Jan Stenerud’s path to the Pro Football Hall began in Bozeman, Mont., but the first steps down that road were tentative.
“I had taken the train from Buffalo, NY, all the way to Bozeman,” Stenerud recalled nearly 52 years after first appearing through the departures gate at the town’s old train station on Main Street. “I didn’t know who was going to meet me, if anyone, and I remember a lady with red hair looked my direction and said, ‘Jann Stennard?’ or something like that. I looked around and there was no one else there, so I thought, ‘That must be me.’”
Montana State’s newest ski recruit couldn’t have known it at the time, but he was embarking on a journey that would lead to international fame and athletic glory that would have been unimaginable. The Fetsund, Norway, native won Big Sky Conference Ski Championships in 1965 and ’66, was an skiing All-America, and eventually parlayed his youth playing soccer into election as the first man elected to the Hall of Fame only for his kicking.
Leaving the train station, Stenerud was informed that he would be boarding with the school’s Dean of the College of Letters and Science. “I was going to stay at Dr. (Charles) Bradley’s house for two or three days until the dormitories opened, and I happened to look east,” Stenerud recalled with a laugh. “I looked left and I hardly saw anything.”
Had he glanced further back over his left shoulder Stenerud would have seen the Bridger Mountains and, in the distance, the back side of Bridger Bowl. It was there in 1965 that he won the first of his Big Sky ski titles. One year earlier, Stenerud finished fourth in the NCAA Ski Championships hosted by Dartmouth, but in between those two ski meets occurred the event that would change Stenerud’s life, and the sport of football.
It was the fall of 1964 when Stenerud and several of his ski mates concluded some training for an event the NCAA no longer sanctions in a stadium that no longer exists. After running stadium steps at Gatton Field, then the home of the football Bobcats, Stenerud warmed down by kicking a few footballs with Dale Jackson, an injured member of the Bobcat squad. It wasn't his first time doing so, but on this afternoon Montana State basketball coach Roger Craft happened to “stride across the field going from the old (Romney) gym to the new gym (the Fieldhouse),” Stenerud recalls.
Craft told legendary Bobcat football coach Jim Sweeney of his find the next chance he got, and after some prodding from Craft Sweeney offered Stenerud a tryout.
During practice one day, “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.'” As Craft remembered the afternoon, while the ‘excitable Irishman’ who served as the school’s football coach became more animated and more difficult for the young Norwegian skier to understand, Stenerud just smiled and said, “Jah. Jah.”
Unable to fit inside the roster limit that fall, Stenerud suited up without competing just to get used to a sport which remained foreign to him. Before he joined the football team, Stenerud clearly grasped the importance of football in his adopted country.
“I could see that the biggest guys on campus were the basketball players, and especially the football players,” he remembered. “It was fun to go (to games). 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. For someone who didn't know the game, it looked like they just ran into the pile, and lined up 30 seconds later and did the same thing again. But it was all very exciting.”
As a newcomer to the sport and to the team, Stenerud recalls the kindness of his new mates. “Football players, they were the big deals on campus,” he says, “and instead of making fun of me for being the new guy from a different country they made me feel very welcome. They were so nice to me. Instead of treating me like a newcomer and someone who didn't fit in they welcomed me.”
Stenerud had kicked plenty of balls as a soccer player in Norway, but when he began kicking for fun he didn't immediately utilize what is now known as 'soccer style.' “I kicked with my toe at first,” he says. “I don't know why.” Quickly, though, he transitioned to the style that made him the greatest kicker of footballs to that point in the sport's history.
Even while competing at a new sport in unfamiliar surroundings, Stenerud said he any nervousness he felt was mitigated by the familiar adrenaline rush of competition. “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 his now-famous 59-yard boomer sailed through the west goalpost at Gatton Field in that year’s Cat-Griz game. “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.”
The Bobcats finished 1965 with a 3-7 record, but bounced back in '66 to win the first of three straight Big Sky Conference titles. Months later, Stenerud signed with the Kansas City Chiefs of the fledgling AFL, and the rest is history. He kicked three field goals in KC's Super Bowl win over the Minnesota Vikings, was chosen for six Pro Bowls (including a pair of AFL all-star games), and has his jersey retired by three different organizations (MSU, the Chiefs, and the Green Bay Packers).
As a Bobcat, he was an inaugural member of the school's athletic hall of fame, and was an All-America in two unrelated sports, ski jumping and football. As a football All-America, he was selected as the top kicker in the nation regardless of division, joining players from schools like Notre Dame and Michigan State. And he held school and NCAA records upon his graduation.
A 1991 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee – years earlier he had entered his alma mater’s sporting shrine – Stenerud held several NCAA and NFL kicking records upon his retirement.
In the spring of 2013, the Hall of Fame honored Stenerud as a Hometown Hall of Famer, installing a plaque in MSU’s Brick Breeden Fieldhouse and in conjunction with the University and the community of Bozeman dedicated the circular drive in front of Bobcat Stadium as Stenerud Circle. It was a fitting honor for the man whose journey to sport immortality began with a few uncertain steps in downtown Bozeman.
