Marquette King remembers being astonished the first time he stepped onto an N.F.L. field. Even though it was only preseason, there seemed to be about a million more people in the stands than he had ever seen at his tiny alma mater, Fort Valley State University, in Georgia. Trying to remain calm, he kept his head down, and cast his eyes safely on the grass at his feet.

He jogged to the line of scrimmage, hoping to look like he belonged. He wasn’t just playing football, he was competing for a job. And even though he had experienced success at every stage of his career, had excelled at tryouts, had dominated pro-days, and impressed scouts who appraised him quietly from behind visors and sunglasses, he knew how merciless N.F.L. camps were for unproven rookies. You could have been the best at every place you played. You could sweat, and bleed, and run yourself ragged, giving every ounce and pushing far beyond your own limitations, and still, at the end of the day, an assistant might greet you at your locker with a sombre look and the words no hopeful wants to hear: “Come with me. And bring your playbook.”

King knew that if he failed to execute the next fifteen to twenty seconds of his life with absolute perfection, this could be his last chance to play professional football. As he had done countless times before, he lined up at his spot and prepared to yell out the snap count. But before he could open his mouth, a player on the opposing team, the Dallas Cowboys, took one look at him and shouted.

“A black punter?! It’s a fake! It’s a fake!”

The opposing players, equally eager to impress their coaches by seeming on top of every nuance of the game, scrambled into new positions, King told me, guarding against the possibility that this black guy, inexplicably lined up at the whitest of N.F.L. positions, was really some backup quarterback or receiver—a speedster who would fake a kick and instead run for the first down, catching their whole defense unaware. Clearly some trickery was afoot.

For King, it was a gift. He actually laughed out loud. Even black players didn’t believe that he was a punter. It wasn’t the first time he had been viewed with suspicion, and the comedy of the situation calmed his nerves. He called for the snap, took three precise steps, and dropped the ball perfectly toward his rising right leg. The ball, as it did nearly every time, rocketed into the air, nearly disappearing in the late afternoon sun. He was knocked to the ground as he finished his kick, but when he got back up, the ball was still in the air and his teammates were pounding him on the back.

Ask anyone who knows the N.F.L. well and they will tell you that the twenty-seven-year-old Oakland Raider Marquette King is one of the most impressive punters in professional football. Videos of his performances at kicking camps have almost mythic status among special-teams devotees. And he has increased his consistency each of the three seasons he’s played, gradually mastering a precision with his kicking to match his tremendous power.

“Marquette King has one of the purest, strongest legs in the league,” John Middlekauff, an Oakland sports-radio host and former N.F.L. scout, told me. Much of the positive reaction to King has centered on his obvious strength. The performance of punters is judged by two principal measurements: distance and hang time. Hang time is crucial, because the longer a ball stays in the air, the more time the defending team has to get down field to guard against a return. While a typical N.F.L. punt will last about four and a half seconds in the air, King, in workouts, has reached the unthinkable mark of 5.85 seconds. He does well with distance, too: his longest punt in a game is seventy yards, managed against the Ravens, and footage exists of him kicking as far as eighty-seven yards in practices.

King spends considerable time in the weight room, a place not necessarily frequented by members of the kicking squad, and his collegiate forty-yard dash time was less than two-tenths of a second behind that of his team’s fastest runner, the wide receiver Amari Cooper. The joke about punters is that they usually look like someone from the accounting department who accidentally ended up on the team—in other words, like a pasty white guy who improbably found himself in the company of football men. King has the opposite effect: he is an athletic black man in a spot usually reserved for pasty white guys. It would probably be uncomfortable, if he weren’t so used to being different.

King grew up in Macon, Georgia, and like a lot of kids his initial attraction to football was visual. He now lives an hour’s drive away from where he plays and practices with his team—a distance he chose so that he can decompress before he gets home—and he told me the story of his childhood as we sat on the sofa in his underfurnished Bay Area apartment. In middle school, he would watch one of his mom’s friend’s sons play football and admire the uniforms and the shiny helmets. His mother, concerned about injuries and academics, would not yet let him play, but King began training on his own, doing two-mile runs around his neighborhood with dreams of being a receiver. Two years later, he made his high-school team—and quickly decided that after-school practices and position-specific training were not enough to fill his insistent appetite for improvement. Weekend days were spent walking around his neighborhood with a football and a set of cones that he could use to practice receiving routes. He tried to get quarterbacks, receivers, and other teammates to join him for these extra sessions, but he found that most kids, even the athletes, preferred to spend their free time watching TV or playing video games.

When he got bored, he would kick, and he soon became fond of watching the ball rocket off of his foot and into the air. He began to challenge himself. Could he kick it over this ditch? Could he kick it over this tree? He got his parents to measure how long he could keep the ball in the air. He didn’t know yet about hang time and drop technique. He wasn’t thinking of it as a potential career. He just liked being really good at it, and getting better. He experimented with different techniques. One day, he said, not long after he began kicking, he was playing football with friends and a pass was thrown way out of bounds. King went to retrieve it, but instead of throwing it back, he kicked it. “Damn!” came the response. “Do that shit again!” Eventually the game devolved into neighborhood kids just trying to field King’s explosive punts.

A new coach took over his team during junior year, and King told him about his kicking. The coach made him the team’s kicker, though King continued to play receiver as well. During his senior year, a friend mentioned offhandedly that he could get paid to kick. King says he legitimately thought the guy was making fun of him. After high school, he went to Fort Valley State, a small historically black college thirty miles from home. He didn’t play at all in his freshman year, and had trouble finding time for himself at receiver, competing against more skilled players at the position. Eventually he was told flat out by the coaching staff that if he wanted to keep his scholarship, he had to kick.

Punters don’t run as fast or lift as many weights as other football players do. They don’t tackle or block. They can’t make big hits or game-winning plays. In a football culture that prizes strength, speed, toughness, and, to some degree, violence, a guy whom you can’t even touch in a game without being penalized ordinarily commands little respect in the locker room. He may as well be a professional darts player hanging at the gym with a bunch of M.M.A. fighters. But King either didn’t notice this or didn’t care; the same internal mechanisms that had him out alone on Saturday afternoons with a football and a bunch of cones while most other kids his age were playing Madden now induced him to throw himself completely into kicking with little regard for ego or social standing. He was simply enamored of the feeling of success when he booted a big one. When he had bad games, he was known to stay in the stadium long after his friends and family had gone home, putting on a pair of headphones and kicking ball after ball well into the night. Assistant coaches eventually forbade him from staying late, not so much to protect his leg, but because his obsessive work kept them from getting on with their own lives. As King recalls, he responded by surreptitiously finding out where the light box to the stadium was and learning how to break into the weight room after hours.