About a month ago, someone stopped Bengals kicker Evan McPherson at the local Target, sheepishly asked him whether he was the Evan McPherson of the Cincinnati Bengals and, after promising not to make a scene, asked whether he could spare a moment to take a picture.
This was the moment, McPherson says, when he knew that life would never be the same. All it took was five game-winning kicks (two in overtime playoff games) and one of the best regular seasons for a placekicker in modern NFL history, and he can no longer roam the aisles at his big box chain without the threat of a moderately sized mob breaking out.
“I would go to Target and nobody would have a clue who I was,” McPherson says. “I could be walking around wearing a No. 2 McPherson jersey and everyone would be like, ‘Aww that’s cool he’s a Bengals fan and … he likes the kicker!’”
So it goes for quite possibly the most entertaining recurring character in the Joe Burrow Bengals universe. The quarterback blessed the legend of “Money Mac” after the team’s divisional-round victory over the Titans, revealing in a postgame press conference that the rookie kicker casually stood up before drilling the biggest kick of his life, lightly twisted his torso like a golfer shaking out before a practice round and said: “Welp, looks like we’re going to the AFC championship game.” He does the “Griddy” in the locker room. He has a trademarked nickname (though there are no current plans, he says, to launch any widespread merchandising efforts). He is, according to the vice president of trading at Caesars, the first kicker anyone can remember being among the top wagered prop bets before the Super Bowl (almost the entire betting world is assuming he will make at least two field goals Sunday). On a promotional photograph of the Bengals located in the city’s airport, the three players featured are Burrow, Rookie of the Year shoo-in Ja’Marr Chase and McPherson. On a gigantic billboard on the side of Interstate 71, the local weather station advertises their meteorologists are “as accurate as Evan McPherson.”
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Of course, those who have roamed the tiny 15,000-person town of Fort Payne, Ala., know that McPherson’s origin story is full of superhuman feats befitting of the league’s most marketable kicker since Justin Tucker. In fact, McPherson is the middle child of a Southern kicking dynasty, one that has had a stranglehold on state records for more than a decade. He insists the best is yet to come, and he has a little brother who was allowed to attempt a 70-yard field goal in a high school game (and damn near drilled it).
Coaches say they struggle to come up with another example of a kicker being the most valuable player on the field, so much so that they wouldn’t use him as an able body at wide receiver despite a slew of injuries. They were in awe of him clean-and-jerking 225 pounds, bashing elbows with the bigger boys in the high school football locker room. His parents say he has converted football atheists across the country who tune in to games to simply watch the kicker. Kids are crafting posters and sending the McPherson family Evan McPherson sculptures.
“There are posters and other things all over town,” his mother, Amber, says over Zoom. “On storefront windows. They’re making shirts. I mean, little kids are making art projects with Evan on there and field goals.
“And then Friday at the Fort Payne city systems is gonna be Evan McPherson Day.”
How, amid a Cinderella run the likes of which no one expected, buoyed by a superhuman quarterback, did his top lieutenant become a 5'11", 185-pound kicker?
The McPherson kicking empire started outside in the backyard of Amber and LaDon McPherson.
On a soccer goal, their oldest son, Logan, and middle son, Evan, would blast full-speed kicks at their youngest, Alex, who had the unenviable task of standing in as a goalie. They would play H-O-R-S-E and C-A-T with a soccer ball, trying to land various trick shots in the corners of the net. They would compete in coin spinning and, a family favorite, stopwatch timing (to see who could hit the button a second time the fastest, coming up with the lowest numbers).
When Logan was in eighth grade, he asked his mom whether he could try out for the football team. This, after eight years of soccer. He came home that night and asked his mom whether she knew what it felt like to find her niche. She asked him what he meant.
Logan tried kicking and punting and fell in love. Literally the next day, Evan accumulated enough PVC pipe to fashion a makeshift field goal post on the top of his soccer net. If Logan was going to kick, so was Evan.
And so the brothers would all venture out together with a sack of about 10 or so footballs. On Christmas. On New Year’s. LaDon and Amber, tried to train their family dog to fetch the balls so they didn’t always have to shag for hours at a time to no avail. The job was theirs in snow and pouring rain. Each boy had their favorite ball to kick as well.
“They’d get so frustrated they couldn’t kick as hard as the other one or as strong as the other one,” Amber says. “And I’d say, ‘Guys, you’re four years younger. You’re not supposed to kick as hard as your brother right now.’ But they just would push themselves so hard. Logan would say, right before he left his senior year, ‘My job is to make you better than me.’ Evan was like, ‘O.K.’ And then Evan did the same thing for Alex: ‘I’m going to train you and teach you.’ They are so excited for each other and supportive of each other when they’re breaking each other’s records.”
Logan went on to a spot on the Louisiana Tech football team, where he was the Bulldogs’ most dependable special teams presence for four years. He left behind a high school long field goal of 57 yards that Evan was obsessed with besting during his time at Fort Payne. He beat it under the lights at Brewer High, back heel at midfield, with his youngest brother, Alex, holding (at the time, Alex weighed—generously—90 pounds but knew exactly how Evan wanted the football placed after hours in the backyard together). Rather than use a tee, Evan wanted to free-kick the ball to simulate the on-grass protocol of collegiate football and the NFL.
When it became clear the kick had enough juice, the return man for the other team gave up like an outfielder chasing a flyball realizing it’s a sure home run. The ball boy waiting on the other side of the post picked up the ball with his right hand and made a flying motion with his arms as he ran it back to the sideline. It looked like one of the referees had tipped his cap in Evan’s direction. Some of the opposing fans gave a standing ovation.
This was a benchmark, though it had always been obvious to his parents that their boys were wholly devoted to making placekicking and punting their life’s work. There were national kicking camps, which gave the family an assurance that Evan wasn’t just a large fish dominating a small pond. He was the No. 1–rated kicker in the country coming out of high school. Then Florida head coach Dan Mullen took the private jet to Alabama and spent time with the family before Christmas.
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But Amber and LaDon had a feeling this was coming. One day, before Evan could drive, he asked his mom to take him to the field so he could kick, just as he did every day. Only this time, his prodding changed their perception of how he viewed the sport.
“And I was like, ‘I take you every day,’ ” Amber says. “I was just tired that day. Something was going on. Maybe it was cold. Maybe it was hot. I don’t know. And I said, ‘Do we have to go today, Evan?’ And he said, ‘Well, somebody is going to go today. And they’re going to go today; they’re going to be a day ahead of me.’
“And I was like, ‘Well, you can’t argue with that. Let me get my keys, and we’ll go to the field and I’ll shag some balls.’”
In high school football, an errant field goal attempt that lands in the end zone or misses the upright is considered a touchback, which meant that his high school coach, Paul Ellis, was going to let Evan try kicks from just about anywhere. Call it the Steph Curry effect, in which once-staggering distances seemed meaningless. Ellis saw Evan drill kicks from 68 without a rush, so he would line up deep in his own territory and give it a shot. There was almost no place on the field that Evan couldn’t touch a football where it wouldn’t land in the end zone.
Ellis says that most drives in high school start around the 35-yard line, with no kickers possessing the requisite leg strength to get a ball downfield. Evan could drill the ball out of the end zone on kickoffs. Literally every possession he was saving his team almost 20 yards, which factored heavily into their game plan.
During one game, he successfully executed a pair of onside kicks, punted the ball from his own end zone to the opposing team’s 13-yard line (84 yards) and drilled a 54-yard field goal that would have been good from 70.
“My dad was a coach, and I’m 54 years old—I’ve been on the field my whole life,” Ellis says. “I’ve never seen a kicker affect a game like he did that night.
“It was so demoralizing [for opponents] every time we went down and scored, because he would make sure the opposing team had to go 80 yards.”
When Evan was in ninth grade, after a season in which he scored the game-winning goals in both the semifinal and final of the state soccer tournament, he lined up in the back of his own end zone punting as a lanky freshman against a wall of Class 6A varsity giants. The team they were facing had blocked a punt on Fort Payne the year before and was showing the same look, with a rusher coming free off the edge.
Ellis had no choice but to signal in a fake, which only Evan and his target, the personal protector, saw coming. Other coaches on the sideline begged him to reconsider given that he was a freshman.
“He takes a step, flips it out there; we gain 40 yards, first down,” Ellis says. “You’re talking about a freshman doing that. We’re in the second-highest classification in the state. He never flinched.”
Walking off the field, Evan just smiled at Ellis and said: “I can’t believe you called that.”
Maybe this is the first tangible evidence of an Evan McPherson Moment, a heroic gesture followed by a moment of movie-set cool. Back then, it only earned him the nickname “twinkle toes.” (“I don’t like that one,” LaDon says.)
Of course, the truly heroic thing McPherson has done this offseason is change the perception of a kicker in the first place. That it’s O.K.—obvious and sensical, even—to stick him on billboards and mob him at Target (maybe let him shop in peace, though). In grade school, he was a baseball shortstop whose coaches would switch him defensively based on where they thought the ball was going to go. Every sport or banal, monotonous activity he picked up he excelled at.
And, thanks to his built-in support system, McPherson is only getting better. He was able to livestream his younger brother, Alex, breaking his own high school record, drilling a 61-yarder against North Jackson (Evan joked that it “probably would have weighed on him for the rest of his life that I was better than him”). In that same game, Alex hit another 61-yarder that was called back due to a false start penalty and he barely missed the 66-yard try afterward. He also hit 52- and 54-yard field goals in that game. All three still compete.
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A year back, when Evan was going into his final year at Florida and Alex was going into his junior year of high school, all three McPherson boys headed out to the football field around Christmas. It was the first time in a while they were home together. Logan decided he was going to let it rip, having not kicked in more than a year.
So they played “make it, take it” with each of them backing up to the 50, the 55 and the 60.
“We get to 64 yards, and it’s me and Logan. And he ended up beating me. And I was like, ‘That’s just not supposed to happen.’ He felt really good about himself.”
Perhaps Evan remembers this, not because it’s fuel but because he has battled so constantly, competed so relentlessly and kicked so frequently that the (very) rare misses are the ones that stand out. That’s why those who know him claim his comment, which basically guaranteed the Bengals a spot in the AFC title game, wasn’t cockiness. Evan doesn’t need to hype himself up or suck in attention to propel his performance. He’d simply done it before and was comfortable acknowledging the obvious: Some people just know the ball is going where they’d like it to go. It is, undoubtedly, the best of his superhuman traits.
