Viva Gramatica!

By Brett | Permalink | No Comments | December 4th, 2006 | Trackback

Forget the 60 yard game winner that Rob Bironas booted to beat the Colts. Forget Josh Brown’s game winner –his record-tying 4th game winning kicker of the season– to beat Denver in the late game. The award for Best Game Winning Field Goal of the Day has to go to Martin Gramatica, the spindly South American who, until last week, was thought to be dead. Two images stand out in our mind from Gramatica’s 15 seconds of fame yesterday:

1. The look of sheer and utter terror on Gramatica’s face before he went out for the kick. We’re pretty sure he pissed himself as he was trotting his 145 pounds out on to the field — and that was before Tom Coughlin called a timeout to ‘ice’ him (by the way, is ‘icing’ the kicker not the most idiotic thing EVER in the history of sports? Just end the damn game already). We loved the fact that Fox pretty much just kept the camera squarely on Gramatica during the ‘ice’ timeout, and that Martin appeared to be praying the entire time. We would have LOVED to hear how that prayer was going, and we can’t help but wonder if the words ’sweet Lord Baby Jesus’ came out of his mouth. He did, after all, play the in Nascar South Division for a several years, so it’s reasonable to think he’s gotta little Ricky Bobby in him. God, we wish that he’d been ‘mic’d up’ during that timeout.

2. The way that Jason Witten basically put Gramatica in sleeper hold after he made the kick, preventing him from going on one his famous, apeshit, ACL-blowing, soccer-style victory laps. We’re pretty sure that Bill Parcells pulled Witten aside before the kick and said something along the lines of: “Look, Jason, I don’t care how you do it, but, if he makes it, you just make sure that squirrely little bastard doesn’t take off running after the kick. We can’t have him blowin’ out his knee, if it turns out that the kid can still kick. If he misses, I want you to whack his knee as hard as you can with a lead pipe in the locker room.”

Turns out that Gramatica can still kick, and is actually pretty clutch in December and January in his career — around 80%. Seems like every move the Cowboys are making these days is paying off, including dumping Mike Vanderjagt for Gramatica. We don’t really feel strongly one way or the other about the Cowboys, but we’ll say this — the world is a better place when Martin Gramatica is kicking in the NFL.

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