ITEM FILE PHOTO
Harry Agganis, pictured here playing for the Boston Red Sox, was honored as an MIAA legend at the inaugural Legends Event at Gillette Stadium on Thursday night.
By STEVE KRAUSE
I remember being on a train once and going to the food car for a snack. A man quite a few years older than me, judging at least from how he looked, came up to me with an eager look of recognition on his face.
“Harry Agganis,” he said, at which point it dawned on me that I was wearing a shirt with an early logo of the Agganis games. “I remember him when he played for Boston University.”
The man wasn’t from Lynn. He wasn’t even from Massachusetts. He was from Michigan. But he remembered some of the legendary football games the “Golden Greek” played for the Terriers. And he remembered that Agganis later played baseball for the Boston Red Sox.
“He died young, didn’t he?” the man then asked.
Yes, he did. And while it may seem to some that his death enhanced his legend (read A.E. Housman’s poem, “To An Athlete Dying Young” if you want to see how that can happen sometimes), rest assured this is one legacy that needs no extra embellishment.
Agganis was the real deal, and guys like him don’t come around very often.
Lest their be much doubt about this, the MIAA has eliminated it with its selection of Agganis to be among the inaugural honorees at Thursday night’s Legends Event at Gillette Stadium’s Putnam Club.
If you want an indication as to where Agganis among his athletic peers, here’s the rest of the list of honorees: Dana Barros, who played basketball for Xaverian, Boston College and, eventually, the Celtics; Winchester’s own Joe Bellino, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1960 while playing for the U.S. Naval Academy and who later played for the Patriots when they were still in the American Football League; Doug Flutie, who threw perhaps college football’s most famous Hail Mary pass when the Eagles beat Miami in 1984; former Billerica and Atlanta Braves pitcher, and Hall of Famer, Tom Glavine; and Rebecca Lobo, who got in on the ground floor of the University of Connecticut’s remarkable women’s basketball run.
Pretty heady company.
There’s no doubt dying young, and while the word “potential” is still rolling off everyone’s lips, can help put you in the legend category quicker. There’s no way of knowing whether someone such as Agganis, or Tony Conigliaro, or Reggie Lewis, just to name two others, would have continued to climb the athletic ladder toward Michael Jordan-hood or whether they’d have leveled off and had nice careers, perhaps, but something a little short of legend status.
It’s a tribute to Agganis that people who make these decisions felt comfortable extrapolating in Agganis’ case. His career was just in its beginning stages in 1955, when, at the age of 27, he took ill suddenly and died of a pulmonary embolism.
The shock of his death took the focus off his athleticism somewhat as his contemporaries, as well the Greek community, sought for a fitting way to memorialize him. Agganis was to the Greek community what Joe DiMaggio was to Italian-Americans.
And in that environment, the Agganis Foundation was established, with the mission to provide scholarships for deserving scholar-athletes in and around Lynn, where Agganis grew up and played high school sports for Classical.
And the foundation has succeeded greatly at that mission. It has awarded 927 scholarships to the tune of $1,749,000 since its inception. And not that this is a terrible thing, but the focus has been on Agganis’ off-field qualities as the years have progressed. He could have gone right into pro football, as Paul Brown loved him and wanted him to play for the Cleveland Browns.
However, his mother was recently widowed, and Agganis opted to play for the Red Sox so he could be closer to her. Stories abound about his gentlemanliness and the respect he had for, and commanded from, the community in which he grew up.
But I can also hear the words of my late cousin, Bob Ignatowitz, who was much older than me, and who, as a child, watched Agganis play at Manning Bowl.
“Steve,” he used to tell me, “even then, you could see it. He was a man playing with boys.”
Bob would say that the playground directors of his youth — the ones who were old enough to have seen some of Lynn’s greats such as Boley Dancewicz and Mecca Smiarowski — concluded that in Lynn, anyway, Agganis was the best they’d seen.
They knew what they had at BU. The little street that runs alongside Nickerson Field, which was converted into the Terriers’ home football field after the Braves left for Milwaukee, was renamed Harry Agganis Way.
When the BU athletic program outgrew Walter Brown Arena and a new multi-purpose facility was built on the site of the old Boston Armory, it was named for Agganis. A statue of the “Golden Greek” sculpted by Armand LaMontagne, who has immortalized Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski and Larry Bird, among others. Even that is pretty head company.
If there’s anyone left in this area, or elsewhere, that needs validation that Agganis belongs among the pantheon of Boston athletes, tributes such as this should provide it.