A Missed Kick Taught Todd Peterson That His Job Is Not Who He Is

Todd Peterson came back to the football dorm late on a Saturday night and made the mistake of pressing play.

Peterson, then a college kicker at Georgia and later an NFL kicker for 13 seasons, had just missed a 24-yard field goal against Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It was the national television game of the week, his team's top ranked offense against Alabama's top ranked defense, still scoreless in the third quarter. The kick, Peterson said, "probably would have won the game."

In his room, he stood in front of his answering machine, the boxy recorder that saved phone messages in those days. He later said he pressed the button because he was insecure and hoping his parents, his grandparents, or his girlfriend had called. The first message was not from any of them. It was so harsh that Peterson still will not repeat it.

In his late teens and early 20s, Peterson understood what that message meant. If people thought he was only what he did, and what he did that night was miss, then he was in trouble. That lesson would carry him through more than a decade in professional football.

He had started learning it earlier, after high school, when he accepted an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, the military school that trains officers for the Navy and Marines. His mother, who came from an academic family, told him he could not pass it up. His father was an Air Force officer.

For plebe summer, the intense first training period for freshmen, Peterson roomed with three classmates. One had a perfect 1,600 score on the SAT college entrance exam, one had a perfect 800 in math, and the third was a nationally honored lacrosse player. Peterson, a straight-A student and academic All-American himself, suddenly felt ordinary.

He realized that trying to outdo everyone was a losing game because, as he put it, "there's always going to be somebody bigger, faster, smarter, stronger." He called that discovery "humbling" and, in fact, "humiliating." His identity, he concluded, had to rest on something other than performance, connections, money, or work, because those things, he said, are "a house of cards" that "will crumble."

Football proved the point. As a junior, he lost his starting job after the Alabama miss. He got it back as a senior only because the player who replaced him came down with mono and the walk-on who tried next missed a short kick. Peterson said he then had a great senior year, making more than 80 percent of his kicks, and was drafted into the NFL.

Even that felt unlikely. Georgia had seven players drafted that year. The head coach did not know he had been picked, and did not announce him at the banquet. Peterson calls that 13-year career "a great picture of grace," favor he did not earn and did not deserve.