I HAVE kicked footballs on ovals, in parks, on beaches, in carparks, down hallways, across loungerooms, in back yards, in front yards, across the street, along the street, over trees, between goalposts, into hockey goals, at picnic grounds, on the MCG concourse, in queues, in dreams.No doubt you have a list that is similar.

Kicking the footy is one of life’s pleasures. No-one ever says, ‘Let’s go to the park and have a handball’. Kids never propose playing ‘mark to mark’.It’s all about the kicking.

It is about that moment of transcendent optimism just before boot meets leather when you suspect that your next kick is going to be the most perfect you have ever executed.

It is about the sight of a ball rotating lazily across the blue sky. With the occasional exception of smart alec forwards celebrating before the Sherrin has bisected the goalposts, no-one ever looks away after kicking the ball. Part of the process of kicking is watching the footy’s trajectory towards its destination. It is a view of which you never tire.

My father was a beautiful kick of a football. We kicked the footy most winter evenings. He showed me how to kick the drop punt. He taught me the torpie. We specialised in drop kicks, but he reserved special affection for the stab pass.

“The drop kick goes ba-boom. The stab is b-boom,” he always said. His stab kicks landed on my solar plexus and knocked me three paces backwards. Mine never worked. Like comedy, the secret to good kicking is timing, and I had as much of that as a busted wristwatch.

The kick is the footballer. We say ‘so-and-so is a good kick’, not ‘so-and-so has a good kick’.

Traditionally, the best kicks delivered the ball swift and straight, every time. Indigenous players introduced new concepts of effective kicking, using space and time in different ways. They could lob kicks, weight kicks, kick around corners.

Nowadays those strategies are rife at the top level. They are also rife at the bottom level: in any given park, on any given oval, people are kicking across their body, checkside, imparting Murali-like spin or chipping like Federer.

Of course, we also mimic the greats. Who hasn’t tried kicking with a swivelling hip and swinging leg a la Buckley, or holding the ball with the non-dominant hand high as per Fevola?

While the vocab of kicking has expanded, one rule remains rigid: the torpedo is still king. Hands at five and eleven, drop it slightly across the boot, strike it off the outside of the foot.

Get it right and you have the pleasure of standing back and watching a barrel bore its way through the sky, carrying far further than it reasonably should.

Get it wrong and your kicking companions bleat like orphaned piglets.

I remember one kick-to-kick mate from long ago who had an obsession for kicking the ball but was also a devout Sabbath-observer. On some Sundays he would opt out, but occasionally the lure of the leather would overcome him. His personal resolution of the conflict was to kick the ball (he was one of those little blokes who could hoof 60 metres without effort) but never to mark it, only knocking the ball down when it came his way.

One of nature’s gentlemen, he would however become cranky if you experimented too much with modes of delivery – especially where errant torpies were concerned. I can still hear him barking, “Drop punts only, boys!” which seemed a bit heavy for a social kick-around where showing off fancy stuff was half the point.

(Peter Bosustow could reputedly dropkick 40 metres. Backwards. He would have been a kick to kick superstar.)

Of course, there is no better showcase for foot skills than on the ground after the final siren. Whether you try to mimic those players who leave the turf completely in their follow-through, body jackknifed forward like an Olympic hurdler, or whether you do five-metre dad-kicks to a toddler, the thrill remains.

One of the great Australian football compliments is to say someone has got ‘an educated boot’. Not all of us fit the description, but the fascination with becoming better educated is life-long.

And the meditative rhythm of standing 30 or 40 metres from your mate and banging the ball back and forth never gets stale. It is probably as close as we get to Aussie Zen.

----------------------------------------------------------
As part of the lead-up to Kick Around Australia Day, on August 7, the AFL is inviting fans to have a kick on the ground after the following round 18 matches:

Click here to find out more about Kick Around Australia Day.
----------------------------------------------------------The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of the clubs or the AFL.