Zak Keefer | IndyStar

Clark Wade/IndyStar

AP

Twenty-two years hung on 40 yards that day, wind against him, rain against him, coach ready to cut him, career kaput if the kid from South Dakota couldn’t schlep into the muck at old Foxboro Stadium, a field “that resembled a World War I no-man’s land,” according to the local paper, save his job and win the game. He’d scraped for years for this kind of moment, kicked halfway across the globe and slept in the back of his truck and waited tables and survived six grueling weeks of Bill Parcells’ mind games to earn it, and here it was. Forty yards. Through the wind and the rain and the muck, game on the line, job on the line, the next 22 years on the line.

There’s no Adam Vinatieri without this moment, no future staple of “The Super Bowl’s Greatest Moments,” no second-fattest point total in league history, no GOAT talk, no age-defying football demigod kicking at a 94 percent clip at the ripe ole age of 44. Back then, a month into his rookie season in 1996, Vinatieri was an undrafted, unknown, unproven 23-year-old slogging through the kind of start to an NFL career that gets you fired and keeps you fired. He’d missed eight of 12 kicks as a college senior. He’d miss four of his first seven in the pros. Three weeks in, his employment hung by the thinnest of threads, and Parcells, the New England Patriots’ militant coach, sought appropriate measure of the kid’s mettle.

{{props.notification}} {{props.tag}} {{props.expression}} {{props.linkSubscribe.text}} {{#modules.acquisition.inline}}{{/modules.acquisition.inline}} ... Our reporting. Your stories. Get unlimited digital access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

Our best deal of 2018: Get a year's subscription for just $9.99.

In other words: He wanted to know if Vinatieri was clutch.

So he found out. In a Week 3 rout of the Arizona Cardinals, Parcells trotted out Vinatieri for a 31-yarder with 36 seconds left. The kick meant nothing towards the final score but everything for the rookie who was one miss shy of a pink slip. He drilled it. His job was safe. For seven days.

“Kicking is a results-oriented business,” Parcells gruffed to the media that week. “He’s week-to-week,” he said of Vinatieri.

How’s that for a vote of confidence?

“I knew what the hell that meant,” Vinatieri says now. Translation: Miss another big one, kid, and you’re history.

AP

And not just from the Patriots – from football. Teams aren’t lining up to sign a kicker they can’t trust, a rookie with six misses (plus two extra points!) his first month on the job. Vinatieri, back then, was a nobody, a college kicker with bad stats who’d trekked across the Atlantic to play in some outfit called the World League of American Football. From there, he landed in Abingdon, Va., fixed his mechanics at the behest of a kicking guru who shouted commands at him from a wheelchair, trained at a local high school, waited tables to pay the bills and beat out Bill Parcells’ favorite kicker ever during Patriots’ training camp.

Then he missed not once, not twice, but three times in a seven-point loss to the Bills in Week 2. Parcells was irate. Vinatieri’s teammates were irate. The kid was all but finished.

It all came down to 40 yards of wind and rain and muck, in overtime of a Week 4 game against Jacksonville on a sloppy afternoon at Foxboro Stadium. Everyone knew what was riding on Vinatieri’s right leg that day: His job. No one knew the dominos that would fall from there. Miss, and there’s no 45-yard bullet through the blizzard in the Tuck Game, no Super Bowl winners, no 5-for-5 perfection on the road in Baltimore to push the Colts to the AFC title game, no 27 game-winners, no 547 makes across an impossible career that’s still, somehow, some way, humming two decades later, destined to get the kid who started 3-for-7 and was a few feet away from losing his job into Canton someday.

Legend has it that Parcells was blunt with the rookie before he took the field for the kick that saved his career.

“The story goes,” says longtime Cowboys personnel man and NFL.com contributor Gil Brandt, “that Parcells told him if he missed it, there was no reason for him to come back to the locker room.”

Parcells hears this and laughs.

“I don’t think I’d ever tell a kicker during a game that if he missed it, he was done,” the Hall of Fame coach said. “But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking it.”

If he missed it ...

Matt Kryger/IndyStar

It’s probably the last kick of his career. Vinatieri cleans out his locker the next day, waits for a call that never comes, moves on from football. He sticks with his plan. He goes to medical school. Becomes a heart surgeon. Watches the Super Bowl from home each winter, wondering if not for a disastrous start if he would’ve lasted in this league, if he would’ve had the late-game resolve to bury a kick with a world championship hanging in the balance.

What about the Patriots? The Colts? How much did a single kick in September 1996 impact the future fates of two franchises? Do Tom Brady and Bill Belichick have five rings around their fingers without Vinatieri’s 45-yarder in the snow in the epic 2002 divisional playoff game against the Raiders? Without his 48-yarder with no time left in Super Bowl XXXVI? Without his 41-yarder with four seconds left in the big game two years later?

Probably not. Vinatieri made his name on those kicks. The Patriots started a dynasty.

“None of the other stuff ever matters if you don’t turn that first season around,” Vinatieri says now. “At the time, I’ll be honest, I had no idea making a kick against Jacksonville was that big. I was just trying to keep my job for another week. Who knew 21 years later we’d still be talking about it?”

(Vinatieri took the family back to the Boston area this past summer. For perspective on how long he’s been in Indianapolis, consider: After a group of Patriots fans stopped him for an autograph on the street, one of his sons was confused. “Wait. You used to play for the Patriots?” he asked his dad.)

Coach Parcells would say some stuff that would tick you off so bad you’d want to just cuss right back at him. Tom Tupa, former teammate of Adam Vinatieri

Back in college, back at South Dakota State, Vinatieri battled bad weather, bad holders, bad snappers and bad kicks. Across four seasons he made only one more field goal (27) than he missed (26), including a ghastly 4-for-12 line his senior year. At one point, the head coach – whom Vinatieri says he never got along with after the coach reneged on a promise to increase the kicker’s scholarship – benched him in favor of a defensive lineman named Jim Remme whose toe-bashing method was good enough to go 9-for-10 on extra points. That’s right: The greatest kicker in NFL history was benched in college for a straight-line kicking defensive lineman.

Brandt remembers sending a Cowboys scout up to Brookings to check in on the South Dakota State kicker whose mediocre stats didn’t tell the whole story. Vinatieri was learning how to kick in bad weather. It’d serve him well later in his career.

“The scout comes back and says, ‘You’ll never believe this, but they benched the kicker for a defensive lineman,’” Brandt remembers. “I couldn’t believe it.”

And even after landing in New England and somehow winning the Patriots’ job, Vinatieri’s hopes were modest.

“I wanted to last maybe three, four years,” he says. “I just wanted a head start to life, a little money in my pocket, maybe save enough to help pay for medical school. I don’t think anybody starts their career and thinks they’re going to play for 20 years.”

Not during that first camp. Parcells made Vinatieri’s life miserable, taxing him and testing him, exhausting him physically and mentally. He wanted to see if the kid could take it. The coach would stand on the spot he was supposed to kick from, trampling the grass with his shoes. “Oh, sorry, am I in your way?” he’d ask with a chuckle. The coach would have the entire team watch Vinatieri’s final kick of the afternoon; make it and they’d all head to the showers, miss and they’d all line up for more sprints. It’s a good way to lose friends if you’re a rookie kicker.

“Coach Parcells would say some stuff that would tick you off so bad you’d want to just cuss right back at him,” remembers Tom Tupa, the Patriots’ punter that season. “Adam never flinched. Not once.”

Back then, an NFL training camp was a twice-a-day, every-day, month-long grind. Vinatieri punted and booted field goals “until my leg felt like it was ready to fall off,” he remembers, then he did it some more. Each night, he’d retrace his makes and misses and tally them against the man whose job he sought to steal. That was Matt Bahr, a longtime Parcells favorite.

And across four long weeks, Vinatieri turned Parcells into a believer. There was some pluck to this kid from South Dakota, enough that when final cuts rolled around, Bahr earned a pink slip, Vinatieri a job – shaky as it was. “Don’t go talking to the media saying you beat out Matt Bahr,” Parcells warned him. So Vinatieri listened. He kept his mouth shut.

Parcells left him with one last thing before the regular season commenced, and the kicks really started to matter.

“I’m going to give you an opportunity to show me what you’ve got,” he told him. “And either you’re going to shine, or you’re going to pack your s--- and get out of here.”

Since he made it ...

Matt Kryger/IndyStar

He nearly packed his s--- before September was over.

“He could be the hero or he could be among the unemployed,” The Boston Herald wrote of Vinatieri’s fateful kick against the Jaguars in overtime of Week 4. “Vinatieri knew that if he didn’t convert the 40-yarder, his Patriot career was in for a sudden end. Matt Bahr, of course, is only a phone call away.”

Vinatieri’s teammates were more descriptive. Said tackle Bruce Armstrong: “I can’t tell you how important that kick was for him. If he’d missed it, he might’ve been shaken mentally. But he certainly would’ve have been shaken physically.”

No pressure, kid.

Tupa, Vinatieri’s holder, doesn’t recall any sort of sideline threat, but said he wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if it happened.

“Not one bit,” Tupa said. “In other words: Don’t f---- this one up. That always puts you in a great frame of mind right before you run on the field.”

The Jaguars called timeout to toy with Vinatieri’s nerves. It ended up backfiring. Give the kid credit: He was resourceful. Vinatieri used the extra time to patch up the mucky field. Still, the weather did him no favors. “The wind was against him, the rain, even the very dirt, was against him,” The Herald wrote. “He was kicking from a patch of ground resembling a World War I no-man’s land.”

“They’d host concerts and soccer games there, and by midseason the field didn’t have much grass left,” Vinatieri remembers. “Holes everywhere. They’d just fill them with sand and paint it green to make it look like grass. Every other kicker would be like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

It was a nice kick, but tomorrow’s a new work week. Adam Vinatieri

Vinatieri locked in. Bad weather? He grew up in South Dakota. He’d kicked in the rain and the wind and the snow for years. He’d kicked with Bill Parcells’ glaring eyes fixed on him for a month during training camp. He knew pressure.

He’d been booed loudly after he botched an extra point earlier in the game, his second in two weeks, and a 44-yard field goal attempt, his fifth miss in four games. The fans were yelling for his head. This kick would save him or sink him. The game rested on Vinatieri’s 40-yarder. We know now his 22-year career did too.

Bill Parcells found out the answer to his question that day. Clutch? Damn right Adam Vinatieri was clutch.

He snuck it between the uprights and hoisted his arms in the air. He celebrated. He exhaled. It was the first-game winner he’d ever made.

“NO BOOT FOR NOW,” read the headline in the following day’s newspaper. “You could almost hear the whoosh of 60,000 sighs of relief when the officials’ arms went up in the air,” the story read.

Allowed in the locker room after the win, Vinatieri spoke of his emotions. Then he gathered himself. Parcells wasn’t done testing him.

“It was a nice kick," Vinatieri said, “but tomorrow’s a new work week.”

He’s made 595 kicks since, the second-most ever. He’s scored 2,442 points, the second-most ever. He’s played in more games than all but fourother men in history. He’s the only kicker to suit up in five Super Bowls. He’s won four. He’s been a part of more wins than anyone else.

And he’s not done. The clutch gene is still very much a part of Adam Vinatieri’s makeup. His 53-yarder in the fourth quarter in Houston on Sunday proved it. The Indianapolis Colts’ ageless, odds-defying wonder kicks on.

“Sometimes, you’re not sure with a rookie kicker,” Parcells says, looking back. “When he’s struggling, do you chalk it up to inexperience or just the simple fact that he’s not going to be able to do it? Fortunately for me, and for New England, we stayed on him. And boy did it pay off. I’m proud of him. He did it himself. He’s put his name in the conversation for the greatest kicker of all time, and we never would’ve thought that early on.”

Forty yards through the wind and the rain and the muck. Week 4 became Week 5, Week 5 became Week 6, Week 6 became 22 years. At the start, all he wanted to do was get a head start on life, save some money for medical school. He wound up becoming the greatest kicker in NFL history.

The lesson in all this?

Adam Vinatieri pauses. Thinks. Smiles.

“Chase your dream as long as they’ll let you,” he says.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.