America at Large: Ken Walter probably woke up yesterday morning blaming me and my sportswriting colleagues for his unemployed condition, but all he really needed to do was look in the mirror, writes George Kimball.
The erstwhile New England Patriots' punter had been struggling for well over a month, and last Sunday in the RCA Dome in Indianapolis he unloaded an 18-yard shank at the most pivotal moment of an absolutely critical game. The miscue gave the dangerous Peyton Manning the football in New England territory with over three minutes left on the clock - a veritable lifetime by NFL standards - and only a heroic goal-line stand in which the Patriots line withstood four consecutive Colts plays run from inside the two yard-line preserved the 38-34 win.
While partisans of the division-leading Patriots celebrated the gritty denouement, unsettling visions of what might have happened were a bit too fresh in my mind.
"The solution to the Patriots' ongoing problem of execution in the punting game should by now be apparent," I wrote Sunday evening. "Somebody needs to execute the punter."
Two days later the team did just that. While the rest of his team-mates were celebrating their lone off-day of the week, the 31-year-old Walter was summoned to the team's Foxboro headquarters and informed his services were no longer required.
The fact his team had posted a 10-2 record, second-best in the entire NFL and in the driver's seat for a play-off bye, was probably the only reason Walter hadn't been hung in effigy from a lamppost along Route One even before his Indianapolis adventure. That there are 46 places on an active NFL roster sounds like a lot when you consider that only 11 of them can play at once, but a specialist who isn't performing his specialty is a luxury not even a first-place team can entertain. That Walter's sputtering boots hadn't cost them a game yet didn't mean he wouldn't before the season ended.
If New England coach Bill Belichick had seemed inordinately patient with his beleaguered punter, there were at least three explanations. For one, Belichick and Walter went back a long way: as a teenager in Ohio, Walter had served as a ball-boy for Belichick's Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s. For another, despite his problems putting boot to ball, Walter's services holding for Adam Vinatieri's field goals and extra points were valued by the team and the place-kicker himself.
But Walter also survived as long as he did because this has been a particularly bad year for unemployed punters. Nearly every Tuesday for the past month the Patriots had auditioned would-be replacements, none of whom exactly overwhelmed the New England coaching staff.
A day after Walter's Indianapolis debacle the Patriots worked out four punters before settling on Brooks Barnard, who last kicked for the University of Maryland and, having been released by the Chicago Bears before the season, has never tasted NFL action. (Although reports of his earlier flirtation with the NFL were a complete fabrication, it's probably a safe bet that had Ronan O'Gara been around Foxboro this week he'd have gotten a look, too.)
Football can be a cold-hearted business, at least in part because an NFL coach doesn't have the options available to his counterparts in other sports. A pitcher who suddenly can't find the target can be sent to the bullpen in the hope he can restore his confidence with less stressful work. When an NBA player's shooting touch deserts him, his coach can use him off the bench and hope he regains his form.
An NFL coach might hope that a sputtering punter can straighten himself out, but more often he'll just go find another one. If Belichick, for instance, had been this tolerant with Walter's predecessor Lee Johnson, Walter would never have been a Patriot in the first place.
"The punting situation's no different from any other situation," the Patriots coach had sighed after the Indianapolis game. "Every week you try to put your best . . . you try to do what's best for your team. If areas aren't doing as well as you'd like for them to do, you try to improve and get 'em better."
Walter, who replaced Johnson midway through the 2001 season and helped New England to their Super Bowl XXXVI win that year, had dropped to last on the NFL statistical sheet over the past month, but it was his predilection for laying the odd egg at the worst possible moment that foretold his doom. A week before misfiring in Indianapolis he had gotten off a potentially disastrous 31-yarder from his own end zone in overtime against Houston. On both occasions he was punting in Domes under perfect indoor conditions. (The Patriots will close out their schedule with four outdoor games in the breezy Northeast.)
Despite their sometimes dazzling numbers, NFL contracts are normally not guaranteed, but Walter will get out more whole than most. A year ago he signed a five-year, $6 million pact that had made him one of the 10 highest-paid punters in the league. When that contract was restructured in a salary cap-juggling manoeuvre earlier this year part of that salary was guaranteed. The Patriots will have to eat $100,000 this year and pay Walter $400,000 for not kicking next season.
We'd love to tell you what Walter made of all this, but as his kicking woes increased in recent weeks he has been the invisible man, dashing out of the locker-room, apparently sans shower, to avoid the media. After his client had been led to the guillotine Tuesday night, Walter's agent Paul Sheehy did tell my Boston Herald colleague Michael Felger that Walter was "disappointed".
"How else are you supposed to feel? He just got fired. He's not happy," said Sheehy. "But he's trying to make the best of it."
