UCLA kicker battles stereotypes
Posted: Oct.17, 2006, 10:45 am EDT
By Alan Abrahamson
NBCSports.com
LOS ANGELES -- When Justin Medlock trots onto the field, his gold UCLA helmet snug, the pressure is always on. But, he says, that's a good pressure. A fun pressure.
It's a pressure he can control -- unlike some of the other pressures in his life.
Out on the field, he said, thousands of fans screaming, the game sometimes depending on the swing of his leg, on the physics of tracing an arc with authority, there's a trick to dealing with all that pressure. Be smooth. Relax and be smooth. It's like swinging a golf club. Smooth.
Justin Medlock is a field goal kicker, one of the best in the United States, a college senior good enough to entertain realistic ambitions about kicking next year for a living, in the NFL. With UCLA playing this week at Notre Dame (Coverage on NBC begins at 2:30 p.m. ET), it is no secret in South Bend -- or elsewhere -- that Medlock's leg changes game plans.
Moreover, with UCLA down to a backup quarterback, sophomore Patrick Cowan, making only his second college start in the aftermath of a knee injury starter Ben Olson sustained against Arizona two weeks ago, Medlock's import to the UCLA offense figures to be even more emphatic.
Medlock has been named to the watch list for the Lou Groza award, given after the season to the nation's top kicker. The UCLA coaches consider him all but a sure thing for tries up to 50 yards. In his college career, he has made six field goals of more than 50 yards, more than any other UCLA kicker, including 51-yarders this year against Rice and Washington. In each of those games, he kicked four field goals.
In last Saturday's 30-20 UCLA loss at Oregon, Medlock made two field goals, the second a 48-yarder. Since pushing a 46-yarder wide left in the first quarter of UCLA's first game, a 31-10 blowout of Utah, Medlock hasn't missed; he has made 14 field goals in a row. He has made his last 100 extra-point attempts.
If he makes it in the NFL, Medlock would become only the seventh African-American kicker in league history. Though it might strain credulity in this day and age, with African-Americans having excelled at virtually every other position on the field and in the NFL's coaching ranks, it remains a fact: In the history of the NFL there have been only six black placekickers.
Medlock's entrée into the NFL will doubtless be marked, moreover, by questions about his character from scouts, draft gurus and others who don't know him well -- questions he brought on himself in the aftermath of a drunk-driving accident last spring just a few miles from the UCLA campus.
It is an axiom in football that the game is about taking the personal responsibility required to respond to adversity. Coaches thus like to say that football turns young men into men. For instance, the other team completes a long pass play, or sets up on a fourth-and-goal, or even scores. How do you answer?
"I'm the first one to be sorry about it," Medlock said about the accident, which took place last December, on Interstate 405, which as it winds through the west side of Los Angeles is called the San Diego Freeway.
The California Highway Patrol said a 1998 Toyota pickup truck driven by Medlock hit a call box on the freeway about 3 a.m. last Dec. 10. CHP officers found the truck with only a passenger inside, Hannah Jun, a member of the UCLA golf team. Medlock was later found walking on a street in Inglewood, Calif., about a mile and a half away.
Authorities said Jun's injuries included a fractured vertebra in her neck. She has recovered, and she and Medlock remain good friends. She declined a request for an interview.
"I had a mistake. One bad night. That's what happened," Medlock said, adding, "I accepted the consequences.
"I know people are going to have their doubts. I can't really say. Hopefully, they won't think I'm the bad person they heard about."
UCLA coach Karl Dorrell said, "Justin is a good young man who made a very serious mistake. I know that he was very sorry for any pain or embarrassment the accident caused to anyone involved, and I know he felt he let his teammates down.
"This season, he has done a fine job as one of our senior leaders and he appears much more focused and mature than in the past."
By all accounts -- mother, sister, friends, coaches, high school teachers, college professors -- Justin Medlock is the farthest thing from a bad guy.
His life has been shaped by the early death of his father and, as well, by a ferocious but quiet will to succeed, in class and on the football field.
It was in high school, at Mission San Jose High in Fremont, Calif., southeast of Oakland, that it became apparent Medlock, all-league as a sophomore and senior in soccer, had talent kicking the football, too. As a senior, he made four of six field goals; the only misses were from 47 and 50 yards. Eighteen of 20 kickoffs went for touchbacks; one punt traveled 73 yards.
It was also while Justin Medlock was in high school that his father, Robert, died, after a fight with cancer.
The son remembers the father weakening in the hospital and his mother, Tamara, calling, saying, get over here -- and not wanting to go, because there was a football game upcoming and he wanted to practice.
In the end, he went to the hospital -- and everything changed. "I looked at him and said, 'I'm being selfish over here, not going to the hospital. Somebody needs me more and I'm worrying about a game.' From that point on, I was just, you know, it's a giving attitude. My dad said you give and you take, you give and you receive -- the more you give the more you'll get out of life."
After his father's death, Justin became like a son to a Mission San Jose history teacher, Roxanne Ponsi. An auto accident would later claim Ponsi's son-in-law, leaving three children.
"Since then, Justin has stepped in and become a role model for them in so many ways," Ponsi wrote in a letter detailing Medlock's character. "He has helped them with sports and homework. He has been there as an older brother, giving them advice and encouragement. No one has asked him to do any of this ..."
She said in an interview, "He works harder than any kid I've ever seen. He's just amazing."
Before Medlock arrived at UCLA, he said, he heard the whispers. A black kicker?
Motivation, he said: "It doesn't matter whether you're black or white, Mexican, Asian, anything. It's like -- it doesn't matter. I'm out here and I can kick the ball and that's what it's about. It's not about what color you are."
Incredibly, in the NFL, it has -- over the years -- mattered. It may -- at least as far as kickers go -- still matter.
"The placekicker shortage probably resulted from the racist thinking that was once common in the NFL," said John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor whose books include 1997's Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race.
"It is likely that the racial mindset of the 1950s and 1960s categorized kicking as a skill position rather than as one of the 'athletic' ones that were regarded as better suited to black athletes," Hoberman said. "The center position, which requires 'thinking,' was also reserved for white players for many years.
"Once this pattern was established, the Law of the Clique set in. The -- white -- guys who hung out with the -- white -- guys who knew how to kick, and who knew the coaches who taught kicking, simply perpetuated the racial exclusivity of this little guild, just as some American labor unions used to do on a much larger scale."
Medlock said, "I don't think there's really a racial barrier. Look at Tiger Woods ... he used to go to the golf course and they wouldn't even let him on the golf course. So I think, for me, I don't think it's any harder than for anybody else."
Besides, he said, "You can't sit there and complain about it." All you can do, he said, is kick the ball, and kick it well: "You have to have that attitude that you're confident but not cocky. You're determined. And so you have to have the mind-set that you're serious about this."
When UCLA gets in field goal range -- which for him means once the ball is past midfield -- Medlock's helmet is on.
"The thing I tell myself before every time and go and kick in a game -- I look up, I look down, I look back up, I see my target, I'm ready. I tell myself, 'Be smooth.' It's not like, 'Make it.' It's not about that. It's like, 'Just be smooth.' And you know if you're smooth you know you're going to hit it right. And you know you're going to make it."
It's like golf, he said. Every Thursday, Medlock heads to Rancho Park, a municipal course a few miles from the UCLA campus, where he hits maybe 60, maybe 120 range balls. "I hit till I get that nice smooth stroke," he said, adding, "It's like I'm carrying that over to my kicking."
Everything, it seemed, was going smoothly for Medlock until last Dec. 10, a week after UCLA's loss to USC. Prosecutors originally charged Medlock with felony driving under the influence. The Los Angeles County D.A.'s office made the announcement while the Bruins were beating Northwestern in the Sun Bowl at El Paso, Texas; Medlock, who scored 89 points last season, didn't play.
A day after the accident, he had been suspended indefinitely.
In court, Medlock was represented by Milton Grimes -- well known in Los Angeles as police-beating victim Rodney King's attorney, a lawyer who gained further national acclaim as a legal analyst during O.J. Simpson's murder trial in the mid-1990s.
The felony case was dropped to a misdemeanor. Medlock pleaded guilty April 10 and was sentenced to three years of probation; ordered to pay fines and court costs of $1,220 and to attend an alcohol-education program.
Medlock was also ordered to do five days work on a California Dept. of Transportation road crew.
Medlock made his most recent appearance in court last Tuesday. A counselor said Medlock has completed most of the education program and called his attitude "consistently positive." The road work was done over the summer, according to court records.
A UCLA communication studies professor, John Kochian, in a letter written to court officials, called Medlock an individual of "concern and compassion," a "young man of obvious maturity, seriousness and strong personal character," blessed with a "calm and understanding demeanor."
Medlock had been a student in one of Kochian's classes and the professor said, "At no time did he ever request or expect special consideration or treatment as a result of his student-athlete status. As a matter of fact, he showed a particular disdain for individuals who are afforded special resources and privileges."
In July, Medlock was reinstated to the football team. "The first month after all the -- you know, the problems from back then, it was hard," Medlock said one recent afternoon at Spalding Field, UCLA's practice facility. "It was embarrassing to come around here. I think I embarrassed myself, embarrassed my family."
Because of the publicity the accident drew, he said, He said, "It was the only time I ever -- the only time I never wanted to be an athlete. I wished I had never played football. I would talk to my sister," an emergency room doctor in San Francisco, "for a couple weeks after and I was like, should I even play? Why go back and get booed by fans? What's the point, you know?"
Medlock drew a deep breath. He said, "And then I was talking to myself -- it's like, I love this game too much. Why would I quit? You know? I'm not a quitter. I wouldn't want anyone else to quit. I would want somebody to bounce back. These people out here," he said, sweeping an arm around the UCLA practice field, "they needed me.
"And I needed them."
