Raising a Husker: Congdon has right mentality for a kicker
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BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
His parents used to call him Alex P. Keaton.
If you’re struggling with that name, think 1980s. Think Michael J. Fox and a sitcom called “Family Ties.” Alex was the tie-wearing Young Republican who loved Wall Street, Reagan, and lived with the philosophy that time is money.
Well, Jordan Congdon had a little Alex P. Keaton in him as a kid.
“I’d go by to pick him up after soccer and if we were late, he’d be tapping his arm because we were late,” said Jordan’s mother, Gayla.
“He was that kind of kid. I’m not kidding. Another thing about Jordan, he could play a whole soccer game and his hair was like Jimmy Johnson’s hair. He would come off the field and that hair never looked like it moved.”
Beside the resolute hair, Jordan also happened to have a leg that had him hanging out with NFL kickers by the time he was in ninth grade.
Yeah, the Nebraska freshman kicker just happens to be pals with John Carney, Darren Bennett, Brad Daluiso and Evan Arapostathis, who have all made sizeable paychecks while kicking footballs in the pros.
Already a stud at soccer as an eighth-grader, Jordan convinced his mom to fly him to a football kicking academy in Reno, Nev.
Carney and the gang — who run the ABCD Kicking Academy — liked the leg on the kid and soon they were calling him nearly every Sunday in the offseason, saying: “Hey, we’re going to go kick. Wanna go?”
It didn’t hurt that Jordan lived in San Diego, a place many NFL kickers would congregate to practice when the season was over. It also probably didn’t hurt that Jordan had a calm demeanor that surely impressed his mentors.
As a youngster, Jordan even wrote a poem about his coolness called “The Calm and Their Storm.”
“It was about how eccentric his father (Scott) is, how volatile his mother is, and how calm he is,” Gayla said.
Was it accurate? Well, maybe a little.
After Jordan missed a few kicks against Pittsburgh this year, Gayla asked her son if he was OK.
Jordan’s reply: “Yeah, but are you OK?”
“It’s more nerve-racking for his parents,” Gayla said. “Whenever (Nebraska) moves that ball across the 50, it’s like, ‘OK, here we go.’ If your son’s a quarterback, he may go out and throw an incompletion, but he’ll get to go out there and try it again. When my son goes out there, it’s to make it or miss it.”
Jordan’s tough mentality was perhaps best on display in this year’s Baylor game, in which he had three field goals.
What made his performance particularly impressive was that he made those kick in the wake of his grandfather’s death and his girlfriend being in a car wreck in Denver.
“My husband and I both said, ‘I don’t know how he did it,” Gayla said. “We don’t have that mental makeup that he does.”
Actually, Scott and Gayla have a pretty special makeup themselves. Together they work for Amor Ministries, a charitable organization they’ve helped make go since 1981.
Amor Ministries currently attracts 25,000 people a year from all over the world to build roughly 1,200 homes a year for the poor in Mexico.
Scott and Gayla actually met in Tijuana, Mexico, while Gayla was living there and helping out at an orphanage.
Tijuana is one of the main target areas for Amor Ministries. Of all the gut-wrenching sights, perhaps none is tougher on the eyes than the Tijuana trash dump, where people shelter themselves beneath cardboard shacks.
Scott and Gayla adopted a 10-year-old girl who once lived in the Tijuana dump. Her name is Sanjuana. She’s 33 now.
Because of this ministry, Jordan has spent many hours in Mexico. From those visits and from the grade school he went to, he learned to speak fluent Spanish as a youngster.
“I can remember him at six months old, on my back on a backpack walking around the (Mexican) communities,” Scott said.
When you’ve seen some of the things Jordan has, a 40-yard field goal hardly seems a challenge.
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7438 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
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