Still kicking after 21 years, Saints’ John Carney believes there’s life in his 45-year-old leg

Saints’ John Carney still kicking after 21 years

METAIRIE, La. — John Carney was born the same year the Beatles played their first concert in the United States. He kicked his first NFL field goal when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

And a few weeks after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Carney was still kicking — in the Pro Bowl.

Now the New Orleans Saints have asked the 45-year-old back, just in time for the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Carney was the Saints’ kicker when the storm struck on Aug. 29, 2005, displacing the squad to San Antonio. His last season with the Saints was 2006, when the team returned triumphantly to New Orleans, going all the way to the NFC championship game.

“It’s kind of strange. … It’s like a time warp because I come back and everything is so familiar and I have so many fond memories of this place,” Carney said after his first practice with New Orleans on Sunday.

“I’m looking forward to making more fond memories.”

It was an odd twist of fate that brought Carney back to the Big Easy. Though he made 35 of 38 field-goal tries during the 2008 regular season for the New York Giants, the club could not justify keeping him because it already had a good young kicker in Lawrence Tynes. Tynes only lost his job to Carney because of a knee injury, but he was healthy by the end of last year.

“It was time for him to come back,” Carney said. “That’s their long-term guy.”

The Saints, who’d struggled to find consistency in the kicking game since releasing Carney when he was 42, thought they’d finally found a trustworthy replacement in Garrett Hartley.

Hartley came in midway through last season and made all 13 of his field goal tries. However, the 23-year-old now faces a likely four-game suspension. Hartley said Sunday that he made the mistake of using his friend’s Adderall prescription pills to stay awake while driving from Dallas to New Orleans for an offseason workout, not realizing that the stimulant was banned by the NFL.

So on Saturday night, the Saints, already aware of Hartley’s looming suspension, signed Carney once again, something Saints head coach Sean Payton said he would have done last year, if he could have.

“To be honest with you, when he was with New York and we were going through the different options at kicker, we were hoping that he would’ve come off their roster,” recalled Payton, who is only four months older than Carney.

Moving back to New Orleans was easy for Carney, who still has a furnished home in town. He hung for-sale signs in front of it at times and rented it out at others, but it happened to be unoccupied and ready for him when the Saints called.

Carney is expected to kick for the first four regular season games, but he could stick around longer if he performs well, Payton said.

There was a time when Carney couldn’t see himself spending two-plus decades in the NFL. Though he’d kicked well at Notre Dame from 1984-86, he wasn’t sure what his future held when he failed to make the Cincinnati Bengals’ regular season roster in 1987.

In 1988, he kicked in four games for Tampa Bay, then appeared in only one game for the Buccaneers the following season. It wasn’t until the fourth year after he’d turned pro that he finally felt like a No. 1 kicker with San Diego, with whom he played 12 games in 1990.

“My goal at that point was just to kick a couple years to prove all my critics wrong who said I wasn’t NFL material, and then things were going pretty well in San Diego and I set a goal for the millennium,” Carney recalled. “Then that happened and then the Chargers showed me the door and I said, ‘Well, I need to show them that they’re wrong.’”

After 11 seasons with the Chargers, Carney signed with the Saints in 2001 and stuck with them for six seasons, making 83.3 percent of his field goal tries.

In 2007 Carney managed to stay on Jacksonville’s roster for eight games and Kansas City’s for five. Last year, he figured he’d fill in for only a few weeks while Tynes recovered, but wound up putting together a Pro Bowl season, his second overall and first since 1994.

Carney, who has maintained a strict workout regimen and a chiseled physique, said he can still hit 50-yarders in good conditions and doesn’t know when his career might end. Morten Andersen “raised the bar high for all of us” when he kicked until age 46, Carney said.

“As long as I’m healthy and still enjoying the game, I’ll keep pushing it.”