IF there was a hall of fame for stories of the human spirit, courage and perseverance, Younghoe Koo’s will surely be in it.
It’s a story made for film like the movie Rudy, where the title character, played by Sean Astin, never gives up on his dream of playing college football for one of the sport’s storied programs, the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
Younghoe Koo plays kicker for the National Football League’s (NFL) Atlanta Falcons. He is only the fourth Korean to ever play in the NFL. The story isn’t that he’s only one of a handful of Koreans to make it to the NFL, it’s how he got there.
According to NFL.com, “During a lunch break, kids were playing two-hand-touch football,” Koo told The Bill Simmons Podcast in 2017. “They said, ‘Punt it,’ because they knew I played soccer. And they saw me punt the ball and they were like, ‘Oh man. Look at this kid! You should come out and play football with us.’ And that’s how I signed up for football.”
“My middle school coach, my teammate’s dad, came to my house and told my dad, ‘He has a future in [football],’” Koo told Simmons. “Because my dad looked at it like I was just kicking a football. But my middle school coach explained to my dad, ‘You can get a scholarship and you can have a future in this.’”
In an ESPN.com article, “Koo grew up playing soccer, but one day in sixth grade, John Byon, a Korean-American classmate, invited Koo to play football at recess. Byon told him to kick the ball to start off the game.
“I s— you not, it was straight out of The Sandlot. Straight out of a sports movie,” Byon told me in 2017. “The ball just flew over the field we were playing in and over the fence. It was like, ‘Oh my god. You have to play football.’”
“I didn’t know what kicking was,” Koo says. “My parents didn’t know what football was.”
Koo landed a full athletic scholarship to play for Georgia Southern University where he missed only three field goals out of 29 attempts.
Koo was signed as an undrafted free agent in 2017 but was waived after four games in favor of a more consistent and more experienced veteran player.
Koo became sort of a young journeyman after the Chargers stint, moving from the Patriots roster where he was once again waived to the Atlanta Legends of the Alliance of American Football where he was 14 of 14 on field goals which caught the attention of the Atlanta Falcons who signed him.
Thanksgiving of 2019 made both the fans and the organization realize that they had a keeper on their hands.
NFL.com says, “There’s a lot to pack here. In summary: Koo went from Korea to Georgia, then shot a viral kicking video that got him to California and back to Georgia in time to lead all pro kickers in made field goals (29), total points (109), and field goal percentage (96.7%) in 2020.”
During those times, things didn’t go so well, according to ESPN.com, “I played it cool, but emotionally …” Koo said, “I was emotional. I was just there, and then the next thing I know, I’m unemployed. I didn’t really know what was going on, man. I didn’t know what to think. It was my first time experiencing that.”
Koo gave himself three years, just three years to make something happen or else walk away. “I tried to get a backup plan, this and that, but it just never sat right with me. I felt I was wasting energy,” Koo said. “If it doesn’t work out—then I’ll put all my energy into something else. But I can sit at a desk and get a job when I’m 40. I can’t kick a ball when I’m 40.”
ESPN.com explains what has happened to Younghoe since then, “When Koo’s deadline came up in April 2020, his life couldn’t have felt further from that day in Los Angeles. This season, the now-26-year-old Atlanta Falcon finds himself as the top point scorer in the NFL, November’s NFC Special Teams Player of the Month, a point-scoring miracle for fantasy football owners and a social media sensation among football Twitter.”
Ava Maurer, Koo’s girlfriend since he was in eighth grade, explains his work ethic, “If something’s not going as planned, if he gets cut, that only makes him work harder,” Maurer said. “So I knew that although [getting cut by the Chargers] was upsetting at that moment, it wouldn’t stop him.”
For Koo, the cherry on top of the sundae may have been last season, when all his hard work and perseverance were acknowledged when he was selected to his first Pro Bowl, the NFL equivalent to the National Basketball Association All-Star Game.
Koo’s journey to the NFL has been anything but conventional and ordinary, the same article says, “He moved to the United States with his mother as a sixth-grader and didn’t speak any English when he first enrolled in school in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a short ride from New York City. At first, Koo gravitated toward the familiar—kids who came from similar backgrounds, spoke fluent Korean and ate the same food.”
As I was doing my research for this article, it dawned upon me that special teamers, particularly kickers, as ESPN.com writer Joon Lee explained, “That early sense of independence—and the isolation he remembered from being an immigrant and outsider when he first moved to the United States—has aligned well with the isolation of being a kicker in the NFL. Special-teamers train independently from offensive and defensive players walking through the week’s game plans—and for Koo, success and failure falls solely on the strength and accuracy of his foot.”
Maurer said, “As you are coming from a different country and you’re learning, you do have to work a lot for yourself and you lean on yourself a lot more,” Maurer says. “That does correlate to the kicker mentality, because you’re not relying on anyone really but yourself to make that kick. You’re not throwing the ball and hoping someone catches it. It’s you. It’s just you.”
Read full article on BusinessMirror