 miles) per game.
Wing, though, was familiar with American football because his father, David, a former Australian rules football player, also briefly punted for the NFL's Detroit Lions in 1996 and the defunct NFL Europe's Scottish Claymores.
"Dad had a lot of American footballs, but we would just look at them," said Wing, 20. "No one had one. No one used one. They were really unique there. My friends would come over and see ours and just think it was crazy."
Although Wing never liked the grueling running aspect of Australian rules football, he was known for his kicking distance as well as accuracy and once had 11 goals in a game. He played in a club system all the way to the TAC Cup, which is a feeder for the Australian Football League, the country's professional league, but on the last day of cuts in 2008, Wing was released by the Sandringham Dragons.
"It crushed my world," Wing said.
Until being cut, Wing had planned to play in the Australian Football League. But with that dream dashed and a year of high school remaining, he was unsure about his future for the first time in his life.
Because many Australians don't go to college, he even contemplated entering the workforce immediately after he graduated high school. That was until his father suggested he try punting.
But before Wing did, he and his family in December 2008 visited several US cities. The trip gave Wing a chance to watch American football on television, which intrigued him.
One of the cities the Wings visited was Baton Rouge to see Dave Tiede, one of the elder Wing's friends. While there, Brad Wing attended a home game of the New Orleans Saints, which then had punter Glenn Pakulak.
As Wing watched Pakulak, he thought he could punt just as far as him. So when Wing returned to Australia, he and his father started to practice punting.
At first they did so by kicking the larger Australian football in a spiral instead of the traditional end-over-end kick and then switched to an American football.
Proof positive
By then, Wing had decided to move in with the Tiedes in Baton Rouge and attend the private school the couple's sons attended, Parkview Baptist School, for his senior year.
When Parkview coach Kenny Guillot heard Wing would be enrolling, the coach, who described himself as "a very skeptical guy," not surprisingly had his doubts about the Australian's arrival, even after Tiede raved about Wing's punting potential.
"Every dad that comes through here talks about their boy and tells me how great he is," Guillot said. "It's nothing new for a guy to tell me what a great kicker someone is."
Guillot also made it clear to Tiede that he would not help try to get Wing eligible through the state's high school athletic association. Not that it looked like it would ever matter.
"Brad was a skinny, little tight-jeaned, tall socks, goofy-looking Australian kid," Matt Shelton, a Parkview assistant coach said. "Everybody was like, 'This guy is supposed to be a football player?' "
Yet, for all of Guillot's bluster, he couldn't help but notice Wing's leg extension every time he walked past Parkview's stadium and saw him practicing punting.
"He looked like a ballerina when he kicked," Guillot said.
After Wing's arrival in Baton Rouge that summer, he had been so overwhelmed by the heat and humidity that he had trouble breathing. He had just two weeks to prepare for an LSU kicking camp but still wasn't comfortable punting an American football.
Back then, only one of his every 20 punts would go 50 yards.
"I thought that was so good," Wing said. "But looking back, it wasn't very good."
At the LSU camp, Wing stood out not for his punting but for the small Australian football shorts he wore. There, he met campers who had been punting for most of their lives.
They were all more consistent than Wing, but he was confident he could be better than each of them with practice.
During the camp, a man walked up to Wing and thanked him for coming from Australia to attend the camp. Afterward Wing, asked another camper about the man's identity.
"Les Miles," the camper replied.
"Who?" Wing replied.
"He's the coach of LSU," the camper replied.
By the time Parkview's preseason two-a-day practices started, Wing had finally been declared eligible. Wing's first practice was a crash course getting adjusted to drills and meeting his new teammates.
But he quickly picked up on everything and hit it off so well with his teammates that he convinced them to stay after practice with him for extra work. What happened next was unlike anything they had ever seen.
Wing had his teammates run 20-yard slant patterns, but instead of passing them the ball, he kicked it to them in stride. He then had them run 20-yard fade patterns and again kicked the ball to them perfectly.
"It was unbelievable," Shelton said. "Never seen anything like that in my life. It was like he was throwing the ball."
Show 'em what you got
During that first month at Parkview, Wing worked on punting as much as he could, even before and after the two-a-day practices. At first, he punted without defensive pressure.
But after two weeks, an assistant coach wanted to see how Wing would do with pressure. Practices were held on the school's baseball field so the coach had Wing stand at home plate.
When the ball was snapped to Wing, the assistant coach ran toward him as fast he could. Unfazed, Wing handled the snap and bombed the ball over the right-field fence, a distance of about 70 yards.
"I'll never forget that," Wing said.
After Parkview's first month of practice, Wing's punting had become a lot more consistent. He was regularly booming 50-yard punts.
In Wing's first game, Parkview won so convincingly he didn't punt once. In the team's next game, he finally got to attempt his first punt, though under less-than-ideal circumstances: from the back of his team's end zone.
The situation made Guillot extremely nervous, though it would quickly tell him what he had in Wing. As soon as Wing took the snap, there was more trouble: A defender had burst through Parkview's protection and was headed right at him.
On the sideline, Guillot cringed at the thought of Wing's first punt being blocked, but somehow he was able to get it off. By the time the ball finally stopped rolling, it was on the other team's 27-yard line.
When Wing got to the sideline after his 73-yard punt, Guillot met him. The cynical coach wasn't so skeptical anymore.
"Welcome to Parkview," Guillot recalled telling Wing.
Before long, Wing's teammates had nicknamed him "Wangtime" as a play off his last name and the hang time of his sky-high punts. In Parkview's first few games, he didn't punt much, but after he had done so four times, Guillot had a highlight tape made of them and gave it to a friend on LSU's coaching staff.
"We didn't give scholarships at LSU to kickers," Guillot recalled being told by his friend.
"Well, you give them the tape, or I will," Guillot replied.
Shortly thereafter, then-LSU special teams coach Joe Robinson attended a Parkview game to watch Wing. But it hadn't been the highlight tape that sparked the Tigers' interest.
A woman's touch
It had been a scouting report that Miles' wife, Kathy, gave her husband about Wing. She had taken the couple's two sons to a Parkview football game to watch their friends play and while there noticed Wing's excessive hang time on his kicks.
"That ball is up there a long time," Kathy Miles thought.
When she got home, Kathy Miles told her husband about what she had seen.
"There's a punter over there at Parkview who's pretty good," Miles recalled being told by his.
"It became pretty popular I guess," Wing said.
And while Wing thrived on the field, he was still adjusting off it. The biggest change has been the food, but he came to love crawfish, which generally isn't served in Australia.
He struggled with driving on the right side of the road in the US because in Australia it is done on the left side. The steering wheel of a vehicle in Australia is also on the right side instead of the left, as it is in the US.
"It was tough because I would come over here and drive on the wrong side of the road," Wing said. "Then when I would go visit back home, I would drive on the wrong side of the road."
While at Parkview, some of Wing's friends invited him to attend an LSU game. He didn't even know it was a college football contest until they explained to him.
"Oh, there would be a few people there, right?" Wing recalled he told his friends.
A few as in the 200,000 on LSU's campus that day for the Tigers' game against Vanderbilt. The atmosphere, especially the tailgating, overwhelmed Wing.
"That was crazy," he said. "I was just in shock."
All-America teamTake a look at the players named first