You’ll have to ask my kids to verify this if you don’t believe
me, but it’s true. I said it just before
Chicago attempted the game winning field goal last night against Philadelphia that
they were going to miss because, “you just can’t put the game in the hands of a
guy named Cody Parkey.” I know that
sounds ridiculous, but I can’t help it.
I just think that some things are simply predestined by one’s name. Cody
Parkey, as decent as a guy as I’m sure he is, just doesn’t have a name that
gets you over the finish line. He doesn’t.
I wasn’t just mildly puffing in my
prognostication that he’d miss. I knew he would.
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| One is the Loneliest Number, Especially if You're Cody Parkey |
In fact, the NFL place kicker is quite interesting in that
it was probably one of the first positions where the player’s name did as much
to suggest their success as did their
ability. It was branding by happenstance;
a fortuitous circumstance during a specific time in the NFL where kickers who
sounded like they were from Dusseldorf fared better than ones who sounded home
grown in terms of making the team. This trend
seemed to reach its zenith in the early 1980’s, when just about anything foreign
sounding was believed to be better than something produced domestically. It didn’t even have to be foreign per se, it
just had to seem that way. Like Haagen-Dazs ice cream, a brand produced in New
Jersey but packaged as if it came Denmark; even having the audacity to print a
map of lower Scandinavia on the lid of its containers to further suggest that
point. You’d see the little arrow pointing
to a star marking is alleged origin somewhere near the Baltic Sea and think: Damn, this must good! “Korean” grocery markets were also all the rage at the time, as were female Asian news anchors, and egregiously “European” sounding beers: Hey Barkeep, a round of
Lowenbrau’s for me and my friends when you have a second old chum… And yet, inexplicably, it seemed that NFL general
managers had now bought into this branding phenomenon as well. By 1983 any kicker who sounded like he grew
up next door was out, as if he were Breyers Ice Cream. It’s doubtful that many NFL GM’s at the time would
admit to such a practice. That cunning geo-marketing
would somehow influence how they assembled their rosters. Nevertheless, there was this continuously growing
crop of kickers sprouting up with names such as Donald Igwebuike, Rolf
Benirschke, Raphael Septien, Jan Stenerud and Raul Allegre to name a few. Stenarud, the elder statesmen of the bunch and
de facto godfather of import-kickers, first entered the league in 1967 and deserves
much of the credit with regard to “removing the borders” for NFL place kicking. But if this was indeed a fad, good luck getting
it on record. Imagine calling out the perennially
prickly George Young, the New York Giants’ General Manager from 1979-1997, on
this; “Hey George did you sign Ali Haji-Sheikh because everyone is eating
Haagen-Dazs and watching Kaity Tong on the Eleven O’clock News?”
“Shut up…”
“You weren’t just covering your crinkled backside on this?”
“I said shut up…”
“Well, at least you still have a quarterback named Phil Simms
in case he doesn’t work out.”
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| Donald Igwebuike |
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| Ali Haji-Sheikh |
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| Uwe von Schamann |
Trend or no trend, it still remains uncannily coincidental that
internationally sounding kickers were getting snapped up at the same time Benetton
sweatshirts and Bonjour jeans were flying off the shelves. As if a paranoid general manager fearing the
wrath of his owner had a better chance of keeping his job if, say, Uwe von
Schamann missed a game winning field goal instead the other kicker he’d have
signed from Springfield named Joe Woods. In certain professions there’s just something about
a particular guy’s name that evokes confidence more than another particular guy’s
name. Whether it’s fair or not is certainly
subject to further debate, but who do you think sounds better for getting your
team to the Super Bowl: John Elway or Bubby Brister?
And that brings us back to Cody Parkey, that vowelly
sounding rhyme scheme of a kicker where both his first and last names have that
perfect two-syllable pentameter. He unfortunately
sounds much more like a comic strip – or main character of a companion piece to
Highlights Magazine’s “Goofus and Gallant”
– than a guy who’s going to get you to the next round of the NFL playoffs with
his leg. Should he have been named Cody
Parker or Connor Parkey, well, maybe…just maybe…he’d have fared off
better. There’s no logical or statistical explanation
for this. There’s just something in a name…
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| "Danish" Ice Cream Made In Teaneck, New Jersey |
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