NO KICKS : It Was a Grand Party, but Rolf Benirschke Decides It Is Over

Among the invited guests were a snake named Irvine, a leopard named Kelai and an owl named Wahooee.

It wasn’t your average retirement party, but then, Rolf Benirschke isn’t average. The setting--the Rondavel Room at the San Diego Zoo--was tailor-made for a man whose “Kicks for Critters” project has raised more than $1 million for the zoo’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, including $50 for each field goal he kicked as a Charger.

So it was with three of his critters in the audience--all accompanied by trainers, of course--that Benirschke, 32, announced his retirement from football Wednesday. Although Benirschke’s action was anything but a surprise, he thought it best to make the news official.

Benirschke became an institution as the Chargers’ kicker in a 10-year career that ended Aug. 31 when, after he lost his job to rookie Vince Abbott, he was traded to the Dallas Cowboys for a draft choice. He was released by the Cowboys Sept. 7.

“I realize that for a lot of people, this is a questionable announcement,” Benirschke said. “The impression is that I’m already retired. But in the public’s mind and in the NFL’s mind, I’m not retired. Since several teams have called me and asked if I would kick for them, I’m making a formal announcement.”

Benirschke would not say which teams had been in contact but said one was in Super Bowl contention.

“It’s time to hang up my cleats and go on to life after football,” he said. “It wasn’t a decision that was easily arrived at. There were many people who wanted me to go to another city and keep playing.

“When I weighed everything, I asked myself which team would present a better situation for me than the one I’m in now. I finally looked at it this way: The Chargers are the team I started my career with, and they’re the team I wanted to end my career with.”

Benirschke said he would have no trouble keeping busy in retirement. He is a partner in a travel agency and a limousine service, and he has recently joined a marketing firm.

Benirschke’s father, Kurt, a native of Germany, is a professor of pathology at UC San Diego and has won international acclaim for his work. His duties prevented him from attending Wednesday, but Benirschke’s mother, Marion, was there and recalled how Rolf had gravitated into football.

“Rolf had played soccer in the Northeast (he was born in Boston), and when he was a senior at La Jolla High School, one of his friends asked him if he could kick a football. He said he would give it a try, and in the second game he played, he kicked a 44-yard field goal.

“His father wanted him to go to Stanford and study to be a veterinarian. So what happened? He went to UC Davis and played both soccer and football. Sometimes both teams played the same day, so the team physician flew him from one game to another. One day he was late for the football game, and they almost didn’t let him in. They said he didn’t look like a football player.”

After kicking 29 field goals in 43 attempts in college, including 10 in a row at one point and 14 of 19 as a senior, Benirschke was drafted in the 12th and last round of the 1977 draft by the Oakland Raiders. The Chargers picked him up on waivers before that season.

“I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a draft in football,” Marion Benirschke said. “I thought they only drafted people for the military. Rolf was the next-to-last player picked that year. I couldn’t believe he was drafted.”

Benirschke graduated from Davis with a degree in zoology, and his agent, Leigh Steinberg of Los Angeles, recalled, “His father was real dubious about football. He thought Rolf should be dissecting pig bladders instead of kicking them.”

As it turned out, Rolf retired as the third-most accurate field goal kicker in NFL history. He made 146 field goals in 208 tries for a .702 average, topped only by Eddie Murray of Detroit at .749 and Nick Lowery of Kansas City at .733. He is the Chargers’ all-time scoring leader with 766 points and holds 15 club records.

Benirschke did all this despite being stricken in 1978 with an illness that threatened his life. His weight plunged from 174 pounds to 123, and he was thought to have been suffering from Crohn’s disease.

He played again in 1979, but the illness recurred and knocked him out after four games. He fought his way back for a complete season in 1980, and in 1982 the illness was finally diagnosed as ulcerative colitis.

“There was a point where I didn’t think I’d make it,” he said. “I certainly didn’t think I’d ever play football again. I had this terrible stomach pain, then it subsided, and then it came back.

“They operated twice, and I had complications. My mother and father were at the hospital every day, and they helped me through. Once I got out of the hospital, Phil Tyne, our strength coach, walked me through my recovery. I owe a lot to a lot of people.”

For his comeback, Benirschke was honored as hero of the year by the NFL Players Assn. and voted most courageous athlete by the Philadelphia Sports Writers Assn. The Chargers initiated a blood drive to help him through his illness, and the drive now is one of the nation’s largest.

What was the biggest field goal Benirschke ever kicked?

“I would list three of them, for different reasons,” he said. “In an overtime playoff game in Miami in the ’81 season, I kicked one with only a minute left in overtime and we won, 41-38.

“Another . . . was one I made in a game at Tampa Bay. It was the next-to-last game in ‘81, and we had to win to get into the playoffs. We started on our own 20, and I wound up kicking a field goal with 45 seconds left to give us the game, 24-23.

“We also played overtime in Miami in a Thursday night game in ’80. I had been in a slump, and Howard Cosell was in the booth, talking about this kicker who was struggling. I kicked a 43-yarder, and we won, 27-24. That one actually meant the most of all to me.

“I’ve played in great games, and I’ve played in terrible games. I’ve played on great teams, and I’ve played on mediocre teams. The only thing I’ve missed is the Super Bowl, and even though one of my offers came from a team in Super Bowl contention, I just don’t want to go to another city.

“A lot of players miss the limelight after they retire, but I’m actually looking forward to anonymity.”