It seems game time nerves are a foreign emotion to Super Bowl kickers.

“I’ve never been conscious of being nervous,” said Eddie Murray, the Halifax-born kicker who grew up in Victoria, BC and won a Super Bowl XXVIII ring as a member of the storied Dallas Cowboys team of the 1990s.

“It was also my 14th year in the NFL, so it was never something that affected me. I do remember going into that game that my normal thing before pregame warms up, which is going onto the field to kick to get out of the locker room, was very different because it was the Super Bowl.

“One of the things that helped for me was that we scored very quickly. We received the kickoff, ran over the 50, ran and three plays and then I kicked a field goal. Then it became a game and you got into the flow.”

One of the two kickers in this year’s Super Bowl, Lawrence Tynes of the New York Giants, views his role in arguably the biggest game of the history of the sport in a similar fashion.

“I get butterflies but those will easily be gone by the time I kick my first ball in the pregame,” he said.

Tynes played for two seasons with the Ottawa Renegades of the Canadian Football League, an experience that he credits with helping him stay active and pave a way back into the NFL. His 51 league-leading field goals were the most in team single-season history and he tied for the CFL scoring title with 198 points.

He had been released by Kansas City before heading north of the border and two years later would return to the Chiefs to beat out veteran Morten Anderson for the job, before being traded to the Giants.

“I was lucky in that I was a free agent kicker who was always playing and people knew where I was,” explained Tynes. “Sometimes people get lost in the shuffle. You can have a good camp, but still get cut and go home and sit for the next few months. People would rather take me because I was still playing somewhere so it was very beneficial.

“I wouldn’t be here without the CFL, absolutely not. It’s a kicker friendly league because you’re put in there a lot. You get a lot of opportunities. I finished my season up there with 62 field goal attempts I think and had a pretty good year. I made 51 of them. It helps you get a lot of reps.”

Murray played in the NFL from 1980 to 2000, his longest tenure as a 12-year member of the Detroit Lions and was the Pro Bowl MVP in 1981. He kicked three field goals of 41, 24 and 20 yards in Super Bowl XXVIII and has a unique view of his Cowboys team.

“The best way I equate it, purely because they had won the Super Bowl the year before, it was like being a part of a rock band,” he explained. “They had so many start-studded players in the prime of their careers at that point. To have an opportunity to go in and continue that and be in the Super Bowl with them was what I’d played for and never had a taste for with playing for Detroit for so long.”

As he heads into his first Super Bowl, Tynes by contrast has more humble memories, though he did land in the ultimate media spotlight. He appeared on the David Letterman show after making the 47-yard game-winning overtime field goal that sent the Giants to the Super Bowl.

“The CFL is a relatively small league and there is a passion for the game,” he said. “Nobody is making a lot of money and the fans are great. They all did a lot for me. I played nine games my first year and then played the whole season in 2003 so the CFL is very close to my heart. With the hash marks up there it’s a little more difficult to kick.

“The media attention has been a little overboard if you ask me and it is definitely not my thing. But I did it and I enjoyed it.”

Much of that media focus from Tynes’ point of view has been on his two missed field goals from 43 and 36 yards in the NFC championship and the possibility that he might either split the uprights or choke if presented with a game-winning field goal opportunity.

“As a kicker you’d love nothing more than to have that opportunity,” he said. “It’s unfortunate (if you miss) and it happens and you don’t want to be on that side of the score but if you are you deal with it. When I go out there on Sunday there is that opportunity that might happen.”

Murray agrees that the kicker’s lot is an unenviable one in such circumstances.

He explained: “One of the things in our position is that you have to think along those lines. You can’t be afraid of that situation, that’s what kind of separates the guys who are employed and the ones who are unemployed. To be an NFL kicker at that level you have to want to be in that type of a situation and respond in a positive way.”

These days Murray is living in Waterford, MI, not far from the Pontiac Silverdome where he kicked many of the points that helped him become the tenth-highest scorer in NFL history. He is currently the Director of Sports Medicine for a medical that supplies colleges and high schools with sports medical equipment.

Murray remembers the moment when he knew he would be on the winning sideline at the Super Bowl.

“For me it was when James Washington had picked up the fumble from Thurman Thomas and run it back and we scored immediately,” he said. “I then thought ‘there’s no way back, they’re totally demoralized.’ You never want to count your eggs before they hatch or show that, but I knew then there was no way back for them.”

A similar emotion, be it positive or negative, awaits Tynes on Sunday. When asked at Media Day if he has considered the scenario of being presented with a 50-yard field goal to win the game, he said: “I would like it to. I’ll take a 19-yarder too! Everybody wants to be the Adam Vinatieri story of the Super Bowl.

“I don’t know what is going to happen out there. You know that the offense or defense is going to get 40 or 50 plays a game, but for us its pot luck.”

Asked to predict the outcome of the game, Murray felt New England have an edge, but that ironically nerves – the one emotion that did not affect his personal performances – could come into play. He also had a warning for whichever team might hold a halftime lead having witnessed the confidence in the Cowboys’ locker room when they trailed the Bills 13-6 at that point in Super Bowl XXVIII.

He said: “For the NFL I think they would like to see a close game that would be played out similar to the last game of the year between the Patriots and Giants, going back and forth and very offensive minded.

“For the Pats, this would be the one that they don’t want to lose. They could have lost that regular season game and it wouldn’t have mattered, but not this one. I think because of that there could be a lot more pressure on them.

“I think the confidence that we had when we were trailing at halftime was incredible and I was thinking this would be the year that Buffalo finally wins - in the year I’m playing!

“At half time there was no panicking going on from top to bottom from Jimmy Johnson to the coordinators making adjustments, to the players themselves. Everyone was calm and confident enough to come back.

“In the second half we had everything we needed to stop Buffalo with turnovers and the offense putting points on the board. It was amazing to see that at halftime when I had been on teams that were done at that point.”

New England and New York, you have been warned. Halftime complacency could cost you the Super Bowl.