The most dominant championship performance in the history of the New York Giants came on a brutally cold Sunday 55 years ago, on the tundra of Yankee Stadium. The Giants clubbed the Bears, 47-7, with the help of a club-footed kicker, a pioneering son of Armenian immigrants who is now the oldest living Giant player, a man who would spend five decades in pro football, and arguably do more than anybody in history to alter the perception of the kicking game.

Of course Ben Agajanian remembers the 1956 NFL Championship. He kicked two first-quarter field goals from 17 and 43 yards out with the Giants running away to a 34-7 halftime lead.

“I didn’t jump up and down the way the players do today,” Ben Agajanian says from his home in Cathedral City, Calif. “I was cool.”

Ben Agajanian is 92 years old, and has archives to rank with anybody’s, having saved every available game film and newspaper clipping dating to 1938. He can tell you all about his NFL debut with the Eagles and Steelers in 1945; about the 53-yard field goal he kicked for the Los Angeles Dons in the All-American Football Conference in 1947; about his friendship with Pete Rozelle and the nine teams he kicked for and the scores of kickers he mentored, from Paul Hornung to Raul Allegre, kicker for the Giants’ first Super Bowl team in 1987.

Agajanian’s memory is as strong as his right foot, and he beats most everybody in his daily games of gin rummy at the Mission Hills Country Club, though he had no idea about his Giant longevity record.

“I’ll be damned,” he says. “You know what I attribute it to? I don’t drink, except for a beer once in awhile. I don’t smoke. I played handball two or three times a week and that keeps your legs in shape, your body in shape.”
Agajanian will be watching Lawrence Tynes and the rest of the Giants Sunday in Candlestick Park, rooting for his former team, doing it with a life story all his own, and a football resume that has a wide circle of friends and protégés pushing his nomination for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“I have known Ben Agajanian since he was our kicker with the New York Giants in the fifties,” Tom Landry wrote in a letter to the Hall of Fame in 1994. “He has done more for the kicking game in the past fifty years than anybody I know!”

Says Allegre, now an NFL analyst with ESPN Deportes, “I was only with Ben (in the preseason of 1983), but he made a few subtle changes in my kicking form that made a tremendous difference. Without Ben, I would not have kicked in the NFL.”

Agajanian grew up in the California fishing village of San Pedro, where his father built an immensely successful trash-hauling business. Ben became a tennis star, getting his kicking start by literally kicking a tin can while walking to and from school. He wound up getting a scholarship to the University of New Mexico, where he starred in tennis and was a 6-0, 180-pound defensive end and kicker for the football team, before his right foot was crushed in a horrific freight-elevator accident one summer.

The front third of Agajanian’s foot had to be amputated, his shoe size going from 10 to 7. He tried to keep kicking, kept slathering his foot in Tuff-Skin, but it was too painful, until his coach at New Mexico, Ted Shipkey, sent him to a cobbler, who built a thick, square-toed boot, similar to the one Tom Dempseywould make famous when he kicked his record 63-yard field goal for the Saints in 1970.

Suddenly, Agajanian discovered he could make better contact, and kick farther, than he ever had before. The kicking game was a virtual afterthought to coaches when Agajanian started, NFL coaches then loathed devoting one of their 33 roster spots to a specialist, which is why most kickers of that era — Lou Groza and Pat Summerall among them - played other positions. Agajanian — believed to be the first pro player to be strictly a kicker — gradually changed that, kicking 104 field goals and 343 extra points in a 20-year playing career that included five seasons (1949 and 1954-57) with the Giants.

A successful sporting goods entrepreneur with eight stores on the west coast, Agajanian says he never made more than $4,500 a season, and retired four different times, only to be drawn back by the rush of competition, pressure and thrill of performing before crowds.

Landry hired Agajanian to be the Cowboys’ field-goal coach in 1964, and for the next quarter-century, Agajanian, who kicked straight on but became an early proponent of soccer-style kicking, became a guru to field-goal kickers everywhere.

He is credited with being the first to get kickers to take three steps back and two to the side, the best position to approach the ball, and with being fanatical about proper technique through film study.

“It was amazing that he was a straight-on kicker but knew so much about kicking soccer-style,” said Max Zendejas, an Agajanian pupil who kicked for the Redskins and the Packers. “He helped so many people for so many years. His whole thing was being consistent with every kick, every day, and watching film so you knew exactly what the right form was.”

High school kids, aspiring college kickers, wannabe pros — they all would find their way to Agajanian, who set up kicking camps in Texas and California, the goalposts beckoning him to teach right into his mid 80s.
Agajanian is on his second set of knee replacements, and has artificial hips, too. He likes to spend time in the waterfall Jacuzzi behind his three-bedroom ranch house, and is thrilled that he is still active and vital. Agajanian’s square-toed boot is in the Hall of Fame in Canton. He has been nominated for induction himself for a fifth time, and will find out in July if he will make it onto the ballot. It’s a dream that would make his kicking-life complete.

“Ben was the first ever kicking specialist in the history of the NFL. He changed the perception that kickers had to play other positions to be part of a team,” says Allegre. “On his performance alone, he may not have the numbers to sway Hall of Fame voters. But there is a “contributors” section of the Hall of Fame that includes executives and other people who had a profound impact on the NFL. Ben certainly belongs in this group.”

In the meantime, the oldest Giant will root for his old team and keep playing gin rummy, and not even entertain the thought of relocating himself and his voluminous kicking archives.

“No way I’m moving into a retirement community,” Ben Agajanian says. “I’m way too young.”

Benjamin J Agajanian