Hernando's forgotten kicker
By DAVID MURPHY
Published July 1, 2007
Name the most memorable kick, you say, and he hems and he haws. Picking a favorite kick is like picking a favorite child. Every time the foot meets the ball, the result is something unique. Each one is like a snowflake. Or an embryo.
"People always ask me what my favorite kick was," Allan Leavitt says, "and it's really hard to put your finger on one."
Finally, he makes up his mind.
Georgia Tech.
1976.
Nine seconds left.
Score tied, 10-10.
A fog has settled into the stadium. His parents are up so high they cannot see the ball. In fact, neither can he. The kick disappears into the belly of the fog, like a plane disappearing into the clouds.
For a few seconds he is left to guess. Then, 33 yards later, the officials raise their hands. The stadium erupts.
Jubilation.
Vindication.
Victory.
- - -
Turns out, the forgotten kicker was barely remembered to begin with.
He showed up in the summer of '72, plopped his bag of balls down on the football field at Hernando High and one year later was gone, off to the University of Georgia and, four years later, the NFL.
He returned in 1977 to speak at the school's commencement, but since then has passed through town only a handful of times.
As the years have faded, so too have the memories of the greatest high school field goal kicker Hernando County has ever seen.
Allan Leavitt spent his formative years in Pinellas County, a child of the late '50s and early '60s. He was a soccer player, an athletic kid with a strong leg who played for a club team in St. Petersburg. But he also had a fascination with field goal kicking.
Sunday afternoons meant watching NFL greats like Jan Stenerud and Garo Yepremian kick on television, then running outside to attempt to replicate the art. One day, Leavitt decided to try to get in touch with one of them in hopes of wrangling some face-to-face lessons. His mom worked for the long-distance company, which meant the family received free service.
The way he tells it, he picked up the phone and asked for a Mr. Jan Stenerud in Kansas City, Mo. Stenerud answered, but quickly told the little bugger to buzz off.
"He said, 'I don't have time for this,' " Leavitt says.
Undeterred, he looked up Mr. Garo Yepremian in Miami. Yepremian answered. According to Leavitt, they "talked for hours."
"He invited me to go up there to Nova University in Fort Lauderdale and work with him, but I didn't because I would have lost my amateur status," Leavitt says. "Finally, I hooked up with him at one of the Thai shops he owned in Clearwater."
By the end of his junior year at Lakewood High, Leavitt had developed quite a reputation for his soccer-style kicking. At the time, the transition to the new style was still in its early stages. He says he had six scholarship offers before he even took the field as a senior.
But he was unhappy with the coaching staff at Lakewood, whom he felt did not care about his future.
So his father suggested he move north to live with his grandparents in Weeki Wachee, and soon after Leavitt made the 60-mile trek up U.S. 19.
It was 1972.
"It's funny," Leavitt says, "because I literally came to Hernando in April of my junior year, and I graduated early and left in April of my senior year."
But in those 12 months, he made an impression.
He spent countless hours on the football field at Hernando, a bag of balls at his side, sending kicks soaring through the uprights. There were even times when he would visit the stadium of an opponent in the week leading up to the game, climb up a locked fence and practice kicking on the foreign turf.
Ernie Chatman, a longtime Brooksville resident and Hernando teacher who has coached nearly every sport at the high school, remembers the first time he saw Leavitt honing his craft.
"We're running around the track and I see this guy on the 40-yard line kicking field goals in the summertime," Chatman said. "Now, when you're talking about the 40-yard line, you're talking about a 50-yard field goal, and he was booming them.
"So naturally you start asking questions."
- - -
Wait, he says.
There was a kick in high school that sticks out. A 60-yarder, he says. It happened at a spring game in Pasco County. In those days, the 18-year-olds playing for schools like Hernando High and Pasco High looked more like grown men. This once was an area that grew athletes like oranges. Pasco defensive tackle Greg Pittman starred at Iowa State in the 1970s. Gulf lineman Chuck Pitcock was a fixture on Tampa Bay's USFL Bandits. Hernando defensive end Curtis Bunch graduated in 1978 and went on to play in the NFL and USFL.
Then there was this hotshot kicker.
Leavitt tells the story like this: He lines up, marks his paces and drills a 60-yard dart straight through the uprights. The crowd goes wild. In the stands is Harry Reppard, a mover and shaker in the orange juice business who also happens to be a huge University of Georgia fan. Well, ol' Harry Reppard gets on the phone with Athens and talks to Vince Dooley himself and tells him about this soccer-style kicker down in Hernando County he's just got to sign.
Dooley offers Leavitt the first kicking scholarship in Georgia history. Leavitt, a huge Bulldogs fan growing up, decommits from Florida State.
"It's funny how things work out," he says.
- - -
That fall, Leavitt turned in perhaps the greatest single season for a kicker in Hernando County history. He hit 12 of 16 field goal attempts and didn't miss a point-after attempt, he says. Though Hernando failed to qualify for the playoffs, Leavitt was named first-team all-state as both a kicker and a punter.
He ran some track in the spring and earned a reputation as an all-around nice guy.
"He didn't make a lot of noise," said Marion Jones, a basketball star during that time who recently was named Hernando's athletic director.
But, Jones said, "he kicked the devil out of the football."
In April, Leavitt graduated early and headed up to the University of Georgia to begin his new life.
His freshman season, he hit three field goals of more than 50 yards, including a then-school-record 54-yarder against Bear Bryant's Alabama squad. By the end of his career, he had set a then-Southeastern Conference record for most field goals over 50 yards in a career (six). His longest, a 58-yarder against Vanderbilt as a senior, is tied for the third-longest in school history. Leavitt holds the school record for most extra points in a career (125-of-129).
After graduating in the spring of 1977, Leavitt was selected by the Atlanta Falcons in the fourth round of the NFL draft. The Associated Press termed the selection of a kicker that early "unusual."
Leavitt says he was the keynote speaker at Hernando's graduation that spring. It was the last time he would set foot on campus.
He signed with the Falcons that summer, but eventually lost a training camp competition to veteran Nick Mike-Mayer. After the Falcons released him, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers claimed him off waivers. Leavitt played in eight games during the 1977 season, hitting five of 10 field goals and all five extra points.
But later that season, Leavitt injured his knee in practice.
"Something snapped," he said. "I think they are calling it the MCL (medial collateral ligament) now."
He had two arthroscopic surgeries, but never regained his power.
"I went from kicking 75 percent of my kickoffs at Georgia into the end zone to the next year I was having trouble getting the ball to the 10," Leavitt says.
For all intents and purposes, it marked the end of his NFL career.
- - -
Actually, he says, let me tell you about a game in the early 1980s.
His NFL career over, Leavitt hooks up with a semipro team called the Jacksonville Firebirds, who play in a summer league called the American Football Association. His coach is Corky Rogers, who later becomes the winningest high school coach in Florida history. The Firebirds are playing a game in the old Gator Bowl. At the start of the game, the wind is at his back.
"I kicked a 48-yarder," Leavitt says, "and that was the shortest kick I kicked all night."
Late in the game, Leavitt has hit field goals of 48, 51, 53 and 57 yards when the Firebirds face a fourth down a few yards inside of midfield.
Down 14-12 with two minutes remaining, Rogers and Leavitt stand beside each other on the sideline.
"How far would this be?" the coach asks.
"59, 60 yards," Leavitt answers.
"Punt it," Rogers says.
Leavitt decides to take matters into his own hands.
"(Rogers) went over to talk to the offense, and I called for the field goal team," Leavitt says. "We ran out on the field, and Corky turns around and says, 'What's going on? Call a timeout! Damn it, Leavitt!' "
Leavitt kicks the field goal. The Firebirds win.
"When the newspaper came up after the game, they asked Corky, 'Who called for that kick?' " Leavitt says. "He says, 'I did.' He took credit for the damn thing.'"
- - -
For a professional athlete, football isn't a sport; it's a stage of life. It took Leavitt some time to leave it behind. He and his college sweetheart divorced. He played some semipro ball.
"It was a hard transition," Leavitt says, "but it was a good transition. This is a general statement, but it is a statement that holds true even today: For people who set goals, athletes who are goal-achieving, goal-setting, who drive themselves to get better, there's always another staircase to climb."
In 1982, he took a job with IBM in Jacksonville and began climbing up the corporate ladder. Today, he is a 51-year-old client manager responsible for a team of 25 workers.
"Now I'm probably making as much as some kickers are," Leavitt says. "But it has taken a lot of hard work."
He also is an assistant coach at the Jacksonville Bolles School, where the head coach is the same Corky Rogers who once coached him in the AFA.
Leavitt says he has coached 25 kids who have received college scholarships, including NFL players Jeff Chandler, Todd Peterson and John Kasay.
He has been remarried for 15 years. He has coached sons Gabe, 26, and Caleb, 24.
"A lot of people look at kicking as pressure," Leavitt says, "but when I coach my kickers today, I tell them, 'You've worked hard enough in all those hours kicking in the offseason by themselves, just like I did and every other player did, that you've earned the right to be there in the game.'
"I don't view it as pressure. I view it as go out there and show them what you have been working for."
- - -
The conversation is winding down.
"You just brought up a memory," he says.
Ten miles north of Weeki Wachee, there is a road that used to be made of dirt. It's called Knuckey Road. Leavitt spent his year at Hernando High living there with his grandmother and grandfather.
Daddy Bud -- that's what Leavitt called his grandfather. At this point in time, Daddy Bud hates football. Calls it a mindless sport. But Leavitt finally persuades him to attend a game during his senior season at the University of Georgia. Daddy Bud has just undergone cataract surgery. Before, he couldn't see a darn thing. Even at home, he'd have to sit so close to the TV the breath from his nostrils would tickle the screen.
After explaining his situation to Dooley, the Georgia coach arranges for Daddy Bud to watch the game from a folding chair on the sideline.
As far as football games go, Daddy Bud doesn't see much. By the fourth quarter, Georgia is drilling an overmatched Vanderbilt team 42-0. But, Leavitt says, Dooley is on a mission. He wants his star kicker to set a school record for longest field goal.
Late in the game, with Georgia facing a fourth down on the Vanderbilt 41, Dooley signals for Leavitt.
Fifty-eight yards. He nails it.
After the football sails through the goal posts, Daddy Bud jumps from his seat.
"I can see it!" he exclaims.
"For the first time since eye surgery," Leavitt says, "he got excited and jumped up and down."
Daddy Bud dabbles in journalism, writing part-time for the old Brooksville Sun-Journal newspaper, so Dooley invites him to the postgame news conference. There, in the midst of sportswriting legends like Furman Bisher and Lewis Grizzard, he gives Daddy Bud the opportunity of a lifetime.
"Gentlemen," Dooley says, "I'd like to have Bud Knuckey, Allan Leavitt's grandfather, ask the first question."
Daddy Bud isn't fazed.
"Daddy Bud stands up and goes, 'Coach, why did you run up the score on the other team?' " Leavitt recalls.
"Obviously, that was the last time he got to ask a question."
Leavitt laughs.
"If you're asking about memorable kicks," Leavitt says, "that would have to be it."
David Murphy can be reached at dmurphy@sptimes.com or (352) 848-1407.