Bill Buckner was much more than a missed ground ball

With the death of baseball star Bill Buckner Monday there were many remembrances of the former All-Star’s great career – his 2,715 career hits, 1980 batting title and, of course, the ground ball that went through his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

The latter event, which came with Buckner playing first base for Boston, happened with the Red Sox up 5-3 in the ninth inning and just one out away from breaking a 68-year World Series drought.

Instead, Mookie Wilson of the Mets was able to reach first base, the Mets scored twice to tie the game and then won in extra innings. New York went on to capture Game 7, and the Series, giving the Boston media another fall guy to focus on.

But labeling Buckner as one of baseball’s great goats was a major injustice.

Even beyond Buckner’s strong baseball credentials – he played for 22 seasons, had a .289 career batting average and knocked in more than 1,200 runs – he was hardly the sole reason the Sox lost the ’86 Series.

There were plenty of Boston miscues to go around in Game 6 as the team’s relief pitching faltered, errors by two other players earlier in the game led to Mets’ runs and the Sox blew a 3-0 lead in Game 7.

Buckner was released by the Red Sox midway through the following season and signed with the California Angels, but he ended his career with a final stint back in Boston in 1990. The thing that I will remember most about his career was watching him hobble around bases on bad legs at Fenway Park a few weeks before he retired, at age 40.

On April 25, 1990, during the fourth inning of a game against the California Angels, he lined a pitch from Kirk McCaskill over the head of right fielder Claudell Washington and took off. Washington turned and sprinted toward the right field corner.

The ball bounced off the fence and bounded away just before Washington got to it, but Washington was unable to slow up in time. He ran into the low fence, which was about three feet high, and flipped over it and into the grandstands.

By the time the ball had been retrieved, Buckner had circled the bases, albeit in excruciatingly slow fashion, likely the most protracted inside-the-park home run in MLB history.

The smile on Buckner’s face after the game lit up the Red Sox locker room. When asked the last time he’d hit an inside-the-park homer, Buckner said he thought it was in high school.

It was not only the lone inside-the-park home run of his professional career, it was the last round-tripper he would ever hit in the big leagues.

Buckner was released by the Red Sox a little more than a month later, ending his Major League career.

Thanks to several Red Sox titles since 1986, any grudge notoriously fickle Sox fans might have held against Buckner for the Game 6 error have been forgiven.

Still, for some that one misplayed ground ball overshadowed a fine career and, to a degree, a fine life, but Buckner never lost his composure or his faith in God. He was able come to terms with his role in baseball history.

I remember him for both the inside-the-park home run, the only one I’ve ever seen in the more than 200 Major League games I’ve attended over the past 45 years, and for his class in handling adversity.

He was a good ballplayer and a better man, and he will be missed.

Florida fisherman hooks, lands jumbo grouper

Spend any time talking salt water fishing and you quickly become aware of the “big ‘uns,” those deep-water behemoths that are the stuff of legends but almost never end up on the end of your line.

Earlier this month Brandon Lee Van Horn of Panama City, Fla., was finally able to stop dreaming and start bragging.

The longtime commercial fisherman, who began fishing on his grandfather’s charter boat at age 8, landed a 330-pound Warsaw grouper on Oct. 1. He caught the monster in 375 feet of water after a 25-minute fight to bring it to the surface.

“You have no idea how much that fish means to me,” he told the Panama City News Herald. “I will probably never catch another one that big ever again.”

Van Horn, who fishes for a “little bit of everything,” mostly seeks out smaller species like vermillion snapper. Bigger fish such as Warsaw groupers can be difficult to land because they often break off or straighten out hooks once they’ve taken the bait, he told the paper.

Warsaw groupers are among the biggest fish found in the Gulf of Mexico, growing up to eight feet in length and nearly 600 pounds. Van Horn missed the Florida state record by more than 100 pounds, to a 436-pound giant caught in 1985 off Destin, but he was still pretty pleased with his day.

“I will probably never, ever catch one in my life this big ever again,” he said. “Definitely a fish of a lifetime.”

(Top: Brandon Lee Van Horn shows off his 330-pound Warsaw grouper in Panama City, Fla.)

Soccer fans: Always up for a good brawl, anywhere, anytime

Among the more interesting aspects of the World Cup is the fanaticism it invokes.

As the world’s most popular sporting event – 3.2 billion people watched the last World Cup, in 2014 – it’s bound to attract a number of zealots. But often the circumstances of such passion prove more than slightly curious.

Take yesterday’s match between Poland and Senegal. One wouldn’t expect there to be too much conflict between fans of countries more than 3,000 miles apart, but, then again, this is the World Cup.

Which is why approximately four dozen Polish and Senegalese soccer fans brawled while watching a live screening of the game – in Antwerp, Belgium!

Benches and fists were thrown in the donnybrook, which occurred after an argument started.

“It got out of hand and people started throwing chairs,” bar manager Johan Peeraer told local paper Gazet van Antwerpen.

While disturbances have been rare during this year’s World Cup, certainly rarer than in past Cups, the fact that fans from an Eastern European country and an African country brawled while in a North Sea city watching a game played in Moscow is fascinating.

I suppose it’s the equivalent of me and two dozen buddies brawling with the same number of angry Uruguayans in a cantina in Baja California while watching a Formula 1 race in San Marino. Except, this only seems to happen in soccer.

It’s almost enough to make up for the deadly boredom of the sport.

(Top: Poland and Senegal locking horns Tuesday in World Cup action.)

It’s been 60 years since Giants, Dodgers left New York

Sixty years ago today the Giants and Dodgers wrapped up their final seasons in New York. There are still some around who remember when the Giants called the Polo Grounds home and Brooklyn’s Dodgers toiled in Ebbets Field. For most, though, the two clubs are as much a part of California as the San Andreas Fault.

In reality, the transition to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, was anything but smooth. There were considerable machinations, particularly by Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, in the year or so leading up to the move, along with no shortage of hardheadedness by New York City officials.

And while the rivalry between the two clubs continued, almost none of the stars on either club enjoyed anywhere close to the same level of success once the teams relocated.

The Dodgers’ Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Don Newcombe and Carl Erskine were at the end of their careers and would never realize the same levels of accomplishment they had in Brooklyn. In addition, Jackie Robinson had retired after the 1956 season, Roy Campanella had been paralyzed in an auto accident in January 1958 and others such as Sandy Koufax hadn’t yet become stars.

For the Giants, who by 1957 had a lineup with considerably fewer standouts than the Dodgers, Bobby Thomson, Hank Sauer and Johnny Antonelli were nearing the end of the line and future greats such as Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Orlando Cepeda had yet to make it to the big league club.

The only star from either club whose fame transcended the shift from East Coast to the West Coast was Willie Mays, who would go on to play for 15 seasons in San Francisco.

Today, it seems difficult to fathom major league baseball without operations on the West Coast. There are not only the Dodgers and Giants, but three other teams in California, along with a club in Seattle. Yes, expansion west was inevitable, but did it have to cost the fans of baseball’s biggest market two its most storied franchises?

Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 through 1957.

What if, instead of the Giants and Dodgers heading west, the teams had remained in New York and Major League baseball instead had placed expansion franchises in the two cities? The National League did expand in 1962, adding the New York Mets and what was originally known as the Houston Colt .45s, now the Houston Astros. (The American League had expanded a year earlier, also adding two clubs.)

The Mets have won two World Championships and the Astros none since inception, but, at least in the Giants’ case, until recently the results between established franchise and expansion franchise were about the same. The Dodgers have won five titles since moving West, but none since 1988, while the Giants have won three, but didn’t get their first until 2010.

West Coast baseball fans would have been grateful for any big league club in 1958, although in fairness they had enjoyed high-caliber minor league ball through the Pacific Coast League for many decades. In other words, it didn’t have to play out like it did.

Sports and entertainment probably play a larger role in American society than they should. But for many, the diversion of sports can, on occasion, give families a shared interest, bring cities together and provide a common cultural bond.

It wasn’t for nothing that Japanese soldiers used the insult “To hell with Babe Ruth” when attacking US troops during World War II.

The loss of the two clubs left a void in New York, particularly Brooklyn, that has never fully been filled.

The names of O’Malley and then-Giants owner Horace Stoneham still conjure less-than fond memories among old-time New Yorkers, particularly since both seemed opportunistic and unscrupulous schemers who sold out their city and left fans, at least initially, with only the New York Yankees.

Of course, the league’s official stand at the time glossed over any pain on the part of the fans. Then-National League President Warren Giles officially commented on the move of the two clubs in 1957 thusly:

The National League again has demonstrated that it is a progressive organization. The transfer of the Giants and Dodgers means that two more great American municipalities are to have major league baseball without deny another city of the privilege. The National League, and I personally, will miss New York. But it is only human nature to want to reach new horizons.

It was, wrote Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune, “a paragraph or so of singularly rancid prose.”

Today, the Dodgers continue to play in one of baseball’s best parks, Dodger Stadium, while the Giants, after finally discarding the dismal confines of Candlestick Park, now call inviting AT&T Park home.

Except for a few retired numbers – such as those of former Giants Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, Bill Terry, Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell and Monte Irvin, and ex-Dodgers Reese, Campanella, Snider and Robinson – there are few reminders of New York within either organization.

(Top: Fans outside the Polo Grounds Sept. 29, 1957, during the New York Giants’ final game.)

Baseball says thanks as Vin Scully prepares to sign off

As Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully winds down the last few days of his 67-year career, there are so many things to contemplate about his amazing stretch behind the microphone.

First, many people don’t even live 67 years; few work that long; and it’s safe to say almost no one else has worked for the same employer for that length of time.

Consider that Scully, now 88-years old, began his career in the spring of 1950, when the Dodgers were still playing in Brooklyn, a locale they departed nearly 60 years ago for the West Coast.

As Jayson Stark writes for ESPN, when Scully first began calling Dodgers games, Connie Mack, a man born while Abraham Lincoln was president, was still managing in the major leagues.

I first began listening to Scully in the mid-1970s, when living in Southern California. In the late 1970s, when my family moved to Northern California, I would sometimes catch Scully on far-flung stations, given that listening to baseball, any baseball, was preferable to homework.

(For many years, I thought his name was “Vince Cully,” likely because I’d never heard the name “Vin,” and because “Vin Scully rolled so smoothly off the tongue that I couldn’t discern where the break came. Also, I wasn’t a particularly astute youngster.)

The velvet harmony of Scully’s delivery and his penchant for stories laden with equal parts baseball knowledge, history and humor and left me more than willing to put up with the fact that he worked for the much-reviled Dodgers.

Even when I was 14 or 15 years old, more than 35 years ago, I was staggered by the fact that Scully had begun his career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the same club highlighted in Roger Kahn’s 1972 book The Boys of Summer, featuring the likes of Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese,  Don Newcombe, Johnny Podres, etc.

By the time I started listening to Scully on the radio, the Dodgers had been gone from Brooklyn for not even 20 years, but to a 15-year old, the Brooklyn Dodgers were ancient history, not much different from the exploits of Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove or Ty Cobb.

As Stark’s article points out, Scully’s career was expansive, and because he was around so long it encompassed much of baseball’s ancient history, at least tangentially.

Stark includes a comment from Stan Kasten, president and CEO of the Dodgers, who in his current role has spent a considerable time talking baseball with Scully.

“ … we talk about a lot of things,” Kasten explained. “And at one point it comes to where he hates the way major leaguers do rundowns. They all stink at it. … The best way to do a rundown is the full arm fake. The full arm fake stops runners dead in their tracks, and you gently walk over and tag them. That’s the way to do it, you know? And so Vin and I had this thing. Vin said whenever there’s a rundown now he thinks about me, (and) whenever I see a rundown I think about him. And I was discussing this with Vin one day, and I said, ‘This is the right way to do rundowns, and the way I know that is because I read it in stuff that Branch Rickey wrote 70 years ago.’ And Vin says to me, ‘You’re right. That’s right. That’s exactly what Branch and I used to discuss.’ “

Kasten goes on to relate that Branch Rickey, who served as president and general manager of the Dodgers in the 1940s, broke into the major leagues in 1905.

“(So) Vin Scully has talked baseball with people who have played the game from [1905] through yesterday, OK?,” Kasten states. “Who on earth can make that claim? No one. One person. Vin Scully.”

Noted sportscaster Bob Costas added, “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? It’s probably two, and no more than three, degrees of Vin Scully – to connect you in some way to everything in baseball history. Everything.

“He had to have known somebody … who knew Cy Young. He had to have known somebody who probably met Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb lived until 1961,” Costas added. “If he didn’t know Walter Johnson, he sure as hell talked to somebody who batted against Walter Johnson. … So there is no significant baseball personage that Vin Scully either didn’t know or potentially knew someone who knew them.”

Through it all, Scully has remained a class act. As players, coaches, managers and any number of others have made their way to his press box this season to say goodbye, he’s remained the same humble individual that he was when he broke in in April 1950, when major league baseball consisted of 16 teams and none farther west than St. Louis.

One story relates how a 90-year-old man wanted to meet Scully. Scully, as always, made time not just to meet the man, but chat with him for 10 minutes. The following day, Dennis Gilbert, current White Sox special assistant and a longtime friend of Scully’s heard from the gentleman’s son, “saying how his father says his life is now complete. It was one of the greatest moments of his life to meet Vin. And I called Vin to tell him. … Vin said, ‘Thank ME? I want to thank HIM because of what a great experience it was for me just to meet the gentleman.’”

For me, it’s been a great experience to have been able to listen to Scully over the years when opportunity allowed. There won’t be another like him, but the Dodgers – and baseball – have been fortunate to have had him for so long.

(Top: Vin Scully nearly 60 years ago in the broadcasting booth, back when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn.)

Babe Ruth was good, but not quite that good

Impossible to tell which intern is in charge of ESPN’s baseball twitter feed this morning, but apparently someone’s asleep at the switch.

Note the second tweet, posted around 9:45 a.m.: “On this date in 1927, Babe Ruth hit his first HR. He would go on to set a single-season record with 60 home runs.”

Given that the 1927 baseball season finished on Oct. 1, one might be left with the impression that the Babe had one hell of a month, clouting slightly more than two dingers every day for the remainder of the regular season.

In reality, the New York Yankees’ 1927 season began April 12. Ruth, who not only broke the Major League record with 60 homers in ’27 but batted .356 and knocked in 165 runs, did manage to have a spectacular final month of the season.

On Sept. 2, 1927, he hit home run No. 44, off Rube Walberg of the Philadelphia Athletics. On the last day of the month, he connected for No. 60, off Tom Zachary of the Washington Senators, his 17^th round-tripper during September, the third-most home runs hit in a month by any player in Major League history.

Not surprisingly, the Yankees were dominant in 1927, finishing 110-44, and sweeping the Pirates in the World Series.

The man who recalls, and records, the glory of old-time baseball

There are few alive today who remember baseball’s first golden era, that of the 1920s and ‘30s, when greats such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Charlie Gehringer, Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell, Jim Bottomley, Rogers Hornsby, Ted Lyons, Pie Traynor and the Waner brothers, to name but a few, plied their trade on diamonds in a handful of major league cities.

Obviously, the length of time that has elapsed is a major reason – Babe Ruth, for one, retired more than 80 years ago – but there’s also the fact that one would had to have been not only a baseball fan, but located in fewer than a dozen cities to have regularly witnessed the slugging prowess of a Foxx or Ruth or the pitching wizardry of a Grove or Hubbell.

In an era before television, sports highlight shows and big-time commercial endorsements, the only way most Americans ever got to see professional athletes in action was through a trip to the park.

Given that there were only 16 major league teams spread among just 10 cities, ranging from Boston and New York in the east to Chicago and St. Louis in the west, many fans were lucky to see more than a game or two in person, if that.

Given the mastery with which Roger Angell has written about baseball over the decades, it’s hardly surprising that he is among the few still around who saw some of baseball’s first real superstars in person.

Roger Angell

Born in 1920, he began going to games in New York in the late 1920s, and regularly attended both New York Yankees and New York Giants games. The Yankees featured not only Ruth and Gehrig, but also Tony Lazzeri, Bill Dickey, Earle Combs, Red Ruffing, Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock and Lefty Gomez, while the Giants had, in addition to Ott and Hubbell, Bill Terry, Travis Jackson, Bob O’Farrell, Freddie Lindstrom and Freddie Fitzsimmons.

The two teams regularly won or contended for their respective pennants, which meant, in the days before baseball watered its product down with seemingly endless rounds of playoffs, that they would often go on the World Series.

Angell, who today is 95, wrote about his early-baseball memories in his 2006 work Let Me Finish:

My father began taking me and my four-years-older sister to games at some point in the latter twenties, but no first-ever view of Babe Ruth or of the grass barn of the Polo Grounds remains in mind. We must have attended with some regularity, because I’m sure I saw the Babe and Lou Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs on more than one occasion. Mel Ott’s stumpy, cow-tail swing is still before me, and so are Gehrig’s thick calves and Ruth’s debutante ankles. Baseball caps were different back then: smaller and flatter than today’s constructions – more like the workmen’s caps that one saw on every street. Some of the visiting players – the Cardinals, for instance – wore their caps cheerfully askew or tipped back on their heads, but never the Yankees. Gloves were much smaller, too, and outfielders left theirs on the grass, in the shallow parts of the field, when their side came in to bat; I wondered why a batted ball wouldn’t strike them on the fly or on the bounce someday, but it never happened.

Angell has written a number of highly regarded baseball books over the years, including Late Innings, Game Time, Season Ticket and The Summer Game, but for all the magnificence of those, it’s tough to beat the above for capturing the beauty of baseball’s early years.

“… Ott’s stumpy cow-tailed swing …” “ … Ruth’s debutante ankles …”  And anyone who recalls the history of the game and the 1930s Gashouse Gang has little trouble imagining the rollicking Cardinals of Hornsby, Pepper Martin, Frankie Frisch, Dizzy Dean, Dazzy Vance, Joe Medwick and Leo Durocher wearing their caps askew or pushed back, or of the Yankees of Ruth, Gehrig, et al declining to do so.

His ability to recall old-time players with names seemingly gleaned from the best of Dickens is a treat in and of itself: Eppa Rixey, Goose Goslin, Firpo Marberry, Jack Rothrock, Eldon Auker, Luke Appling, Mule Haas, Adolfo Luque, Paul Derringer, Heinie Manush , Van Lingo Mungo – all of whom played six, seven or eight decades ago.

The Baseball Writers’ Association of America recognized Angell in 2014 when they honored him with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest award given by the entity.

Angell became the first, and so far only, non-BBWAA member to be so honored since the award’s inception in 1962.

Angell has written on a variety of topics besides baseball with equal aplomb, but there’s something about his ability to cull out the quaint and curious, his understanding of the game and his imminently gifted writing style that makes his baseball prose sparkle.

(Top: Team photo of world champion 1929 Philadelphia Athletics.)

Mr. Hockey: He did it all with skill, aplomb and unbending toughness

There’s little that can be written here about hockey legend Gordie Howe that hasn’t been stated elsewhere with more color, clarity and eloquence.

Howe, who died Friday at age 88, was the consummate all-around player: he could score, pass, defend and intimidate. He was the embodiment of what a hockey player should be: tough as a $2 steak, modest and always had time for fans, young and old.

You don’t get the nickname “Mr. Hockey” for nothing.

Howe broke into the NHL at age 18 and didn’t retire until he was 52. Over the years he suffered broken bones, concussions and had teeth knocked out. He was said to have received more than 500 stitched on his face alone during his career.

In 1950, he crashed into the boards during a game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, fracturing his nose and cheekbone, and lacerating his eye. Only emergency surgery in which doctors were forced to drill a hole into Howe’s skull to relieve pressure on his brain saved the Floral, Saskatchewan, native’s life.

Howe responded the next season by leading the league with 43 goals and 86 points in 70 games. He would spend 25 years with the Detroit Red Wings and was among the league’s top-five scorers for 20 consecutive years.

When he was 50 years old – and playing with his sons in the rival World Hockey Association – he led his team in scoring with 96 points.

On top of all that, Howe, who grew up on the Canadian prairie, had a dry sense of humor, particularly on the ice, though opponents likely weren’t laughing along.

In the mid 1960s, Bobby Orr of the Boston Bruins took the league by storm as a youngster with his gifted skating and playmaking ability. During a game between the Red Wings and Bruins, Howe sent the rookie hard to the ice with one of his infamous elbows when he felt Orr had been a bit too spirited.

“I’m a very religious player,” Howe explained when Orr asked him about the hit. “I think it’s much better to give than to receive.”

Stan Mikita, the Chicago Blackhawks’ Hall of Fame center, once told The Detroit Free Press what happened after he cut Howe under the eye early in his career.

“A couple of minutes later at the Olympia, we were both turning in the Wings’ end. The next thing I remember I was at the Chicago bench, my head is killing me. Our backup goalie, Denis DeJordy, said he was the only one in the building who saw what happened. Gordie had skated by me, slipped his right hand up under his armpit, pulled out his fist, popped me in the jaw and put his glove back on.

“A few shifts later, he ambled by and asked if I learned anything. I said, ‘Are we even?’ Gordie says, ‘I’ll think about it.’”

Tough-as-nails defenseman Gadsby dies at 88

Former NHL defenseman Bill Gadsby died last week at age 88. Gadsby, who spent 20 years minding the blueline for the Chicago Blackhawks, New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings, was tough as a two-dollar steak and representative of the robust, resilient players who skated in hockey’s pre-expansion era.

Gadsby not only tallied 130 goals and 438 assists, becoming the first defensemen to score more than 500 points during his career, but also notched more than 1,500 penalty minutes, while sustaining some 640 stitches and numerous broken bones while playing in the NHL between 1946 to 1966.

To say that Gadsby was a survivor would be an understatement.

As a 12-year old, he and his mother were aboard the British liner SS Athenia in early September 1939 when it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. The pair spent several hours in a lifeboat before being rescued. Some 128 passengers and crew died when the vessel sank.

When Gadsby was 25, he contracted polio at the Blackhawks training camp and narrowly averted paralysis, according to the New York Times. He quickly recovered and went on to play in 68 games that season.

Gadsby retired in 1966, the season before Bobby Orr made his debut with the Boston Bruins and revolutionized defense. While Orr would obliterate scoring records for defensemen, hockey didn’t forget about Gadsby. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1970.

Gadsby played long before the era of big money, yet, as the Times recounted, he found an interesting way to earn some extra compensation.

“When a local insurance man started offering players stitch insurance, I signed up immediately,” he once told the Hockey Hall of Fame. “Under terms of the $100 policy, I would receive $5 for every stitch I received that season.”

Soon afterward he incurred a cut that required 30 stitches to his lower lip.

“I had to laugh at the poor agent,” he said. “In less than two weeks I had paid for the policy. I had gotten back all my money, plus a $50 profit. I think they stopped offering that policy not long after that.”

(Top: Bill Gadsby, left, talks with teammate Gordie Howe, prior to a Detroit Red Wings game in 1963.)

Oldest LA Ram once played the game for free – literally

One of sport’s most used clichés involves professional athletes qualifying their love for the game by stating that they would have played the game for free, usually uttered by those who made millions during their career.

But sometimes it’s just a figure of speech. The Los Angeles Times recently caught up with Ben Agajanian in Cathedral City, Calif., southeast of Palm Springs. Agajanian, who played for the Rams in 1953, is the oldest living Los Angeles Ram, at age 96.

Between 1945 and 1964 Agajanian played for 10 different clubs in three leagues (the National Football League, American Football League and All-America Football Conference). Among teams the Southern California native played for were the NFL champion 1956 New York Giants and 1961 Green Bay Packers.

Agajanian was called, in the jocular manner common to athletes years ago, “the Toeless Wonder” because while in college he’d lost four toes in an industrial accident; afterwards he was fitted with a special squared-off shoe that enabled him to continue kicking.

Agajanian played because he enjoyed it, and enjoyed being part of a team. ”Once anyone wanted me, that’s it, it doesn’t matter how much they paid me, I would be there,” he told the Times.

How much did he love playing? During the middle of the 1962 season, amid contract negotiations with the Oakland Raiders, Agajanian blurted out, “Aw, hell, I’ll just play for nothing.”

So the Raiders, being the Raiders, offered him nothing. Agajanian accepted.

He would play six games, living in the Long Beach area the entire time and joining the team every week just prior to kickoff. The five field goals he kicked for the Raiders during that spell remain most inexpensive in the history of professional football.

Today, Agajanian lives in an assisted-living home in Cathedral City but is still pretty sharp. Able to remember when the Rams were heralded as big shots in a town of big shot, he was excited to hear about the team’s recent announcement that they’ll be returning to Los Angeles, after 21 seasons in St. Louis.

If the Rams have any understanding of history, they’ll make sure Agajanian is on hand when they take the field for their first home game back in Los Angeles next season. And they’ll make sure he’s recognized and honored as the living link to pro football’s past that he is.

(Top: Ben Agajanian, kicking for the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference in 1947.)