He Can’t Lose

At the edge of his chair, on the outskirts of credulity, Doug Blevins will sit.

If the Super Bowl comes down to a final kick today, few hearts will leap like the one belonging to the kicking guru who will not move.

The field goal could be attempted by Adam Vinatieri of the New England Patriots, a guy who once slept in his car in Blevins’ driveway for a chance to learn from him.

The field goal could be attempted by David Akers of the Philadelphia Eagles, the guy who once waited tables in Blevins’ neighborhood just to work with him.

If the kick is good, if one of his guys wins a championship, Blevins will want to raise both hands above his head. But he can’t. So he will cry. And when you think about it, wouldn’t you?

The moving force in this Super Bowl could be a guy who has never walked.

“Truly amazing,” Vinatieri said.

The key motivator in this Super Bowl could be a guy who cannot clap.

“Talk about unbelievable,” Akers said.

The game-winning kick in this Super Bowl could be created by a man who has never, even in his wildest dreams, kicked.

“So?” Blevins said.

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Before describing who Doug Blevins is, we should start with a story about who he is not.

It was 1997, word of Blevins and his genius had reached the Miami Dolphins, where Coach Jimmy Johnson was looking for a kicking coach.

A glowing letter of recommendation arrived from the New York Jets, where Blevins had worked as a full-time consultant. It was enough for Johnson, who hired him on the spot and immediately ordered him to Miami.

Without really knowing Doug Blevins.

When Johnson saw Blevins, who has cerebral palsy, sitting outside his office door on a Monday morning -- this short, stocky guy sitting in a wheelchair with a curled-up hand -- he thought he was a disabled fan.

Johnson gave him a cap, a pennant and asked his secretary to take this poor young man on a tour of the facility.

“I have to go now, I need to meet my kicking coach,” Johnson told Blevins.

“I am your kicking coach,” Blevins said.

“Stop joking,” Johnson said.

“I’m not joking,” Blevins said.

A mild argument ensued until Blevins showed identification and Johnson finally invited him through the door.

“But not before making me give back all my souvenir stuff,” Blevins said with a laugh.

Welcome to his world, the biggest, baddest world in professional sports, where nobody wants to believe a coach can conquer a football field without ever stepping on it, or that a man can learn to kick 50 yards from a teacher who cannot take one unaided step.

“I’ve accepted the fact, when it comes to the handicapped, people are dumb,” said Blevins, 41, during a training session in Vero Beach last week. “They question your mental capacity. They think you are a fluke. They think anything you do is a public relations stunt.”

He speaks in the salty Southern accent of a football coach. He issues curse-peppered platitudes like a football coach. He waves his usable right hand like a football coach.

He even has endorsement deals like a football coach, with his Pride Jazzy wheelchair and his Viewpoint Mobility-equipped van.

“I’m the Michael Jordan of handicapped products,” he said with a grin. “I mean, I am a football coach.”

The numbers support it, as he has placed about a dozen kickers in the NFL, many more in NFL Europe, and currently works with four or five a month on an individual consulting basis.

He has worked for the Jets, Dolphins, Patriots and, most recently, the Minnesota Vikings.

He has worked for not only one of the best coaches in NFL history in Johnson, but also for the best coach in college football.

“Doug is the real deal,” said USC’s Pete Carroll, who was the head coach during Blevins’ season with the Jets. “He sees things that other guys don’t see. Kickers respond to him. He understands them.”

By now in the story, the disbelieving reader is carefully asking, how?

How did a disabled kid from a small town in Virginia become this? How can a kid who wasn’t even allowed to enter a mainstream school until fifth grade become a football coach so respected, all-world Vinatieri agreed to be his son’s godfather, and All-Pro Akers credits him for his toughness?

Flash back to a kid from Abingdon, Va., who suffered a crushed kneecap because he insisted on playing football -- tackle football -- with his crutches.

Said his mother, Linda LaFon: “The doctors told us that while some cerebral palsy patients have mental problems, he wasn’t one of them. He was very bright. So we built on that.”

That still didn’t prevent children from teasing him, nor did it prevent him from fighting back, and he once pounded on a bully with his crutches.

Officials thought he looked too handicapped to attend a regular school, so he was banned from the classroom until the fifth grade, when, one day, his mother carried him to school, rolled him into a classroom, and refused to roll him out.

“I just said, ‘That’s it, this child belongs in a school, and he’s not leaving,’ ” she said. “They never stopped me.”

Blevins fed off his mother’s energy, devoting himself to his favorite sport of football. Because he couldn’t play, he would watch and dissect games in a bedroom filled with NFL trash cans and toy helmets.

He began writing strategy letters to NFL coaches, never forgetting to mention that he was in a wheelchair -- “I told them the whole deal,” he said, grinning -- and they always wrote him back.

A couple of years ago Hollywood nearly made a movie about him, but this childhood period didn’t jibe with the script.

“They wanted to show me as a 10-year-old boy crying because I thought I couldn’t fulfill my dream,” he said. “I told them, you’ve got the wrong movie.”

In high school, after reading and studying countless letters and books and videos about blocking and tackling and passing, he had a realization.

“Nobody was talking about kicking,” he said. “You look at the special teams coaches in the league, hardly any of them were kickers.”

Because he figured he would need to develop one specialty to have any chance of becoming an NFL coach, a kicking guru was born.

He coached at, and graduated from, East Tennessee State, then worked at Southwest Virginia Community College. Then one of his colleagues there put in a call to a friend at the New York Jets, and, in 1994, he was given a chance.

“To be honest, I was very curious to see how he could pull it off,” Carroll said. “But the only question I had for him was, will the ball go through the uprights? And it did.”

Nick Lowery, who had been recently acquired from the Kansas City Chiefs, improved eight percentage points from the previous season, connecting on 20 of 23 field-goal attempts.

In Blevins’ six seasons in Miami, Olindo Mare connected on more than 80% of his kicks four times, twice reaching 90%.

For once, a kicker had a coach who studied only him, who watched him so closely he could predict the outcome of a kick from the sound of contact, who dissected everything from steps to leg swings.

“Doug gets into all the details of kicking,” Akers said. “He breaks it down so you can understand it, makes you look at things in different ways.”

Even while surviving in different ways.

Working the sidelines, Blevins has been knocked silly with a kick that he wasn’t fast enough to avoid.

He once looked silly when a rainstorm caused an electrical short in his wheelchair and caused him to spin in circles.

And he can’t tell you how many times he has flown home from games on the team plane still wearing soaking wet or mud-caked coaching clothes. Given his condition, it takes him nearly an hour to shower and change clothes, and he often doesn’t have time.

But then comes Super Sunday, and it will again be worth it, Blevins watching two of his products in football’s ultimate thing, remembering the first time he met either one of them.

A decade ago, an unemployed former South Dakota State kicker had heard about him, and flew to a tiny Southern airport to meet with him.

“I get off the plane, and there he is, and I think it’s a joke,” Vinatieri said. “I had no idea that this kicking coach was in a wheelchair, no clue that he could not kick a football.”

Thus began a nearly yearlong tutorship that led to Vinatieri’s NFL career, which has included winning kicks in two of the last three Super Bowls.

You want to know how the guy does so well under pressure? Maybe look back at how Blevins would beep his wheelchair horn at odd times during Vinatieri’s approach, or enlist someone to pepper him with foam footballs during his follow-through.

Sometimes he would turn on golf cart lights and order Vinatieri to kick in the dark. Other times he -- you guessed it -- made him kick during snowstorms.

Said Blevins: “We were quite a sight out there, him trying to clear a path for my wheelchair, then me rolling over the snow to flatten a path for his kick.”

Said Vinatieri: “He’s a middle linebacker in a handicapped body.”

It figures that, while he uses a motorized wheelchair that he works with his good right hand, Blevins refuses to hang a handicapped placard on his car. He will park five blocks away in the rain to avoid what he considers a stigma.

“We need to save those parking spaces for people who need it more,” he said.

His van’s license plate, or his decision to even use it, sums up this powerful push behind the Super Bowl legs.

“4TH & 10,” it reads.

A punt for most, a field goal for Doug Blevins.

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Active NFL kickers who have worked with Doug Blevins:

*--* 2004 STATISTICS PLAYER TEAM FGA FGM PCT. LONG ADAM VINATIERI New England 33 31 93.9 48 DAVID AKERS Philadelphia 32 27 84.4 51 OLINDO MARE Miami 16 12 75.0 51 JOE NEDNEY* Tennesee 31 25 80.6 53 KRIS BROWN Houston 24 17 70.8 50 AARON ELLING** Minnesota 25 18 72.0 51 SHAYNE GRAHAM Cincinnati 31 27 87.1 53

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* 2002 stats because he missed most of 2003, all of 2004 because of injury.

**2003 stats because he missed most of the 2004 season with an injury.

Sources: www.DougBlevinskicking.com, NFL.com