Dallas Clark, John Dutton, and Jay Novacek are some of the most notable NFL alumni from South Dakota, but the legendary kicker Adam Vinatieri has to hold the crown as the Mount Rushmore State's best NFL player to date. Vinatieri is also the second kicker to make our 50 greatest NFL player list from state to state. Vinatieri is responsible for making some of the most crucial field goals in NFL history and is arguably the greatest NFL placekicker of all-time. The future Hall of Fame kicker from Yankton, South Dakota began his college football in his home state at South Dakota State and later transferred to San Diego State where he holds the school's all-time leading points record with a total of 185.
After going undrafted in the 1996 NFL Draft, Vinatieri headed across the pond to play for the Amsterdam Admirals in the NFL Europe league. That same year, Vinatieri was signed by the New England Patriots where he played ten seasons. Vinatieri currently is on his 14th season with the Indianapolis Colts and the NFL's oldest active player at 46-years-old. Throughout his legendary and lengthy career, Vinatieri is a 4x Super Bowl Champion, holds the record for most Super Bowl wins by a kicker, the most field goals made with 585, and holds the NFL record for most points scored all-time with 2,612 points through the third week of this current NFL season. You can't front kickers are responsible for putting up major numbers and Vinatieri is living proof of that.
Celebrities are no strangers to changing their looks for a role. And in some instances, they have to get pretty extreme. From 500-calorie-a-day diets to drinking pints of ice cream, Actors and actresses know what it takes to change their bodies in preparation for a new film.
Charlize Theron is no stranger to gaining and losing weight for movie roles, as we remember her transformation in Monster. Charlize Theron gained close to 50 pounds for her role as Marlo in Tully. Theron said that “for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. … I remember having to set my alarm in the middle of the night in order to just maintain the weight.”
You’re used Chris Hemsworth's hulk-like figure in Thor, but In the Heart of the Sea required a totally different diet. The movie required the cast members lose a ton of weight to make their stuck-at-sea plight more believable. Chris Hemsworth said there were days when all he ate was one boiled egg, a couple of crackers, and a celery stick.
Anne Hathaway wanted to get serious for her role in Les Misérables, as she was playing Fantine, a starving prostitute with tuberculosis. So Anne Hathaway went on a diet of “rabbit food” to drop 25 pounds. Hathaway explained her diet was essentially just starving herself, but she didn’t want to give details, as she doesn’t want to encourage anyone to copy her emaciated look. She did note that she “just had to stop eating for a total of 13 days shooting,” however. And at one point, her bones became so frail that she reportedly broke her arm.
Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, a man with HIV/AIDS, was spot-on, earning him the title of best actor at the Oscars. But it also required a serious physical transformation. Matthew McConaughey said he lost 38 pounds for the role. During filming, he said he lost a lot of energy from eating so little — and he hit plenty of plateaus along the way. Finally, with a strict diet, he got down to 143 pounds. And while he did cardio to help with the weight loss, he said it was 90% what he was eating and portion size.
Hilary Swank had to put on 23 pounds of pure muscle for her role as a boxer in Million Dollar Baby. The process doesn’t sound easy, however. “I started working out five hours a day — I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day,” Swank said. She also mentioned that she had to consume 60 egg whites per day, and when that proved too difficult, she had to drink them. And to keep the muscle on, she would get up and drink protein shakes in the middle of the night.