USC running back Sultan McCullough didn't need to bash his head into any chairs to get fired up against Penn State.

Before Sebastian Janikowski's senior year at Daytona Beach's Seabreeze High, he tried out for the football team. He was now 6'1", 240, and he bombed his first kickoff 87 yards. He then made a 60-yard field goal in a game and an absurd 82-yarder in practice ("high school balls are like balloons," he says). He never measured his steps before his kicks, nor did he ever stretch or lift leg weights. He kicked by feel. "I've got amazing leg speed, I guess," he says. "The speed of sound." He improved his accuracy by kicking at light poles, and soon Florida State's Bobby Bowden and Florida's Steve Spurrier were in coach Angelo Rossi's home. "I chose Florida State because they kick more field goals than Florida," Sebastian says.

So this is how he became a Tallahassee cult figure, but also how he went downhill. For the first time, no one was telling him when to go to bed or to roll out of bed. He had a fake ID and went drinking four times a week. "Nobody was there to control me," he says.

During practice, for laughs the coaches would call him fat, and he'd call them fat. Until it was time to kick, he'd be in the equipment shed, trying on various neck and knee braces, or napping on the tackling dummies.

"What was his night life like? Well, he drinks vodka the way we drink milk or O.J.," says Clay Ingram, his long-snapper and roommate on the road. "To Sebastian, going to a pool hall until 2 a.m. is not going out. To him, going out is staying out all night. But he could handle it. He'd take a nap from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., maybe go to class, show up at practice and go out to shoot pool that night 'til 2 a.m."

But Ingram noticed him moping at times, and Sebastian would explain, "My mother, I have not seen her in three years." But, little did he know, his girlfriend's family was working with an attorney to get his mother a temporary visa. And she finally received it when she went to the embassy with a newspaper clipping of Sebastian kicking a football. "That's my son," she said, and the official stamped her paperwork.

She arrived in November of his freshman year, and they hugged and celebrated. "She brought a suitcase of Polish vodka with her," Ingram says. She drove to see him kick in the 1998 Sugar Bowl, thinking she'd have to present her passport at every state border. "When he saw her, he was a completely different person," Ingram says. "It totally lifted his spirits. He just had a better attitude about everything."

When she had to leave in February, his wild times resumed. In the next 18 months, he gained 30 pounds, up to 270, and was arrested for entering a club from which he'd been barred and again for underage drinking. Police were called to a fight he had with a male cheerleader -- who he says bumped his girlfriend -- and other scuffles went unreported. "He's a friendly guy, but as soon as he gets alcohol in him, he becomes belligerent or mean," tight end Ryan Sprague says. "At clubs, he gets into Sebastian-the-Superstar mode. He's on his high horse. If he sees someone he likes, he's fun. But if it's someone he doesn't want to talk to, he'll say, 'Get out of my face.' Take alcohol out of his life, and we're not having this conversation."

To read the rest of the story, get the August 7 issue of ESPN The Magazine.