It’s Not Always a Kick for Merten With the Bruins

It’s easier now, maybe because he has grown a shell, or because he’s older, or because he has developed selective memory, or because he has support from his coach or maybe just because of time.

Or because of Katie.

“She’s always been there for me,” Bjorn Merten says of his fiancee, Katie Johnson, who shed her aversion to dating football players when they were both freshmen at UCLA.

After all, he was a kicker, and they’re a little different.

She’s been among the few who have stood by him, five years now. She has graduated, he’s still kicking field goals for the Bruins--well, most of the time. He has been successful on seven of nine kicks in four games, and made one from 50 yards, a personal best, at Tennessee when the season was only 2 minutes 2 seconds old.

By kicking two field goals at Oregon on Saturday, and adding five extra points, he quietly slipped past Gaston Green into third place on the school scoring list, with 253 points.

The next field goal he makes will move him into second, behind John Lee.

But Merten also misses field goals, and that has been a problem for two seasons now, because one miss is too many for fans and coaches, who expect perfection from a guy whose only job is to kick.

Particularly an All-American guy.

An All-American freshman. What an awful way to start.

“Yeah, I think it did [come too fast],” he said, looking back on it from the perspective of a senior. “I definitely didn’t appreciate it for what it was worth. It was just kind of thrown upon me, totally unexpectedly, and . . . I was young and naive and I didn’t know what came along with it.

“Along with it comes a lot of expectations.”

Fans become friends when you’re an All-American and make 21 of 26 kicks in a Rose Bowl season. They slip to acquaintance status when balls start sailing wide. A miss turns friends’ faces into sympathetic glances. A few more misses bring blank stares. Too many and people start looking away.

Merten found that out quickly enough.

He made four field goals in the opener of his sophomore season, a victory over Tennessee, and the effort was greeted with a decided lack of enthusiasm. All-Americans are supposed to kick four field goals against Tennessee.

He kicked five of seven in his last five games that season. But in Games 2 through 6, he missed eight of 10 kicks, and UCLA ended up losing six in a row.

A lot of Bruins shared blame, but the kicker wasn’t sleeping nights.

“I was 19,” he said. “I was young. I’d had all that glory and I liked it, and all of a sudden I was on the total opposite end of that. I felt everyone was coming down on me. I didn’t know what to do, so I just went and stayed all by myself, alone, as often as I could. I was really reclusive.”

It wasn’t difficult. Who wants to be with a kicker who can’t kick?

“No one wanted to come close to me,” he said.

Katie helped him with his priorities, and with himself, and with learning why he was on the field in the first place.

“It was difficult, but I think while it was bothering him, it was preparing him, not only for life, but hopefully for the NFL,” she said. “You’ve got to go through tough times to prepare, and he’s sure done that.”

“He’s the kind of kid you really can’t get on very much,” Coach Bob Toledo said. “He takes things seriously, doesn’t say too much.”

Merten takes coaches very seriously. All kickers do, and many find themselves frustrated by coaches who don’t understand the lot of the kicker, the independent streak, the tenuous nature of the job.

Toledo apparently does. Saturday night in Eugene, Ore., when Merten missed from 43 yards on his first try, Toledo told him to forget it.

Said Toledo, “I told him that people miss blocks, they miss tackles, they drop passes, they throw interceptions. Kick the next one.”

Merten did, from 46 yards.

His marching orders, given by Toledo in a preseason meeting, have been to relax, that he has the job, even after a 10 for 17 junior season in which he found himself sharing kicking chores with Greg Andrasick.

“One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is, you’ve got to forget about yesterday, or even the last minute. . . . You can’t get down because you never know if four plays later you might have to get back in the game and kick again.

“Kicking’s hard. You have a lot of time between kicks to think about stuff. The important thing you have to do is, good or bad, the last thing you did, you’ve got to forget about it and go on.”

He’s going on, with a Jan. 4 date in mind and a daily countdown. It’s the date of his wedding with Katie Johnson. She’s having to deal with preparations, because he’s a little busy right now, kicking back and forgetting about the past. When you’re a kicker, that’s the only way to deal with the future.