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A lot of people can kick a ball a long way, but sometimes you get in a little funk and you work your way out of it.
I know my body needs to have the proper nutrition so that I can keep kicking at a high level. The same goes with sleep.
This is a hard enough sport when you're giving 100 percent. If you're giving anything less than that, it'll swallow you up.
Making the playoffs is hard to come by, so if you can help contribute to your team's success it's always a successful time.
Cleaning out your locker the first week of January is not a whole lot of fun and it always leaves a lousy taste in your mouth.
There's some guys - Michael Jordan and Mariano Rivera and Tiger Woods - that were blessed with the ability just to be... great.
Ask a receiver, can we take his gloves off because he's catching the ball too well? Nobody is going to be overly happy about that.
I learned early that it's very important to approach every single kick you attempt, even those in practice, as if it were in a game.
Will I still get a slice of pizza? Will I drink a beer or two? Absolutely. You still have to live, but I try to do things in moderation.
Obviously this all-time leading scorer thing I knew was out there and I thought, 'Man, if I stay healthy, I would like to reach that goal.'
NFL Europe helped me quite a bit. It was a situation where I came out of college and spent the first few months of my career over in Europe.
I was born with a shotgun in my hand, chasing pheasant through the cornfields. My dad probably started taking me out when I was 4, 5 or 6 years old.
People think kickers in general kick field goals. But kickers are actually good athletes; we run and work out just like the rest of the football team.
Every kicker that's in this league has kicked a million or so balls. You just have that swing; you know what you have to do, and you go out there and do it.
You've got to trust your steps, trust your guys that are on the field with you, and when the ball is on the ground, you've got to do that every single time.
Yeah, at the end of the year you always sit back and you evaluate, and unless you have a perfect season with no misses there is always room for improvement.
I think you can develop your ability to be clutch, if that's the word that you will use, your ability to focus and to be able to block out all the external stuff.
In the end, the Super Bowl is just a football game. You try to take a couple of big, deep breaths and convince yourself it's just another game. You try to, anyway.
Preparation meets opportunity, and that causes success if you're prepared to do your job and you practice a lot, more times than not you're going to be successful.
I think anybody that has had a bad game, or, I dunno, I guess if you go out golfing and you hook a couple balls, are you thinking about it until you get it figured out?
As a football player, as a kid and as a professional athlete the moment of playing in the Super Bowl and winning a Super Bowl, that's what you play your whole career for.
As kickers, it's all about being able to block out the crowd noise, being able to block out certain aspects of the game, and just do your job no matter what the circumstances are.
Coach Parcells challenged me a lot in my rookie year, and not just in games. Almost every day in practice, he'd stand right beside me as he called for the field-goal team to take the field.
I would compare kicking to being a closer in baseball. This whole game gets played, or the cake is made in front of you, so to speak, and you have to turn around and put the icing on the cake.
There's a brotherhood with the specialists. There's not many of them and we don't get any respect, so we have to show a little respect for each other. We have to help each other out if we have the opportunity.
I suppose any person who's played somewhere for a certain amount of time and then has the opportunity to go back and just reminisce a little bit, maybe it holds a different feeling than some of the other places.
I have to admit I've dreamed of kicking the game-winning field goal in the Super Bowl many times. That's the fun thing about being a kicker, you never know when it's going to come down to your kick deciding the game.
The mental aspect of kicking is the difficult part. Physically, we still have to be in shape and perform on the field, but the thing that separates the ones who make it versus the ones who don't is definitely the mental side.
Will it make the game safer for people by moving the extra point back to a 43-yarder? If anything, players are going to rush harder because they're thinking, 'That far of a field goal-type try, we have to go after blocking it more.'
One thing I always noticed out of Bill Parcells is that he always wanted a good class of blue-collar, hardworking guys that he felt like he could win games with that way... When the difficult times came about he knew who was going to perform.
I've played with some of the best that have ever played, obviously. I don't know if there is anybody that is a better technician than Peyton Manning. Tom Brady is another quarterback that I was fortunate enough to play with for a bunch of years.
On teams that have won championships and got to the big game, there's a certain vibe and feel in that locker room. Everyone talks about how there's a brotherhood in that locker room, there's not a lot of dissent, there's not guys that go off on their own. It's a team atmosphere.
Coming from a small South Dakota school, it was a different route to get to the NFL. I went from South Dakota State to the World League of American Football with the Amsterdam Admirals, and fortunately I did well enough there that the New England Patriots decided to sign me and give me a chance.
I first learned about kicking under pressure in 1996, my rookie year with the Patriots. I was signed as a free agent by a team that already had Matt Bahr, one of the best kickers around. To win the job, I had to show coach Bill Parcells that I could make kicks when they counted. That process started in training camp.