A Sure Three

Introductions had been made, pleasantries exchanged. Now Chuck Amato wanted to get inside Scott Bentley’s head. Bentley, the best schoolboy kicker in the country, was on his official visit to Florida State last January when Amato, the assistant head coach, tossed him this hypothetical: ”It’s August 28, we’re in Giants Stadium for the Kickoff Classic against Kansas. Right before kickoff, we call a timeout, and the other 10 guys on the kickoff team are pulled off the field. Think you can kick it out of the end zone?”

The idea, Amato explained later, was to see how the kid handled pressure. But Bentley, then 18, was becoming impervious to pressure. After he had said thanks but no thanks to Nebraska, Cornhusker coach Tom Osborne flew out to Colorado to meet him anyway. Come here, Miami had told Bentley, and you can kick and play receiver. In all, more than 90 schools had offered him scholarships. By January he had narrowed his choices down to Florida State and Notre Dame. The Seminoles had greeted him as if he were a soccer-style kicking messiah, the missing link to the national championship that has so long eluded them. Fighting Irish head coach Lou Holtz, meanwhile, had promised Bentley the starting kicker’s and punter’s jobs for four years. Bentley’s father, Bob — Notre Dame, class of ’67 — had told him to listen to Holtz.
Well, did he think he could kick it out of the end zone?
Bentley’s response to Amato has become part of his growing legend:
”Probably. But if I don’t, I’ll make the tackle.”

Meet football’s equivalent of cartoonist Roz Chast’s Poodle with a
Mohawk: Kicker with an Attitude. At Colorado’s North-South All-State
Game in June, Bentley, a 6 ft. 1 in., 175-pound Parade All-America
who played defensive back and quarterback in high school, was
forbidden to do anything but kick and punt. So he sprinted upfield
after each of the punts. ”I couldn’t help it,” said Bentley. ”I
just wanted to hit somebody.”

Ray Pelfrey, who runs kicking camps all over the country (page
38), has called Bentley ”possibly the best kicker in the history of
high school football.” Pelfrey feels that Bentley’s gift resides in
his fast-twitch muscle fibers. ”The kid runs the 40 in 4.4,”
Pelfrey says. ”You combine that leg speed with his technical
soundness, and good things are gonna happen.”

They already have. In four years of high school — one at Regis
High in Boulder and three at Overland High in Aurora — Bentley
nailed 35 field goals. His longest, a 58-yarder, was one of seven he
kicked from 50 or more yards out. (He consistently makes 65-yarders
in practice and has connected from 70.) At Overland he converted 115
of 117 extra-point attempts and put 34 kickoffs between the uprights.
His 41.8-yard net punting average last season would have ranked him
first in Division I-A.
( Don’t call him a kicking specialist, though. Last season
Bentley punted, kicked, kicked off, returned punts and started at
quarterback in a veer-option offense that required him to absorb, on
average, 20 hard shots per game. In the spring he started at
shortstop on the Overland baseball team; next spring he will play
centerfield for Florida State. For the scores of college football
recruiters who courted Bentley, Overland coach Tony Manfredi had this
advice: ”Don’t treat him like a kicker. Treat him like a football
player, or you’ll lose him.”
Seminole coach Bobby Bowden grasped that. Holtz did not. ”You’ll
only have to practice for a half hour,” Holtz told Bentley. ”Then
you can go and play golf.”
”I don’t want to play golf,” says Bentley. ”I want to run 40’s
with ((Seminole wide receiver)) Tamarick Vanover.”
When Bentley called a press conference in late January to announce
that he was Tallahassee-bound, a desperate Tony Yelovich phoned
Bentley’s school to try to stop it. ”The kid’s confused,” said
Yelovich, a Notre Dame assistant who had spent three years
cultivating Bentley.
The kid was, in fact, thinking more clearly than he had in years.
Ever since Scott was a fourth-grader booting 35-yard field goals, his
father, who had lettered in baseball and basketball at Notre Dame,
had been steering him toward South Bend. Finally, two days before the
press conference, Bob had told Scott to follow his heart. ”If my dad
hadn’t gone to Notre Dame,” says Scott, ”I would have committed two
weeks earlier.”
Who can blame Bob for trying? As a six-year-old soccer player in a
youth league in Tulsa, Scott sent so many balls rocketing into the
faces of other boys that their parents suspected him of doing it on
purpose. When Scott was 12 and his brother, Chris, was 14, the
Bentleys moved to Denver, where Scott tried out for a local youth
soccer team. He got into his first game with three minutes left in
the first half, scored three goals and kicked another ball so hard
that it knocked the goalie unconscious.
As a ninth-grader at Regis, Scott beat out a senior for
placekicker on the football team. But the team went 0-10, and the
next year Scott transferred to Overland, a perennial powerhouse. In
the second game of his sophomore season he kicked field goals of 50
and 52 yards. But he did more than just kick; Scott also platooned at
cornerback as a sophomore, played free safety as a junior and
quarterbacked the team as a senior.
Bentley began to be courted by college coaches in his sophomore
year. Yelovich was among the earliest to work on him. ”When I was a
sophomore, I told him, ‘I’m your kicker,’ ” says Bentley. By the
time he was a senior, Bentley had backed away from that promise. He
told Yelovich that ”it looks good” and that he was ”leaning
toward” Notre Dame — which, until he visited South Bend and
Tallahassee, he was.
The Notre Dame visit, in early December, got off on the wrong
foot. Craig Hentrich, who had kicked for the Irish the previous four
seasons, told Bentley of the easy time in store for him. ”He told me
he and the other kickers would sometimes bring a barbecue down to the
lower field and make food,” says Bentley.
He and Hentrich went to a bar. Though Bentley does not drink, he
doesn’t judge those who do, and he expects that courtesy to be
returned. It wasn’t. Though Bentley admired the beer-downing capacity
of some Irish linemen — ”These guys would just drink right out of
the pitcher,” he says — some of those players ridiculed him for his
refusal to imbibe. Bentley asked himself, Do I need this for four
years?
After a training-table breakfast that included the renowned
ND-monogrammed waffles, Bentley got a tour of the campus during a
driving rainstorm. He opted not to go out Saturday night and was
awakened at 2:30 a.m. by the retching of another recruit, who was in
the bathroom retasting the evening’s lager.
Late that afternoon Bentley had met with Holtz, who was distracted
by the Army-Navy game on the TV in his office. Holtz told Bentley not
to worry about his punting average; a ”pooch punter” would take
short punts. (”Can you believe that?” says Bob Bentley. ”He’s
telling a placekicker with 50-plus- yard range that he’d rather
pooch-punt than kick field goals!”)
When Scott didn’t commit on the spot, Holtz pressed him. ”What do
you want out of college, son?” Holtz asked. Bentley said he wanted a
healthy social environment, strong academics and the starting
kicker’s job. ”Then we’re all set with you, right?” said Holtz.
”We’ve got everything you’re looking for.” Bentley knew a hard sell
when he heard one — his old man once owned 40% of a car dealership.
Scott dug his heels in, telling Holtz, ”I’ve still got four visits
to make.”
Now Bob Bentley was nervous. When Scott first evinced interest in
Florida State, Bob had asked, ”Why go to the Bermuda Triangle of
kickers?” When , Bowden visited the Bentleys before Scott’s trip to
Tallahassee, Bob was downright hostile. ”You’re taking a Notre Dame
degree away from my kid,” he said.
Scott’s Florida State visit began more auspiciously than the Notre
Dame trip. He had dinner the first night with Jamey Shouppe, the
Seminole baseball recruiting coordinator. Afterward Shouppe took him
to Dick Howser Stadium. The lights had been turned on. ”The field
just sparkled,” says Bentley, a Coloradan who had not seen his own
lawn since October. ”I almost committed on the spot.” Later Bentley
and freshman backup quarterback Danny Kanell — who was one of his
Florida State escorts and is now his roommate and holder — went to a
bar. ”The pressure to drink wasn’t there,” says Bentley. ”And I
wasn’t treated like a kicker, I was treated like just another
player.”
For Bentley’s benefit Seminole offensive coordinator Brad Scott
had charted the number of field goals a Seminole kicker was likely to
attempt per season. ”We went back four or five seasons, and it came
out close to 30 a season,” recalls Scott. ”We suggested ((Bentley))
compare that to what he was likely to get at another school” —
namely, Notre Dame, where Holtz prefers short punts to field goals.
”If you’re going to be an All-America,” Scott told Bentley, ”you
need to get your at bats.”
It was also Scott’s idea to prepare Bentley’s locker. In the Notre
Dame locker room, Bentley had noted with dismay that the stalls of
the kickers were separated from those of the other players. At
Florida State they are not. Bentley’s locker was next to Deion
Sanders’s old stall, which is now a glass- encased shrine.
By the end of his visit Bentley was ready to sign. But he was
afraid it would crush his father. ”Normally Scott is the loosest,
most relaxed person,” says his mother, Kathy. ”But he was so
anxious that he started getting up early” — unheard-of for Scott,
who hits the snooze button a minimum of twice per morning.
Finally, as signing day approached, Scott leveled with his father.
”I’m scared that if I don’t pick Notre Dame, I’ll be letting you
down,” he said. At last Bob released his dream. ”It was as if a
weight had been lifted,” says Kathy. ”Scott started hitting the
snooze button again.”
The day of Bentley’s press conference, Holtz got on the horn with
Brian Ford, a punter-placekicker from Cathedral High in Indianapolis,
and talked Ford into breaking a verbal commitment to Vanderbilt. The
Commodore coaches were furious. ,
Then Holtz phoned the Bentleys. Scott was asleep, and Holtz left
his number. ”What do you think he wants?” Scott asked his father
when he awoke. ”He probably wants to congratulate you and wish you
luck,” Bob guessed. ”He’s class.”
The classy coach chewed the boy’s head off. Bentley says Holtz
accused him of lying. ”Did you tell Coach Yelovich you were coming
here?” Holtz reportedly demanded. Says Bentley, ”I said that there
had been times Coach Yelovich put so much pressure on me that I told
him what he wanted to hear.”
Holtz’s pontificating about the sanctity of a recruit’s promise to
a coach would have been more convincing had he not just finished
persuading Ford to screw Vanderbilt. And Holtz wasn’t finished with
Bentley. ”Son, you didn’t just make a four-year mistake,” he
reportedly said, ”you made a 40-year mistake. You let me down, and
you let your father down.”
The call might have been Holtz’s last stab at changing Bentley’s
mind. Or it might have been purely spiteful — Holtz has never
pretended to be a gracious loser. The coach isn’t saying: He refused
to discuss Bentley with SI.
There is also the possibility that Holtz was doing a bit of
preseason coaching. The Nov. 13 game between Notre Dame and Florida
State could easily come down to a field goal. Perhaps Holtz wanted to
give Bentley something to think about. ”If that’s what he was trying
to do, it was a mistake,” says Bentley. ”Anybody who knows me knows
that kind of stuff just pumps me up.”
Holtz never did figure Bentley out. A game-winning field goal may
be what it takes for Holtz to see the light.

To see the full article click HERE

Wrote by: Austin Murphy

Published by: Sports Illustrated

Published on: August 30, 1993