When Lawrence Tynes strolled to school in Campbeltown kicking a football with his brothers Mark and Jason, he had little inkling of how the ball would roll for him.

His ambitions at St Kieran’s Primary rested with playing for Celtic but it was Rangers who were to show more interest in his burgeoning talents. Ultimately, he was to make his name not only in a different sport, but with a different shaped ball.

At the age of ten – and with his beloved Celtic winning their first league and cup double for 11 years in their centenary season under Billy McNeill – the Tynes family uprooted to live in Florida.

Father Larry, who was based with the US Navy in Makrihanish, had always intended returning home, and took his Scottish wife, Margaret Ann, from Port Glasgow, and his three boys with him.

Lawrence was to continue playing “soccer” at Milton High School where he earned himself a considerable reputation as a striker, but it was not until his final year when his Physical Education teacher, one of the coaches for the schools’ American football team, persuaded him to try out as a kicker.

It was a try-out that was to lead all the way to the National Football League (NFL). Tynes, the first Scot to play in the NFL, has completed three seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs and, at 28, is rated one of the best kickers in the league. 

As of May 23rd, he transferred from Kansas to the New York Giants, and will fulfil his boyhood dream of playing at Wembley when the Giants play the Miami Dolphins in October.

He is the only Scot currently playing in any of the three major sports in America. Paisley-born basketball player Robert Archibald had two years in the National Basketball Association (NBA) between 2002-04 with Memphis Grizzlies, Phoenix Suns, Orlando Magic and Toronto Raptors.

But Scots are not littered throughout the annals of American sport, although Bobby Thomson, born in Glasgow, has the most revered place, having hit what many baseball historians cite to be the greatest home run in the sport...

On October 3, 1951, the “Staten Island Scot” gave the New York Giants the National Pennant as they came back from 1-4 down to the Brooklyn Dodgers to win 5-4, with his winning swing of the bat, “The Shot Heard Round the World”.
 
The equivalent for Tynes in his sport is kicking a 60-yard field goal in the final seconds of a Super Bowl.

Tynes has taken the tourist route to the NFL, and the Greenock-born player had a stopover in Scotland in 2002 when he played for the Scottish Claymores in the NFL Europe League, and later went to play in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Renegades, from where his career took off.

“Playing in Scotland was great for me as it gave me a chance to stay active. Often if you get cut as a kicker, there’s nowhere for you to go and you end up sitting around the house,” Tynes points out.

“But I have always been able to play somewhere, whether it was in Scotland, or in Canada, and that has kept me ticking over.

“Unfortunately, when I played in Scotland, the NFL Europe had a silly rule about national kickers taking the short kicks and allocated kickers taking the longer ones.  It meant as an allocated kicker, you could be out of action for long, long spells and that was difficult.

“In Canada, it’s three-down football, so you’re involved a lot more as a kicker and that really helped my game.  But I was shocked when I heard about the Claymores shutting down. It didn’t make sense to me as you had a team in an English-speaking country.

“I suppose they wanted to centralise the European league, but I was sorry to see the Claymores go down as they were an important part of my career.”

Perhaps having read this, some of Scotland's eager young footballers could see an opportunity to follow in Lawrence's footsteps.

RM

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