Fomer Montana State kicker Jan Stenerud is the only pure placekicker to be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. His journey to the pinnacle of professional football is No. 13 on the Big Sky's 50 Greatest Men's Moments.
As with all great legends, the tale of Jan Stenerud’s record-setting 59-yard field goal has grown with time.
“Even now, 50 years later, people will tell me they were at that game,” Stenerud said with a laugh, standing near the site of Gatton Field, Montana State University’s home field a half-century ago, including November 6, 1965, when the Bobcats beat Montana 24-7. “The strange thing is that people tell me, ‘Oh, I remember how that kick beat the Grizzlies.’ But it was actually in the first quarter, and it made the score 3-0.”
While it may not have proved dramatic in the context of that game, Stenerud’s 59-yard field goal marked the moment he entered the national consciousness. It was the longest kick on record, standing as such for over a decade, and its story circulated throughout the national sporting scene in an age before instantaneous highlights and live look-ins.
For Stenerud, who was already well-known on the Montana State’s small campus as an All-America ski jumper, the heroics really only began with his famed 59-yarder. He finished that season with seven field goals, more than Bobcat kickers had combined to convert in the previous three seasons combined, even while his team suffered through a rash of injuries in limping to a 3-7 record.
A year later, health – and normalcy – returned to the Bobcat program. The Cats stormed to their second Big Sky title in three seasons and the first of three in a row, and Stenerud continued to achieve what had been unthinkable. He nailed 11 field goals in 1966, raising his career total to a then-MSU record of 18, and his 82 points set an NCAA record for kick scoring in a season. Following the season, Stenerud was the only small-school player named to The Sporting News All-America Team, comprised of players from the top programs in the nation.
Through all the years, that is something in which Stenerud has found considerable pride. “That was really something, seeing my name with those guys from Notre Dame and Texas and the really big schools.”
Stenerud’s professional career is well-documented. He successfully converted 373 field goals kicking for the Kansas City Chiefs (1967-79), Green Bay Packers (1980-83) and Minnesota Vikings (1984-85), the most in league history upon the conclusion of his career. He scored 1,699 points in the NFL, was named All-Pro seven times, earned six Pro Bowl nods (a figure which includes two AFL all-star games), and was named MVP of the 1970 Pro Bowl.
His journey began in Bozeman, however, on a sunny fall afternoon in 1964. After finishing dry-land training that day, he was killing time with end Dale Jackson, who had been vanquished to Gatton Field that day because an injury prevented him from practicing with the varsity. A soccer player growing up in Norway, Stenerud had kicked field goals before while cooling down from running the Gatton Field steps, but his fate took a turn that day.
Montana State basketball coach began to “stride across the field going from the old (Romney) gym to the new gym (the Fieldhouse),” Stenerud recalls noticing. At the next opportunity, Craft told legendary Bobcat football coach Jim Sweeney of his find, and after some prodding Sweeney offered Stenerud a tryout.
During practice one day the next week, “Sweeney got me down on the field and had me kick a couple,” Stenerud said. “Then they made me take my (right) shoe off and put on one of (Sweeney’s) terrible old coaching shoes. I clunked a couple, but then I found my groove and I kicked one a long way.
“Sweeney put his arm around my shoulder,” Stenerud said with a laugh, “ and said, ‘What are you doing tomorrow afternoon.’”
Ineligible for competition during the 1964 season, which was in progress, Stenerud suited up in the home finale without competing just to get used to a sport which remained foreign to him, but which had clearly impressed him as important in his adopted country.
“It was fun to go (to games),” he said of his encounters with the sport before joining the team. “Here come the cheerleaders, which we’d never seen in Norway, and here comes the team, and we all stood and sang the (school songs). It looked funny to me. They ran into the pile, and for someone who didn’t know the games, it looked like they lined up 30 seconds later and did the same thing again.”
In spite of the spectacle college football presented even a half-century ago, Stenerud said he was only marginally bothered by nerves from participating in a new sport. “I’d ski jumped in front of 80,000 in Oslo, but you don’t feel the crowd in ski jump. So I was used to competing all the time, but it was a different thing. I guess I was (nervous), but my first ski meet I was 8 years old, my first soccer match I was 8 years old, so I’d been competing all my life.”
Stenerud was an instant sensation in the fall of ’65, long before the 59-yard boomer. “At times the student section would start yelling for me (when the team neared the 50-yard line) because people hadn’t seen a ball kicked that far,” he laughed. “Every time I kicked there was a kind of commotion in the stands.”
Plenty of commotion has followed Stenerud ever since. In addition to his national honors and records, he is recognized as one of Montana State University’s greatest athletes ever, and one of its finest ambassadors. He was an inaugural member of the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame, and was honored in the Treasure State for his long-standing relationship with the state’s Special Olympics program. He helped the school raise a nearly a quarter-million dollars for athletic scholarships at MSU through a celebrity golf tournament that brought countless sporting legends to Bozeman.
He has remained equally fond of his alma mater and adopted home state through the years. “I’ve always held this town in the highest regard,” he said. “It is so beautiful, and the people are so nice.” Last summer, many of his teammates returned to Bozeman to join Stenerud when he was honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s “Hometown Hall of Famer” program.
Through all of the football glory, Stenerud still easily recalls the kick that, in many ways, launched his spectacular career and became, in its own right, legendary. He remembers his first Bobcat-Grizzly day as cool and windy, and one which MSU fans greeted with high hopes. After decades of domination by UM, the Cat-Griz series had tilted eastward by the mid-1960s. MSU had won two straight and seven of the previous nine when that day began, and would run that string of success to 17 of 22.
As it turned out, the Bobcats cruised to an easy 24-7 win on that day. And as Stenerud correctly remembered, his 59-yard field goal was just the opening salvo.
He also makes one other disclosure. “There was a good wind blowing (at his back), I’m not afraid to say that,” he says with a smile. “And on the kickoff after that field goal, I kicked it all the way over the bleachers in the end zone.”
