Sports

Monday, Dec. 01, 2008

Brian Milne: Gardner on target, but it was too little, too late for Cal Poly

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Andrew Gardner is an easy target.

At 5-foot-7, 162 pounds, the Mustangs’ junior place-kicker is dwarfed by just about everyone on the Cal Poly sideline — even some of the ball boys.

When he trots on the field, you can’t help but point a finger, especially after all of the ups and downs the Cal Poly kicking game has endured this season.

Gardner wasn’t much of a factor in the Cal Poly football team’s 49-35 loss to Weber State on Saturday, but he was certainly worth watching.

The pep in his step. The way he calmly measured up those five PATs as if they were nothing. As if last week wasn’t the “worst of his life.”

Seven days after shanking three PATs and becoming the fall guy for Cal Poly’s overtime loss at Wisconsin, the fourth-year walk-on from Davis made a statement just by showing up for the first-round playoff game in Alex G. Spanos Stadium.

His kicks didn’t make amends for the damage that was done in Madison, but it was something to build on for next year and helped exorcise some of those demons that followed him home from that one-point loss to the Badgers.

“The hardest thing was looking into my teammates’ eyes afterward and knowing I let them down,” Gardner recalled of the Wisconsin loss. “I could care less about the other stuff. It was the ride that night on the bus. I can’t put into words what it felt like. It was the biggest game of our seniors’ lives. A game that could have put us on the map. … And all I could say was: ‘I am truly sorry. I wish I could take those kicks back.'"

If only the world around him were as compassionate.

While his teammates and coaches put the Wisconsin loss on the entire team, embracing Gardner as an important member of “their family,” it wasn’t as if people were scrambling to sit with him on the flight home to San Luis Obispo.

So goes the life of a kicker. They love you when you make ’em (San Diego State). They hate you when you miss ’em (Montana).

Only the Madison meltdown was made worse thanks to national exposure, the Big Ten Network capturing that heartbreaking image of Gardner, alone on the Mustangs sideline with his facemask buried in the turf as the Badgers celebrated wildly at midfield.

By the time the team’s flight landed, the hateful messages were already waiting for him. Not for his gang of teammates, who shouldered the load for the loss. Or the coaches, who have failed to give a scholarship to a top-level kicker for years. Or the athletic department, whose budget has produced a practice field without field goal posts where kickers must practice booting balls between a pair of PVC pipes.

“It’s been really hard, hearing stuff from people I don’t know and also old high school friends I would’ve never expected this from,” he said. “It’s been hard on me. It’s been hard on my family. I mean, I’m a New York Jets fan, but when our kicker misses a field goal in overtime, I would never make that jump and make a personal attack. I don’t care if you miss 100 field goals. It’s not a reflection on that person.”

Yet, Gardner was ripped on every message board, blog and facebook page from here to Madison.

Former high school teammates called him a disgrace to Davis High. Others went as far as to say he intended to throw the game and joked that he should commit suicide.

BleacherReport.com had an entire post dedicated to Gardner’s misses, calling him the Alexis Serna of 2008. Serna, for those who have forgotten the name, missed three PATs in his debut against defending champion LSU in 2004. His Oregon State team lost in overtime 22-21, ending with Serna crumbling to the ground after missing the third PAT.

Serna, however, quickly turned around his career, making his final 144 PAT attempts and winning the Lou Groza Award (presented to the nation's top college kicker) as a senior. That one-time “choke artist” was one of the many supporters who reached out to Gardner last week.

“I got an e-mail from him, and that really meant a lot to me,” Gardner said. “He just said to surround yourself with friends and family. He said, ‘You know you can do it, so go out there and do it. Don’t think about all this other negative stuff.’”

So what was racing through Gardner’s mind on Saturday?

Nothing more than the kicking basics … “Take your steps. Look down. Make sure your steps are correct. Swing, and put the ball where it needs to go.”

The ball went where it needed to go on all five attempts against the Wildcats.

Instead it was Cal Poly's star seniors who contributed to four of the Mustangs’ five fatal miscues.

But years from now, when people look back at this past season, Cal Poly’s record-breaking pass-catch duo of Ramses Barden and Jonathan Dally won’t be remembered for the miscues on Saturday.

Gardner, however, might never live down what happened in Madison.

“My whole life I’ve had to overcome difficult situations, so this is nothing new,” Gardner said. “I was told I wasn’t even going to make the team when I came here as a freshman. … I’ve been fighting that adversity my entire life, so I look at it like just another bump in the road.”

But Gardner knows the road for a college kicker is a long one and hopes it’s a much smoother ride next season, which will be his senior year at Cal Poly.

“It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with,” he said. “But if that’s the toughest thing that’s going to happen to me for the rest of my life, you can bet I’m going to end up the happiest guy in the world.”

Tribune web editor and columnist Brian Milne can be reached at bmilne@thetribunenews.com.