It’s difficult to overstate the importance of former NFL kicker Tom Dempsey, who died April 4 of the coronavirus, in the lore of the city of New Orleans.
Dempsey, who was born with no toes and no fingers on his right foot and hand, respectively, is famous for the 63-yard field goal he kicked in Tulane Stadium to win a 1970 game for the woebegone New Orleans Saints over the playoff-bound Detroit Lions. The kick set the NFL record by an astonishing seven yards, breaking a mark that had held for 17 years. Except for one 64-yarder in the much thinner air of the Mile High City’s stadium in Denver in 2013, nobody yet has made a longer kick in the 49 seasons since.
In the Crescent City, that kick stood as the single best moment in the first 20 years of a Saints franchise that had never boasted a single-season winning record. Those 1970 Saints won only two of 14 games.
New Orleanians, being six feet below sea level and plagued by hurricanes, floods, yellow-fever epidemics, and other pathologies, have always seen themselves as underdogs. Dempsey, with his stub-foot and half-hand, was a perfect symbol for the city’s fans — especially because, off the field, he was one of those open-hearted, beer-drinking personalities perfectly at home in French Quarter haunts.
Dempsey’s kick was so extraordinary for its era (and for a woeful team) that it immediately spawned a cottage industry of celebratory kitsch, not the least of which was a two-minute song released on a 45 LP, especially beloved by Crescent City children, called “The Mighty Boot of Dempsey.” (Parts of it, in segments, can be heard here: “Then came the mighty boot of Dempsey/To make the football fly/It’s the might boot of Dempsey/Two seconds, do or die!”)
Nobody in New Orleans except those 66,910 in the stadium saw or even heard the kick live. NFL home games back then were “blacked out” locally on television. And, get this, the announcer’s voice in the radio broadcast was drowned out just as the ball was about to be snapped. All that listeners heard was, literally, a buzzing sound. As it turns out, a giant swarm of bees flew into the radio transmitter at the most inopportune moment. Not a soul heard the radio-man describe the kick tumbling through the uprights.
Still, it was one of those moments about which every Saints fan then living could tell you where they were when it happened. For example, my family has held Saints season tickets for the life of the franchise; that game remains the one and only contest for which my Uncle Carter requested the tickets. So I, at age six, was not at the game, but almost exactly a mile away playing basketball in a friend’s backyard.
Suddenly, we heard, even at that great distance, a sound the likes of which neither of us had ever experienced. There was an eruption of crowd noise, a rumbling and yelling that just lasted and lasted and lasted. About 15 minutes later, a friend of one of my friend’s older brothers climbed over the wall behind my friend’s backyard, knelt atop the wall with hands raised in triumph, and half-gasped (he had been running), half yelled: “Dempsey! 63-yard kick! Saints win!”
Then he jumped back off the wall and kept running down the alley to who-knows-where.
Some New Orleans cops gave Dempsey several cases of beer in the locker room after the game, and Dempsey didn’t emerge from his fog until the following Thursday. The Saints lost all six of their remaining games that year, by a combined score of 174-68. And New Orleans kids kept spinning their 45 LPs, secure in the knowledge that club-footed miracles could and did happen, even if you had to strain to hear them, somewhere amid the buzz.
