What PR People and NFL Kickers Have in Common

As I was watching tonight's Monday Night Football game between the San Francisco 49ers and Phoenix Cardinals, I was reminded of an essay I wrote comparing NFL kickers and PR people. It's pretty crude and rough, but hopefully you'll get the idea I was going for.

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What PR People and NFL Kickers Have in Common
by Charles Var

The crowd roared as the New Orleans Saints’ kicker trotted onto the field with 1:55 left on the clock to try and kick the winning field goal against the Denver Broncos. The snap. The hold. The kick. No good! The kick sailed wide right. For this kicker on this day, there were no high fives, slaps on the back, congratulatory head-butts or the all-too familiar ride off the field on the shoulders of fellow players. No, for this kicker there were only cold stares of disappointment from fellow teammates – if they bothered to make eye contact at all.

So is the life of an NFL kicker. A champ one minute; a chump the next. Their value to the team is measured solely on the result of their last kick. Who cares about last week's winning kick? So too is the life of many PR professionals who work day in and day out to create positive awareness for their company, product or cause. What they did last week, last month or last year matters little. All that matters now is the next big announcement or next big story.

NECESSARY EVIL

The similarities between an NFL kicker and PR professional don’t just stop at the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately nature of their jobs. They also both suffer from the constant criticism, misunderstanding and envy of the people working around them. If you've ever played organized football and run endless amounts of wind sprints while the kicker frolicked on the sidelines kicking balls, you know the sentiment. “Kickers are pussies!”

Executives within businesses often view PR professionals in the same way, assuming the job entails nothing more than schmoozing at fancy parties, traveling the world on a bottomless expense account and lounging with the big wigs. What few people see is the groveling, scraping, negotiating, pleading, arguing, and fighting that’s behind every single piece of media coverage they generate.

NFL kickers and PR people are also plagued with the common misperception that what they do isn't that difficult or complicated. “I could do that easily if that’s all I did all day long,” many people reason. The truth of the matter is that they’re probably right. Practice kicking a football enough, and almost any athletic position player could kick a field goal. The same is true about PR. Take any reasonably smart and educated executive, and they too could learn to do the basic job of a PR professional.

Ironically, there are a lot of occupations and jobs out there that are reasonable simple to learn and even master. Take a commercial pilot. Today’s modern aircraft are so well designed and so well equipped with sophisticated computer systems, that most of them literally fly themselves. But how many of us think to ourselves, “I could do that, no problem.” Even well educated and trained doctors performing surgery admit that the routine nose job is a relatively simple procedure. Yet, surgeons are among the most respected and well-paid professionals on the planet.

So if an athletic position player could learn to kick and a smart executive could learn to do PR, why don’t teams and companies just do away with kickers and PR professionals all together? They answer is simple. They can’t. If they did, they’d be at a major competitive disadvantage.The truth is that it’s not enough just to be able to kick a ball or do the basic PR jobs. What counts is whether you can do it consistently, and more importantly, do it when it counts.

Kicking a football off a tee in practice is easy. Kicking a football in the last seconds of a game in front of 70,000 screaming fans while 11 monsters from the opposing team fly from all angles at you is hard. Likewise, writing or editing a press release from your office on an idle Tuesday afternoon is easy. Convincing an overworked, underpaid and pissed off journalist who listens to countless corporate blowhards that your company is interesting, different and worth writing about it is hard.

Still, each time a kicker misses the winning field goal, I suspect there's no shortage of upset position players who grumble, “I could have kicked that field goal.” However, I suspect by the time the next practice rolls around, few if any step up to ask the head coach for the kicking job. And even if they did, any smart NFL coach who really cared about winning would surely tell the player to just worry about his own job.

I hear the same thing in Corporate America all the time. CEOs, heads of marketing, and even the occasional ego maniacal venture capitalist constantly criticize PR professionals and belittle their jobs. “You don’t need to hire a PR firm or PR person” they preach. But to this day, I've yet to witness any one of them take on the job full time themselves and do any better. And I don’t mean those wanna-be CEOs at start ups who work from their parents basement and do everything from business development to balancing their business checkbook with Quicken. I mean the real CEOs of real businesses. Perhaps more importantly, I've yet to find one single successful company – small or large – who doesn't have a veteran PR professional somewhere on the payroll with the skills and balls to kick it through the up rights when it really counts.

Like them or hate them, kickers and PR professionals are necessary and important parts of any successfully team. If you don’t believe me, by all means give it a shot. But trust me, the only thing you’ll be kicking is yourself.