Fred Cox RIP

Kicker for the Vikings? Inventor of Nerf? Chiropractor? Jesus, next you're gonna tell me he drove the Zamboni at North Stars games.

 

He gave guitar lessons to a Minneapolis youth named Prince Nelson.

 

It's all fun and games until someone loses their front teeth slamming into the side of a swimming pool while trying to catch a Nerf football. (No names to protect the guilty.)

 

I never could understand how a soccer-style kicker got lift and accuracy that way. I was a "jammer" from the word go. I idolized Fred Cox and Mark Moseley.

 

You can buy your own square-toe kicking shoe for only $130.

Football Square Toe Kicking Shoe | Prokicker.com

 

I couldn't resist. Strictly bullshit post on my end.

But Fred Cox looked like he could work a plunger and a pipe snake.

 

Colts rookie kicker Jim O'Brien (winning FG in SB V) was dating the rookie head coach's daughter.

Don't know if that's how he got the job. But both O'Brien and the coach (Don McCafferty) went to the Lions in 1973, and that was the last year in the league for each (McCafferty died in 1974).

 

Kicking nerd here. When other kids were playing baseball and basketball, I would kick alone in my back yard. Boom. Retrieve. Boom. Had all sorts of tees and also kicked off the grass (that's HARD). Used twigs to hold the ball up.

I kicked both ways for many years as a child/teenager but I could never get that true "explosion" off the ball on impact.

The straight-on style always got me superb lift over the line of scrimmage but then the physics would kick in -- the ball would die sooner after hitting its peak. Also, just being a half-inch off one way or the other would lead to a horrendous chank.

On soccer-style, I found much great control over the accuracy unless I was trying to kill the ball, which would lead to an awful hook without much lift.

The best soccer-style kicks I ever had were ones where the tip/outside of my right (kicking) foot hit the ball and not the inside, which goes counter to how I was trained. These kicks would happen by accident because if I tried to do it intentionally, I would slice the ball horrendously.

But I never got the power that I craved on kicking so I gave it up in high school.

My freshman year in college, I'm kicking inside the football bubble on one end with a friend. Just to try a few things.

Then on the other side comes the kicker for the college team. He set up at the 50. Demolished the ball. Rep after rep. Each one clearing distance of the goalposts (60 yards away). Didn't always go straight but it always hit the nets in the back. I had never seen anything like it in person. Like a cannonball. We were both the same height. He hit a 60-yarder in college and kicked ten years in the NFL.

 

Fred Cox would have consistently kicked home runs onto the roof of our elementary school.

One of the great moments of my college life was when our baseball team played a fall weekend four-game set at Virginia Tech. Got up 6 a.m. on Sunday morning with four players and the batboy, walked into unlocked Lane Stadium and kicked field goals on the game surface for two hours.

 

I literally just bent over in pain like I was kicked in the nuts reading that.

 

I was pretty damn good straightaway. Then I heard about the golf club analogy, with greater force, etc. Tried it. The first time, I missed the goal posts by .... 45 degrees. The ball still went straight off my foot. Never got better. I just couldn't get my leg to whip around like that.
We were one of the first high school teams to have a soccer-style kicker (1969). He was accurate and we won our first three games by one point each because they other teams missed PATs. But he wasn't a strong kicker. A different guy, who kicked straightaway, did the kickoffs.

 

Given Bud Grant's reputation for being cheap and the realities of the NFL in those days the Cox handyman story was at least plausible, in addition to being quite entertaining.

I still have the square-toed kicking shoe I used as a straight-on high school kicker in the mid-80s. You didn't want to wear one of those while playing regularly as a non-kicker if you could avoid it - they're heavier and affect your running.