through a solid but unspectacular career, Reveiz was reminded of that this summer during the World Cup soccer tournament.

One morning while working in the Orlando venue for the Spanish-language network Univision, he was shocked by what he heard on his car radio.

Andres Escobar of the Colombia soccer team had been murdered by countrymen because he had accidentally scored a goal for the United States in Colombia’s 2-1 loss two days earlier.

Reveiz thought, “That could have been me.”

He had grown up kicking a ragball on the streets of Bogota. His leg was so strong he had kicked a 60-yard field goal at a Miami high school.

“Soccer was the only thing I knew,” he said. “If I stayed in Colombia, that is the only thing I play.”

Then he thought he would never again worry about a silly blocked kick.

“I immediately prayed for that guy’s family,” he said. “I felt such pity for all those people down there who are facing such pressure. And I remembered the bottom line. What I do is just a game. That took a lot of the pressure off me.”

It has showed. With one game remaining during a season in which field-goal kickers were supposed to become irrelevant:

--He has a league-leading 125 points, three field goals more than his previous career high.

--He hasn’t missed a kick in the last two months, and has made 32 of 37 attempts overall.

--He has missed only three field-goal attempts of 40 yards or shorter in the last five years.

--He has beaten the Green Bay Packers with game-tying and overtime field goals. He has won two other games, against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Buffalo Bills, with five field goals in each.

“Fuad has been in a zone,” said Gary Zauner, Viking special teams coach. “It’s like every situation has been the right situation for him. Every kick, the right kick.

“Not one thing bothers him or seems to worry him. He’s like a great surgeon. No emotion.”

Reveiz saves that for stories about arriving in this country and seeing, for the first time, Coca-Cola in cans.

“It was like, ‘Wow! How could this be?’ ” Reveiz recalled. “Everything was so big, so different.”

And so out of reach. For his first five years, while his father was working toward owning a freight business and the family lived in tiny apartments and rented homes, Reveiz and his two brothers shared a room.

Part of the registration fee for his first soccer league was put up by a coach. Fuad was never certain that his family owned more than those suitcases.

But he saw enough to make him want to stay.

“In this country, everybody has a chance,” he said.

At 22, in a ceremony that was filmed for a United Way commercial, he became a U.S. citizen. He was a lowly rookie for the Miami Dolphins, but even Coach Don Shula publicly congratulated him.

Not that being an immigrant ever became easier.

Despite all the jokes about foreign-born kickers, Reveiz has had increasingly fewer compatriots. Today, he says, the only opposing coach or player he can address in Spanish after games is the Rams’ Tony Zendejas.

Several NFL players and coaches have Latin American roots, like punter Rich Camarillo, but they no longer speak the language well.

“There used to be a little club of guys like Raul Allegre, Efren Herrerra, Max Zendejas, Fuad . . . “ said Samm Pena, producer of “Super Show Deportiva,” a new Spanish-language NFL news show. “If anybody understood each other, it was those guys. But now almost all of them are out of the league except Fuad. That’s got to be a little hard.”

Five years ago, Reveiz became even more isolated by signing with Minnesota.

“I tripled the Hispanic population,” he says with a laugh.

Reveiz has found comfort in visiting classrooms like those at the Adams Spanish Immersion School in St. Paul, where the children are taught in Spanish.

“I didn’t have any idea who he was, but after he was here a few minutes, he and my third-graders couldn’t stop talking,” said Concha Fernandez del Rey, a teacher from Spain. “You say he’s doing good this year? I would imagine. People who put their heart into what they do are good at anything.”

The cultures mix when Reveiz spends time at a police substation in nearby Brooklyn Center, a storefront that provides local children with a safe haven in the middle of a crime-ridden area. He recently bought a big-screen TV for the station so his young fans can watch him kick.

“The other day he was here speaking Spanish to these two little girls who were really excited that they could understand him,” said Sgt. Frank Roth of the Brooklyn Center force. “We’ve dealt with the athletes from all the pro teams here, and none is more genuine. Most of the guys won’t show up unless they hear a little ka-ching . Fuad comes for nothing.”

Leave it to the little guy from Colombia to lecture his fellow pros on American ideals.

“These days, everybody is saying that pro athletes should not be role models,” Reveiz said. “I’m saying, that is absolutely wrong. Sure, your role models should be your mom and dad, but kids today react to so many other things. One of those things is us.”

There is a reason Reveiz behaves so calmly on the field. He knows who is watching.

“Today, kids think it is cool to taunt your opponent, to insult him, to even insult your coaches,” Reveiz said. “I am saying, that is not cool. That is not how it works. That is not how you build a life for yourself.”

What is cool is marble cake. The children at the Brooklyn Center substation baked one for him the other day. “Congratulations Fuad, You’re Our Pro Bowler,” read the script on the icing.

The next day it was announced that he had made the real Pro Bowl. But he couldn’t stop talking about that cake.