Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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where have you gone? course, said he could. "I missed it to the left, long enough but to the left," Hentrich said. "He meets me at the numbers and he grabs me by the facemask and drags me to the side and starts shaking my head side to side. He says, 'Don't you ever lie to me again. If you ever lie to me you're never kicking at the University of Notre Dame again.'" With only a few minutes left in the game, the Irish moved back into field goal range. Hentrich was secretly hoping they would punt, but Holtz came over and asked him again if he could make the kick. This one was only 32 yards. He said yes, put it through the uprights and kicked for the next four years. "I truly believe that if I missed that field goal I would have never kicked again," he said. Two decades later, Hentrich walked away from a long and successful career, but he couldn't quite quit football cold turkey. He started Legacy Kicking camps in 2010 to try to pass on some of his knowledge to a younger generation of punters and kickers. Hentrich said he currently works with aspiring kickers that range from 7-year-olds to NFL free agents. The camps run mostly during the summer months, which syncs well with the slow time of Hentrich's furniture business. "I knew once I retired from football that I would miss it," he said. "This was my way to stay engaged in it. "I kicked footballs for 35 years of my life. I had a lot of stuff on my mind that I had learned and I wanted to share." So while Hentrich is keeping his hands busy crafting furniture, his foot isn't off the hook yet. ✦ The Trials Of A Triple Threat When Craig Hentrich kicked for the Irish, it was a little more commonplace for one player to handle all three specialists' jobs — kickoffs, punts and placekicking. He soon shed the placekicking duties when he reached the NFL. It's increasingly rare for a college kicker to do all three in today's game, but Notre Dame might call on junior Kyle Brindza to do just that this fall. Hentrich said that can be a challenging task. "It's extremely hard, and I don't envy anybody who has to try to do it," he said. "Doing one job is hard enough at a major college setting like Notre Dame or anywhere else just because of the pressure. You have to almost be perfect." Hentrich said he had to make sure missteps in one aspect of the game didn't bleed into others during his career with the Irish and compound any mistakes. The physical wear and tear is the bigger problem, though, according to Hentrich. He said it was easy to get worn down by the crunch-time pressure situations during a long season. And that's coming from a player who originally thought he was being slighted by getting to only kick at the college level. Hentrich was a standout high school quarterback, and at times called on his ability to throw with trick plays, but he learned quickly that he didn't want to be a target for defenders any more than he had to. "I wanted to do it until the first year when I saw Tony Rice get creamed," he said. "Then I just wanted to be a kicker." — Dan Murphy