Mark Moseley: Still Kicking at Age 47

Mark Moseley made the tackle on a kickoff, took a forearm in the back of the head and retaliated, earning his first-ever unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

“They had been taking some cheap shots at me all night,” Moseley said. “Something snapped in me and I went after him. It was first penalty I’ve ever gotten in my life, and I’ve been playing football since pee-wees.”

When the semi-pro Fredericksburg Generals enticed the former Washington Redskins kicker out of retirement this fall, they expected him to hit field goals, not 300-pound linebackers.

He ended up doing both. At 47 years old--10 years after leaving the NFL--the only kicker ever to win the NFL’s MVP award can still split the uprights from 50-plus yards.

That is, if the ball is in the right spot.

“I’ve had snaps hit me in face mask, in the middle of the helmet,” Moseley said. “The holder, he gets a little nervous. Because he’s holding for me, he thinks he’s got to be perfect.”

So what on earth was Moseley, who owns a Super Bowl ring and was a two-time Pro Bowl selection in his 13 years with the Redskins, doing mixing it up with players half his age for free in front of 1,000 or so people on Saturday nights this fall?

“My wife thinks I’m crazy, as I’m sure a lot of people do,” Moseley said. “But they’ve never been there. You have to have been there, done that, seen that, to see where I’m coming from. I love playing football. This gives me a chance to do something I love to do.”

Moseley, who admits he’s surprised that he doesn’t wake up sore after a game, has kept himself in shape since the mental pressures of his position led him to retire from the NFL in 1986. He often works out at Redskin Park in Ashburn, run an annual camp for kickers, and has put up goal posts in the yard of his Northern Virginia house so that his son--a straight-on kicking high school sophomore who can also make one from 50--can practice with dad.

But Moseley, who runs a successful Fairfax-based travel business, had no idea he’d play competitive football again, at least not until he gave in to the pleas of his friend and Generals coach Jamie King, whose Mason Dixon League team was struggling just to make extra points early this season.

“They lost a game to Richmond by one point, and they missed three extra points and a couple of field goals,” Moseley said. “He called me up on that Sunday after the Saturday game and said ‘Listen, we’re dying down here.’ Either you got to find me a kicker or you got to come kick for me.”

Moseley gave it a shot, becoming both a player and a special teams coach as he tried to mold a workable snap, hold and kick routine. Field goals were still erratic adventures, but Moseley didn’t miss an extra point all season.

The Generals also didn’t lose another game after Moseley joined the team. They finished 11-1, winning the Mason Dixon title last week with a 35-14 victory over Hampton.

“It was big deal for them,” said Moseley, who broke his face mask making a tackle in the championship game. “It was a big deal for me, too. Of course, once you’ve been to the Super Bowl, it doesn’t quite match that.”

In the title game, Moseley had field goals of 42 and 47 yards negated by penalties. Before the games and during the team’s Thursday night practices, he was making them from 52 with room to spare. Given that the Redskins current kicker, Eddie Murray, can sometimes barely scrape the crossbar from 50, why isn’t Moseley playing at RFK Stadium instead of Maury Stadium?

“I quit the game when I did because I was just mentally burned out,” Moseley said. “Physically I was still kicking the ball well. Mentally, I was tired of the pressure. And I could probably go back now, or I could have gone back 6-7 years ago and been OK mentally, but I was just tired.

“People had such high expectations of me because of what I had done in my career that they expected me to be able to do that forever. A lot of the things I did had only been done once, and that was by me. To duplicate that a second time was almost impossible. I was hard for me to realize that myself because I expected myself to reach those high goals all the time, and when I couldn’t reach them, it really tormented me. So now I’m going out there and doing these things for the fun of it, and I’m enjoying it.”

Moseley so enjoyed himself that he’s planning to play again next year, possibly involving himself more to promote a hodgepodge league that had to cancel one game this year because York’s bus broke down on the way to a game.