A Field Goal Day

His junior season at UCLA has been a voyage of kicking discovery, and with 6 minutes 27 seconds to play in the second quarter Saturday, Chris Sailer learned something else about football.

Mainly, that he was supposed to be nervous.

Oregon called time out to let him think about trying a 40-yard field goal into a stiff wind.

“It’s the first time anybody’s ever called time out to ‘ice’ me,” Sailer says. “It really didn’t bother me. I get more nervous after I’ve kicked than before, because of the adrenaline, I guess.”

What the timeout did was allow Sailer, UCLA’s kicker, and Joey Strycula, his hand-picked holder, to catch up socially.

“Me and Joey just talk when we go into the game, talk about different things,” Sailer says. “We had some time on our hands, so we talked about the Northwestern game we had seen on TV that morning. A guy had kicked a 52-yarder.”

When there is less time, they often fall back on man’s favorite pastime: talking about women.

Un-iced, Sailer calmly kicked the 40-yard field goal to close UCLA’s deficit to a point at 21-20 in a game the Bruins eventually won, 39-31.

“I kind of liked it, actually,” Sailer says of the delay. “It gave me time to make sure everything was perfect.”

His 11th consecutive field goal was just that.

He kicked No. 12, from 35 yards out, in the fourth quarter. No. 13 was a school-record 56-yarder.

“I asked him before the game what he thought from both directions,” Coach Bob Toledo says. “He said he could kick one from 56 that way [with the wind].”

Actually, says Sailer, the conversation went like this:

“I told him that I could kick it when the ball got to the 30, which made it 47 yards into the wind. The other way, I said, ‘Coach, as far as you want to kick it.’ ”

The kick split the uprights, as had the previous 12, and actually was, in part, the product of failure.

His only failure, really.

That was in the season opener at Washington State, when he lined up from 46 yards out and pushed the ball right of the goal posts by a foot.

“The wind was coming across the field, and I made the mistake of judging the wind too much,” Sailer says. “I actually aimed toward the right post because of the wind and kicked it pretty much where I aimed.”

He learned that he has a right leg stronger than the wind.

“If I kick it down the middle, the wind can’t push it far enough to knock it out of the post,” he says.

And he learned that successful kickers can’t deal with yesterdays, only with tomorrows. With a 3.60 grade-point average, he can do simple math and understands that subtracting UCLA’s 34 points from Washington State’s 37 gives you a result of a field goal.

His field goal.

“It was actually a big miss because we ended up losing the game by three, but it happened and I knew I was going to get a lot more chances during the year to redeem myself,” he says. “I had to stay positive, but it wasn’t that big a job because I’ve got a lot of balls to kick in my life.”

The school record is 18 in a row, by John Lee, in 1985, and he preceded those with four in a row to finish off the ’84 season.

Sailer has 13 in a row and counting . . . but not by him.

“People ask me about the streak, so I know about it,” he says. “You can’t think about a streak, though. You figure you should make every kick, and I just take every kick as it comes.”

It comes too often for Toledo, for quarterback Cade McNown and for offensive coordinator Al Borges, who repeat, as if in a litany: “Too many field goals.”

To them, each is a sign of a failure by the offense.

But success is in the eye of the beholder.

“When the offense does something, gets the ball downfield that far, you feel like as a kicker it’s my job to show something for what the offense has done, to show some points,” Sailer says. “So whenever you miss a kick, you take the blame for it because you pretty much have wasted what the offense has done.”

There has been little waste. Sailer is third in the country in field goal kicking, with 2.17 a game, and eighth in scoring, with 10.83 points a game.

It was his aim when he assumed the job upon the graduation of Bjorn Merten. Sailer came to UCLA as a soccer player who had learned to kick a football well enough to earn a scholarship, and he took over the punting chores because he was better than anybody else at Spaulding Field.

Even after adding the kicking duties, he has averaged 41.4 yards a punt--slightly below his goal of 44 yards. He averaged 42.3 yards as a freshman punter, 41.6 yards as a sophomore, all the while wanting to add kicking to his resume and watching Merten kick field goals and Greg Andrasick kick off.

Sailer might have spent a year too long as a punting specialist.

“If we had him kicking off last year, it might have saved a couple of touchdowns,” Toledo says.

Opponents averaged 26.6 yards a kickoff return against the Bruins last season, and two were returned for scores.

Those memories strong, UCLA coaches chose to use more veterans and better athletes on coverage teams this season, but most times, they needn’t have bothered.

Sailer has kicked 30 of his 44 kickoffs into or through the end zone for touchbacks, one of them--against Tennessee--from the 20-yard-line after a safety. Those are more touchbacks than in the previous two seasons combined.

Sailer’s specialty is self-taught, because generally coaches know little about kicking. They coach the eight guys who protect the kicker, leaving the business of snapping to Chris Rubio, holding to Strycula, Rubio’s high-school teammate at Covina Charter Oak, and Sailer.

“The thing you do with a kicker is get a good one and try not to screw him up,” Toledo admits.

So far, it’s worked. Thirteen times in a row, but who’s counting?