Johnny Hekker Is the Most Interesting Punter in the World

While I explain the ground rules, Johnny Hekker talks smack. We’ve lured the  St. Louis Rams punter to the city’s Tilles Park early on a fall afternoon. The sun hangs high, threatening our freckled skin, but the grass is sleeping in, snuggled beneath a blanket of auburn and scarlet leaves. We’re not here to gaze at the foliage, though. We’ve come to answer one of life’s most pressing questions:

Who is more athletic, an NFL punter or a magazine editor?

To settle this score scientifically, we devised a series of competitions, arranged in a best-of-five format. I mention to Hekker that if he wins the first three, the final two won’t be necessary. “That’s what I’m aiming to do,” he says, “wipe the floor with you.”

He’s come dressed for battle, in a pair of Kevin Durant basketball shoes (a gift from Sam Bradford), Jordan shorts, and a Mob Squad T-shirt. “A group of rams is called a mob,” he says. “Most people don’t know that.”

Not to be outdone, I’m sporting a pair of Mizuno sneakers I’ve had since high school, LeBron James shorts, and a bright pink T-shirt I got for winning a rec volleyball league.

We begin on the basketball court. I try to strike fear in my opponent’s heart by mentioning I played in high school. Because the punter has 6 inches and 80 pounds on me—and because I don’t want an angry Rams mob after me, should he roll an ankle—we decide to play Horse, a noncontact shooting contest, instead of one-on-one.

Hekker begins the game with “one of my famous starting shots.” He calls for a bank-shot free throw and bounces it in. Going glass from the foul line is universally loathed by basketball purists—so of course a punter would do it. I attempt to match his shot and miss. I’ve got an H.

“A waterfall begins with one drop,” Hekker taunts. He nails a three from the right wing. I fire a brick. H-O. “You’re a ho, Bill.”

Hekker finally misses, and it’s my turn. I go for an eyes-closed free throw, a classic Michael Jordan maneuver. Swish.

“I wasn’t even looking to make sure the eyes were closed,” Hekker protests.

“I saw it,” confirms the photographer who’s here to capture the spectacle.

Hekker misses, giving him his first letter. He curses under his breath. For a professional football player, he seems to be taking this seriously, pleading with the ball, cheering his makes, coaching himself in third person.

He misses from half court. (“Dang it!” he yells. “I thought that was going to be a net-ripper right there!”) I miss from behind the hoop. (“Yes! Yes! Yes!” he exclaims.) A shot from the baseline sends me to H-O-R, though Hekker misses the opportunity to call me a whore.

I get him to H-O on a shot from the left wing, but he sends me to H-O-R-S on a pull-up three. “I got to put the nail in the coffin,” he declares. “This is my signature shot: jump from the free-throw line, between the legs, lay it up.”

He uses his long arms to pull off the complicated motion, rolling the ball into the hoop. I surprise both him and myself by getting the ball through my legs and to the rim, but it bounces away.

“I’m not trying to say I stereotyped you,” he says, “but when I first met you, I didn’t anticipate that being as close of a game as it was.”

Hekker leads 1–0.

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Many professional athletes understandably loathe media. How would you like 100,000 screaming people watching as you work, booing every time you mess up, then a bunch of reporters crowding around to ask why you choked? You’d probably be terse, too. Players at the other end of the spectrum use media as a bullhorn, bursting into self-aggrandizing rants, promoting their “personal brand.”

Hekker’s found a sweet spot between extremes. Either in social or traditional media, he’s always up to something, but it seems to come from a place of joy, not ego. “I’ve always considered myself something of a yes man,” Hekker says when asked how he ends up on TV so often.

In September, Hekker and linebacker Jo-Lonn Dunbar hosted Ram-Oke, a charity karaoke party to benefit SSM Health Care’s Kick Cancer initiative. Hekker’s dancing to “Thriller” was so bad, the video made TMZ.com under the headline “St. Louis Rams Punter: The White(er) Michael Jackson.”

He has a weekly radio show on 101 ESPN, and last year, he did a regular spot on FOX 2 KTVI-TV called Hang Time with Hekker. In one episode, he attempted to anchor a newscast. In another, what was billed as a gift-wrapping contest turned into a slideshow of embarrassing childhood photos. Here he is in SpongeBob SquarePants boxers; there he is playing with dinosaur toys. In a third segment, he and a reporter raced go-karts. Afterward, a coach mentioned he might not want to do that again.

“I’m not the best guy on TV,” he says. “I hocked a loogie during one of the segments. I had a cold. I didn’t know we were live yet. It was bad.”

He has a longstanding Twitter stunt called #JohnnyHekkerSketchTime. Followers make suggestions, then Hekker draws them, signs them, and tweets pictures back to the fans. He’s also a gamer. Look him up on Xbox One; his tag is WhatTheHekk. He even took a flight with the Blue Angels, after a coach dared him on Twitter. The pilot flipped and rolled. They broke the speed of sound.

“I’m like pasted to my seat,” Hekker says. “I almost lost my lunch. It was so much fun.”

His most famous off-field stunt, though, was his collaboration with Dude Perfect, a group of friends who turned their trick-shot basketball videos into an online sensation. Appearing in a “Punters are people too” shirt, Hekker kicks a football into a basketball hoop from 40 yards away, then joins the Dude Perfect dudes in going bananas. The YouTube video, titled “NFL Kicking Edition,” has more than 10 million views.

In the interview portion of the film, Hekker is asked which three Pokémon characters he’d take into battle. Without hesitating, he responds, “Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur—the three main Pokémon styles: grass, fire, and water. I don’t think you could be beat with those three.” Then he punts a stuffed Pikachu.

Yeah, he’s not a typical professional athlete.

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I pull out a pair of tennis rackets and a can of balls. Since I lost at basketball, I decide to give myself the upper hand this time, taking the serve, the better racket, and the better side, forcing Hekker to look into the sun.

We decide to play best-of-three games. We both confess to being terrible, which I hope will work to my advantage. “I feel like you’re just sandbagging here,” Hekker says, “and you’re really good at tennis.”

It doesn’t take long to prove him wrong: I smack two wild serves for a double fault. Hekker dances back and forth while waiting to return, mimicking the motions of a professional. I win three straight points on his errors. “Get it together, John,” he chastises himself. He climbs back to deuce, but I win when he hits a shot in the net and shanks another off the fence.

“Idiot!” he yells at himself.

Hekker has the serve for the second game. “1–0. Back’s against the wall,” he says, focusing. Taking advantage of his superior height and strength, Hekker rips his first serves. When they’re in, I have no chance at a return, but he usually misses. His second serves are lolli-pops. “Weakest serve in America coming at you,” he says.

We trade points and exultations. “Come on!” he cries.

“Vámonos!” I scream back.

Between points, I accidentally hit a ball back to him when he’s not looking.

“Dude, are you trying to kill me?” he exclaims.

“Take that,” I shoot back. Sportsmanship is for sissies.

We end up at deuce again. “John, you need to win this,” Hekker says. “Eye of the tiger.”

He wins the next two points to take the game. Before game three, we play rock-paper-scissors at the net. I pick paper; he goes rock. I take the serve for the decisive final bout. He chooses to switch sides, so I’ll have to fight the sun.

Again, I begin with a double fault. The next point, he hits a ball that sticks in a crack on my side of the court. “I’m definitely complaining about that when I write about this,” I promise.

Then I battle back to tie the game, 30–30. “I have some graffiti over here that’s messing with my concentration,” Hekker complains.

On the next point, after exchanging a few shots, I hit a ball into the middle of the court, right at Hekker’s feet. He pulls his elbow in next to his body and tries to flick at the ball, with disastrous results.

“Did you get a photo of that?” I ask the photographer.

“The disgrace?” he responds. “Yes.”

“It was a terrible, terrible choice of shot,” Hekker laments. “I didn’t go with normal tennis. I went with spatula.”

I win the next point to seal the match.

“You were who I thought you were, and I let you off the hook!” he gripes.

We’re tied, 1–1.

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Hekker grew up in Bothell, Washington, a Seattle suburb that Hekker describes as “awesome” and that, if a cursory glance at Wikipedia is any indication, is known for a large chicken statue. So it’s no surprise that he says life there revolves around high-school sports. Johnny is the youngest of five boys, and as a child he wanted nothing more than to follow in his brothers’ footsteps by playing football and basketball for the Bothell High School Cougars.

The family’s lives revolved around sports and their church, where Joy Hekker worked and Johnny went to day care. “I was able to build my faith and spend a lot of quality time around quality people and be brought up the right way,” Johnny says.

One of his first sports experiences came in a noncompetitive Christian soccer league. They didn’t keep score, “but me and my brothers, we couldn’t be stopped,” he says. One time, when his brothers’ team had a few players out sick, Johnny got to play with them. At one point, little Johnny and the biggest kid on the other team went running after a loose ball. “I knocked him over, and I remember I felt so cool after that,” he says.

With four older brothers, he was usually the one who ended up on the ground. “I got my lumps and bruises,” he says. “It was mostly necessary tough love.” The boys played football and basketball in the street. He’d rebound for his older brothers. Then, when it was his turn to shoot, they’d leave him to chase his own ball. They taught him respect. He gives them credit for where he’s ended up.

Johnny’s father, Bob, worked at Fircrest School, a residential facility for adults with severe disabilities. (He and Johnny have matching WWJD tattoos.) “It kind of just instilled a bit of gratitude in your heart for how blessed you are,” Johnny says.

In high school, he was the quarterback and punter, but because the team was good, they rarely needed to punt. He led the Cougars to the state final twice. Western Washington University recruited him as a quarterback, and going there would have meant playing with his brother. But whenever Johnny and his father would drive past the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium, Johnny would say, “Dad, I’m going to play there one day.”

“You can do that,” his father would answer. “Let’s make that happen.”

He sent a highlight video to Oregon State University, where the coach had shown some interest. Johnny tacked a couple of punts on the end. The Beavers already had six quarterbacks, but they did need a punter. Their special-teams coach called. Johnny could come as a preferred walk-on. There would be an open competition for the punting job. Whoever won would get a scholarship.

To prepare, he went to Alabama to work with Mike McCabe of One on One Kicking. “He had a lot of work to do,” McCabe says. “He had potential, but he had such great work ethic.”

Because he’s so big, Hekker’s leg was slow. They worked all summer on speed, trying to get more pop into his kicks, having him drive his leg through the ball.

Back at school, Hekker competed with Ryan Allen for the starting job and scholarship. Allen kicked the ball farther, but Hekker earned the job by a hair—maybe because of consistency, maybe because his background as a quarterback would help with fake punts. He’s not sure how he won, but he did.

Allen transferred to Louisiana Tech University and became the best punter in the country. Now, he’s the punter for the New England Patriots. Imagine that: two walk-ons from Oregon State, both in the NFL. “Isn’t that wild?” says McCabe, who trains both of them.

Little coincidences in life make all the difference. If Hekker had lost the starting job to Allen, who knows where he might be now?

“I’m just really happy to see that it worked out well for both of us,” he says.

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In planning the competition, I’d considered a Pokémon game, but I wanted to at least have a chance. I settled on Pass the Pigs instead.

As we sit down to play, I tell Hekker, who’s never heard of the game, that the wind might affect the action.

“Really?” he asks.

“No.”

He surveys the rules. “I want to get so many snouters,” he says.

Pass the Pigs is a dice game, but instead of numbered cubes, players roll two rubber pigs. Points are earned on the basis of how the pigs land. A pig on its back, called a razorback, is worth five, as is one that lands on its feet, called a trotter. The rarest of rolls, a leaning jowler, where the pig is balancing on its nose, one foot, and an ear, is worth 15. A double leaning jowler, the holy grail of Pass the Pigs, is worth 60. “That’s pretty special,” Hekker says.

The trick is knowing when to pass the pigs. Each turn, a player can keep rolling as long as he wants. But a pig out, where the pigs land lying on opposite sides, costs a player all of the points he’s accumulated during that turn.

The game is usually played to 100 points, but we decide to do an even 10 rounds. We both pig out on our first rolls. On Hekker’s second turn, he has 15 points, but decides to keep rolling.

“You better not pig out,” I tell him.

He pigs out.

“No! You stupid pigs!” he shouts. “Lesson learned.” In fact, Hekker does not learn. He continues to press his luck—and for the most part, it works. He rolls a double razorback, worth 20. “Fortune favors the bold!” he proclaims.

He builds a small lead, but I keep pace, playing a conservative style, usually stopping with 10 or 15 points. “You coward,” Hekker jokes.

In the ninth round, Hekker rolls another double razorback, giving him an 89–59 lead. “Gosh, I love you guys,” he tells the pigs. I answer with a sider, a snouter, and a double razorback, worth 31, to take a 90–89 advantage. “Damn, that’s big,” he observes.

In the 10th and final round, Hekker scores 10 points, then stops. I need nine to tie, 10 to win. I roll a double razorback.

“I never thought seeing two little pigs on their back would bring me so much sorrow,” Hekker says. “I’m just disgusted.”

Powell leads, 2–1.

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For our fourth contest, I suggest playing Pictionary, though we would need to borrow a couple of kids from the playground. Hekker points out how creepy it would be for two adult men to ask children to play Pictionary. We settle on a drawing contest, with the photographer acting as judge.

Given his Twitter art, Hekker seems to have the upper hand. We decide to do three rounds. The first will be five minutes. He goes to a different table, to prevent me from copying his work. The judge gives us a prompt: “Let’s draw Mike Matheny enjoying his favorite Ted Drewes dessert.”

I start by drawing the manager in his uniform, then outline the custard stand. I put one concrete in Matheny’s hand and have the clerk handing another out the window. Five minutes is a lot of time, so I start adding details: clouds, the sun, a flock of seagulls. I give Matheny a long, low dog that looks more like a Komodo dragon.

Hekker draws Matheny smiling, saying, “Yumm.” The sun wears shades, while a plane overhead pulls a Go Cards banner.

The judge deliberates. He incorrectly picks Hekker. “I’m not feeling this long dog,” he says.

For the second round, we drop the time limit to three minutes and draw a Blues player holding the Stanley Cup. This time, we create similar scenes: a character with skates wearing a blue-note sweater and hoisting the trophy. I add some fruit and a child in the Cup, with the player crying.

“It’s highly unrealistic that a child could fit in there,” Hekker argues.

Again, the judge gives the victory to the punter. Hekker gives himself a standing ovation.

We’re tied, 2–2.

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Kickers and punters, you might say, are the ugly ducklings of football. Compared to their mammoth, muscle-bound teammates, they tend to stick out like a gaunt thumb on the sideline. And that’s usually where you find the punter, since of the 140 or so plays in every NFL game, a team’s punter will be on the field for maybe five of them. Unlike a wide receiver, who runs routes, catches balls, and blocks, a punter has one job: punt—and occasionally tackle (but hopefully not).

And punter is the only position where the better the team plays, the less you participate. “I love getting a chance to get out there,” Hekker says, “but I also want to sit on the sideline and have our offense score touchdown after touchdown.”

McCabe says punters’ contributions are underrated. If a team has a good punter and a good kicker, like Hekker and the Rams’ Greg Zuerlein, that’s a third of the game, he says: “If you’ve got 16 games, they’re probably winning you three to four ballgames right there with points and field position.”

About the only time a punter makes Sports­Center, though, is when he shanks a kick or makes an embarrassingly poor attempt at a tackle.

Hekker knows. During a game against Wisconsin in college, he hit the ball off the side of his foot and shot it straight out of bounds for –4 yards. “I’ve never seen the ball punted backward,” the announcer said.

Another time, against Arizona State, Hekker tried to make a diving tackle. When he landed, the guy’s towel was in his hand, and the runner was celebrat­ing in the end zone.

“That’s the kind of stuff you can’t make up,” Hekker says.

But even in this thankless role, he has found ways to shine. During his freshman year, Oregon State traveled to El Paso, Texas, for the Sun Bowl. In the lowest-scoring bowl game in half a century, Oregon State beat Pittsburgh 3–0. Hekker punted 10 times for an average of 45 yards and went home with a trophy as the Special Teams MVP. “That was a great springboard for my career,” he says. Hekker also kicked the school’s all-time second-longest punt, a 74-yarder.

With the Rams, he’s distinguished himself as an excellent punter, but also a dangerous trick-play passer. Twice, he’s used his arm to defeat his hometown Seahawks. During Hekker’s rookie year, in 2012, St. Louis beat Seattle 19–13, after the Rams’ only touchdown came on a fake field goal. Hekker, who was acting as the holder, threw to receiver Danny Amendola in the end zone. “All my friends back home were like, ‘Oh yeah! Oh no!’” he says, laughing.

Two days before we met in the park, he did it again. In the fourth quarter, with the Rams leading the defending Super Bowl champs 28–26, St. Louis faced fourth down from its own 18-yard line, with just under 3 minutes left in the fourth quarter. Giving the ball back to Seattle might have spelled doom. So the Rams faked the punt, with Hekker throwing an 18-yard pass to Benny Cunningham. The game was theirs. Once again, his friends texted him their conflicted feelings.

At press time, Hekker was 4-for-5 for 60 yards and a touchdown in his career. His passer rating of 156.3 is more than 50 points higher than that of Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. (Obviously, the comparison is absurd.)

Hekker’s greatest career achievement came last season, when he set the NFL record for net punting average, with 44.2 yards per kick. Unlike total punt yardage, the net statistic is a team effort, because it takes into account the return. McCabe says the record shows Hekker’s outstanding directional punting and hang time, lofting the ball for 5 seconds and giving his teammates time to sprint down the field.

“The number is really indicative of my teammates more so than myself,” Hekker says. “Leading the best punt team ever to play the game is pretty awesome.”

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For the decisive fifth competition, I challenge Hekker to a footrace. He refuses. Instead, he proposes an obstacle course, involving various playground equipment. A red-bearded writer and a redheaded kicker climbing over walls and swinging across monkey bars? We dub it American Ginger Warrior.

We agree to a time trial, rather than a race, so we won’t be stepping on each other. We start at a set of benches, run up a slide, and climb back down a zigzag ladder. Then it’s up a rock-climbing wall and across a set of monkey bars. From there, we go up some steps, down a slide, and across the park to another slide. We finish by leaping over two rocking horses and returning to the bench.

We go over the course verbally twice and walk it once. The photographer asks whether we should get one or two runs.

“One—winner take all,” we respond in unison.

I go first. Hekker keeps time. I dash up the first slide…then freeze. My mind blanks. I don’t know where to go next. I spin around in a circle, confused. “The clock is ticking!” Hekker calls out. “Go!”

Mercifully, he stops the clock for a second and yells “zigzag.” I go down the ladder, then trip a bit while climbing the wall. I swing across the monkey bars, and now I’m back on track, picking up speed. I show off my vertical while hopping the horses, then turn on the jets. I finish in 1 minute, 8 seconds.

“Man, I choked,” I say.

It’s his turn. With his long limbs, he can cover each stage of the course in a couple of strides, practically stepping over the rock wall and taking the monkey bars in one big swing. He shows impressive speed between the slides and launches himself over the horses with ease. He finishes in a cool 56 seconds.

In the eternal battle between punters and journalists, Hekker reigns supreme.

“That was much more tiring than you would think,” he says, panting. “How do kids do this all day?”

What means more to him, beating the Seahawks or beating me?

Hekker smiles. “I think beating the Seahawks means more to St. Louis—that game takes the cake.

“But on a personal competitive level?” he adds. “This means quite a bit.”