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Before the kick in the snow and the kick that won a Super Bowl, there was another kick — one that launched a Hall of Fame career.
Make that saved a Hall of Fame career.
This one was vintage Adam Vinatieri, except at the time, there was no such thing. This kick came from 40 yards out, in overtime, game on the line, wind howling, coach fuming, crowd edgy and a field drenched in so much mud that the local paper wrote it “resembled a World War I no-man’s land.”
Adam Vinatieri’s unlikely and unexpected road to the Hall of Fame
Zak Keefer and Jeshua Kidd
If Vinatieri doesn’t slip that ball inside the right upright to beat the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sept. 22, 1996, there’s a good chance his NFL career ends after four games. He would’ve been cut a day later, and the market would’ve been all but nonexistent for a middling college kicker from Division II South Dakota State who made just 33 percent of his field goals as a senior, lost his job to a defensive lineman, went undrafted, spent a year toiling in NFL Europe, then opened his professional career with five misses in eight attempts.
The backup plan was medical school. Vinatieri always figured he’d become a heart surgeon.
That would’ve been perfectly fine with the New England Patriots’ fiery coach, Bill Parcells, who was running out of patience with his rookie kicker. The only reason he’d brought Vinatieri to training camp that summer was to light a fire under 17-year veteran Matt Bahr, a Parcells favorite who’d helped him win Super Bowl XXV with the New York Giants.
“I’m going to give you an opportunity to show me what you’ve got,” Parcells told the kid, “and either you’re going to shine, or you’re going to pack your s— and get out of here.”
Vinatieri nearly had to pack his s—.
Even after he beat out Bahr for the job in camp, his grip on the gig never felt secure. Parcells warned him against bragging to the media. And a string of misses to open the season, including three in a seven-point Week 2 loss to the Buffalo Bills, then two more a week later, left Vinatieri on thin ice heading into the Patriots’ Week 4 tilt with the Jaguars. “The kicker is week-to-week,” the coach told reporters.
“I knew what the hell that meant,” Vinatieri later told me. That interview, and others used for this story, took place during my time as a Colts beat writer for The Indianapolis Star.
Bahr was just a phone call away.
That Vinatieri even sniffed professional football was a miracle unto itself, and one could argue none of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s 387 members — Vinatieri will be inducted this week as part of the 2026 class — has ever scripted a more preposterous road to Canton.
Across four seasons at South Dakota State, Vinatieri only made one more kick (27) than he missed (26). He went 4-for-12 as a senior and was benched midseason for a defensive lineman named Jim Remme, who favored the toe-bashing technique. (In fairness, Vinatieri’s coaches made the right call: Remme went 9-for-10 on extra points that year.)
Undrafted but undeterred, and willing to put off medical school for a few years, Vinatieri sought instruction from the best coach he could find: a man in a wheelchair. Doug Blevins was born with cerebral palsy and never played a down of football in his life. But he knew kicking. So Vinatieri packed his life into his pickup truck and drove 18 hours through the night to Blevins’ home in Abingdon, Va., and slept in the back until Blevins woke up.
Then he begged him for help.
They drilled every day for several months. Vinatieri lived in a one-bedroom apartment and waited tables at night to cover his rent.
A year later, at Blevins’ urging, Vinatieri kicked for the Amsterdam Admirals of the World League of American Football — later deemed NFL Europe. The year abroad helped him catch the attention of NFL scouts from two teams. They’d end up being the two teams he’d spend his entire 24-year NFL career with.
Before that first training camp with the Patriots, his ambitions were modest.
“I wanted to last maybe three, four years,” Vinatieri said. “I just wanted a head start on life, a little money in my pocket, maybe enough to help pay for medical school.”
Parcells thought he’d be gone in a matter of weeks. The coach made the rookie’s life miserable. This was 1996, back when teams still conducted two-a-days throughout July and August, and Parcells forced Vinatieri to kick so much the kid started to worry his leg was going to fall off. Parcells also loved getting in his head. Before big kicks — while the entire team watched, eager to know if they were going to have to run more gassers — the coach would trample over the spot Vinatieri was about to kick from. “Oh sorry, am I in your way?” Parcells would ask, chuckling to himself.
Vinatieri would silently fume. Then he’d make the kick.
“Coach Parcells would say some stuff that would tick you off so bad you’d want to just cuss right back at him,” said Tom Tupa, Vinatieri’s holder that year.
Against the Jaguars in Week 4, Vinatieri botched his first extra point, then missed again from 44 yards in the third quarter. The Patriots’ 15-point halftime lead evaporated. The Jags forced overtime. On a sloppy field at Foxboro Stadium, one weathered by rain, soccer matches and concert season — “Holes everywhere,” Vinatieri remembered, and “they’d just fill them with sand and paint it green to make it look like grass” — he lined up from 40 yards away, three minutes into overtime, with a chance to win it.
Parcells left him with some biting words before he jogged on the field.
“The story goes,” longtime NFL personnel man Gil Brandt told me years ago, “that Parcells told him if he missed it, there was no reason to come back to the locker room.”
One teammate took it a step further. “I can’t tell you how important that kick was for him,” left tackle Bruce Armstrong told reporters. “If he’d missed it, he might’ve been shaken mentally. But he certainly would’ve been shaken physically.”
Vinatieri snuck it inside the right upright with less than a foot to spare. It was the first of an NFL-record 28 game-winners.
“NO BOOT FOR NOW,” read the Boston Herald headline a day later.
“It was a nice kick,” Vinatieri told reporters, relieved he still had a job. “But tomorrow’s a new work week.”
He never made it to medical school. He lasted a decade in New England. He tackled Herschel Walker in a game later that season, then kicked off to Desmond Howard in the Super Bowl. He later won two with his right foot, and drilled what Bill Belichick called “the greatest kick of all time,” a 45-yard bullet in an AFC divisional round blizzard that sent the Patriots to overtime against the then-Oakland Raiders in what later became known as the Tuck Rule Game.
Former Patriots coach Bill Belichick believes Vinatieri’s 45-yard game-tying field goal in the snow in the 2001 AFC divisional round is “the greatest kick of all time.” (Don Emmert / Getty Images)
“Don’t fall, don’t fall,” Vinatieri kept telling himself before jogging onto the field that night. He skulled it right over his long snapper’s head. The ball barely climbed 20 feet in the air. He watched it disappear into the New England night, waiting and hoping to hear the crowd scream.
Finally, they did.
A little later, his 23-yarder won it for New England in overtime.
The legend was born. He became the most dependable clutch kicker in the game. Tired of the Patriots’ lowball contract offers, he was headed to Green Bay as a free agent in 2006 until Colts coach Tony Dungy saw the news trickle across the TV in his office. “Shouldn’t we be contacting him?” Dungy asked his boss, Bill Polian. “Yes, we should,” Polian replied. The Colts offered him a five-year contract.
Kick in a dome? For a team with Peyton Manning at quarterback?
“Make it happen,” Vinatieri told his agent.
Nine months later, Manning’s Colts couldn’t find the end zone in a divisional playoff game in Baltimore. No matter. Vinatieri couldn’t miss. “Money,” Dungy mouthed on the sideline after Vinatieri’s 35-yarder in the fourth quarter sealed a 15-6 win. Three weeks later, the Colts were Super Bowl champions. Vinatieri had his fourth title in six seasons.
By the end in Indianapolis, teammates like Shaquille Leonard — two decades Vinatieri’s junior — would bah like a goat when the 47-year-old kicker would stroll through the locker room. Andrew Luck loved telling the story of being 6 years old and attending an Amsterdam Admirals game with his father, 17 years before one of the kickers he watched that day — Adam Vinatieri — made a 53-yarder to deliver Luck his first NFL win.
Vinatieri’s career didn’t just defy credulity. It defied logic.
The kid out of South Dakota who barely survived his first four weeks in the league — the kid Bill Parcells was ready to cut — finished as the NFL’s all-time leading scorer (2,673 points), all-time leader in field goals made (655 between the regular season and playoffs) and all-time leader in consecutive makes (44).
Vinatieri was never a normal kicker in Indianapolis and was never treated like one. His teammates would pepper him with questions about their 401(k)s. They wouldn’t gripe when he switched the music in the weight room from heavy rap to classic rock. At some point, they started calling him a future Hall of Famer. No longer is the modifier needed. As much as he was known for his icy nerve in clutch moments, it was Vinatieri’s unshakable resolve that sustained his improbable career. A ride that should’ve never taken off instead lasted almost a quarter-century. Now it ends in Canton.
Vinatieri remains the NFL’s all-time points leader with 2,673. The closest active kicker is Atlanta’s Nick Folk with 1,826. (Brian Spurlock / Imagn Images)
“I’m proud of him. He did it himself,” Parcells told me while I was at the Indianapolis Star in 2017. “He put his name in the conversation for the greatest kicker of all time, and we never would’ve thought that early on.”
How does one put it all in perspective? How rare is it for a player to last a decade with one team, then 14 more with another? Consider this scene from the summer of 2016. Vinatieri was vacationing with his family back in Boston. A group of Patriots fans stopped him. They wanted an autograph from the kicker who’d helped them win three Super Bowls in the early 2000s.
Vinatieri’s son was confused.
“Wait a minute,” he said, “you used to play for the Patriots?”
