Nobody wants to read about the punt, only about the guy who ran it back.
Jeff Feagles remembered what he considers the best day of his punting career, when he dropped three inside the 20, one inside the 10, during a 9-6 Seahawks win at Giants Stadium in 2002. Feagles also remembered what Giants return man Amani Toomer said after that game.
“Wow, you’re good,” Toomer told Feagles.
“You’re good, too, that’s why I kick it away from you.’ ” Feagles replied.
Thus did the best directional punter the NFL has ever seen reconcile the media heading in different postgame directions than from his locker, right through yesterday when he retired at the age of 44.
“I’m a punter and I got a press conference, that’s good for me,” Feagles said with a laugh when he hung ’em up, as proudly as he hung ’em up for 22 years out of the reach of frustrated returners.
“I really messed with those guys,” he said after 1,713 kicks to end drives that Tom Coughlin never felt utterly failed with Feagles cleaning up the mess. Thus did an appriciative Giants coach get even longer winded yesterday than any of the December Meadowlands swirls Feagles defeated.
“My favorite drill was having Jeff lofting it from the 45 or 40 and having David Tyree catching it before it goes out of bounds,” Coughlin said. “We could always count on him to put the ball inside the 10 or the 5. He is one of the greatest Giants of all time.”
The artiste of coffin corners nailed his career shut 13 days ago, when his sore back and swollen knee told him to tell the Giants they might think about drafting a punter.
“Two years ago, I probably had my best season; last year I didn’t see the ball off my foot,” Feagles said. “There are a lot of things I could try, liftingwise, to get stronger, it just didn’t happen. My mind will always tell me I want to do this. I have been doing this for half my life. I just can’t do it anymore.”
Forty-four years do that to an athlete, and also will grant an iron man perspective on his iron will.
“I lost my job in 1990 when I was with the Patriots, and I vowed this would never happen again,” Feagles said. “I never took anything for granted, just took one year, one kick at a time.”
And he did it for 352 straight regular-season games, an NFL record that will be almost as impossible to break as Feagles’ Meadowlands code.
“My secret was to go to the stadium and practice,” he said. “It was rare to have the wind blowing a certain way on certain days, but lo and behold, on game days we would have the same situation and the other [punters] would have no clue.
“My other secret was I never gave any of my secrets away. I always told them, ‘Look at the flag, that’s the way the wind is blowing,’ when it was the opposite. It was windy, but who cares? You go out there and try to defeat the wind.”
Feagles defied both the elements and the ravages of time, and he classed up not only five different NFL locker rooms, but a position still unrepresented by a full-time punter in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The Hall should be calling now for Feagles. Lots of guys could kick it longer, but nobody ever kicked it better.