Finally, a foot in the door
Veteran Feagles in 1st Super Bowl
CHANDLER, Ariz. - The family's wholesale food business is still up the road in Scottsdale. His home is in nearby Paradise Valley, where he thought he would settle down when his football career finally came to an end. He still has a circle of friends with whom he can share stories, tell tales about Phoenix's Gerard High School, where he was a six-time letterman in football, basketball, and baseball.
And he can talk about an NFL career that began when Ronald Reagan was president, Tom Brady was 10 years old, and Eli Manning was finishing up second grade.
Jeff Feagles can talk about the stops he made in New England, Philadelphia, Arizona, Seattle, and finally New York. He can point with pride to a professional career that began May 1, 1988, when the Patriots signed him as a free agent punter out of the University of Miami, and includes NFL records for most punts (1,585), punting yardage (65,793), punts inside the 20-yard line (508), and consecutive regular-season games (320).
What Feagles couldn't talk about was the experience of playing in a Super Bowl.
Until now.
At 41, older than any player who participated in the previous 41 Super Bowls, Feagles came home yesterday with the Giants, who will meet the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII Sunday evening. He has indeed seen it all from a punter's perspective, but he is also exposed to the fresh-eyed enthusiasm of a youngster like long snapper Zak DeOssie, who was 3 years old when Feagles took his first snap in the NFL.
"I'm a rookie again," said Feagles. "An old rookie. I definitely had my doubts about it ever happening. Now it's kind of like getting my cake and eating it, too."
As the Giants arrived in Arizona yesterday, Feagles was hardly the main attraction. But he never has been. He simply has been more consistent than any other punter in NFL history.
Giants coach Tom Coughlin saw that a couple of years ago when Feagles was thinking about retiring at age 39, after two solid seasons with New York.
"I'm very honest with the guys," said Coughlin. "And I thought Jeff could continue to play, whether he was 38 or 39 or whatever he was. He was in great shape and a very, very good athlete and still performing at a very high level."
Life as a punter seldom means job security, especially for free agents, who can be as much a hunch choice of coaches as anything; it was that way for Feagles when then-Patriots coach Raymond Berry signed him. But Feagles has athletic skills and a competitive instinct that coaches notice.
Former Patriots coach Rod Rust was the only NFL coach who cut Feagles, in the spring of 1990. His first reaction was that the short ride was over; he started to think about life outside football. But then the Eagles called, and he was on his way to what has become a 20-year career.
Over that time, he was never in the right place at the right time to take part in a Super Bowl. Now he is. And the kid in the man is evident. He said he had to fight the feeling that the moment would never come.
"I started to lose hope a little bit," he said. "Every year you just try and make it through. Just being with the Giants the last couple of years and losing in the first round, the window of opportunity starts to close a little bit."
Until this season, the furthest Feagles had advanced in postseason play was in 1992, when Philadelphia lost a divisional game to the Cowboys.
And then, in the chill of a Green Bay evening, it changed. Feagles was the holder on Lawrence Tynes's 47-yard field goal in overtime that gave the Giants a 23-20 win in the NFC Championship game.
"It was pretty memorable. I had a hand in it," said Feagles, laughing. "Literally."
After all those years, and all those kicks, Jeff Feagles was finally coming home, playing in the final game of an NFL season.
Mark Blaudschun can be reached at blaudschun@globe.com 