From kicker to card shark

Tuesday, April 29, 2003 | 10:06 a.m.

A wire ran from Ben Agajanian's earpiece into his shirt, to some sort of contraption, which New York Giants assistant coach Vince Lombardi dismissed as a hearing aid.

Poor Ben, Agajanian heard someone say that day inside a Fordham Field meeting room in fall, 1956.

When Lombardi heard that Agajanian was listening to that afternoon's World Series game from Yankee Stadium on a transistor radio, he threw a piece of chalk to the ground and raged.

Agajanian, then 37, had the seniority to talk back to Lombardi. I had tickets to the Series, he told the venerable coach, but I gave them away out of respect to you and the team to be here.

Lombardi huffed and puffed, then returned to laying out offensive schemes just days before the NFL championship game against Chicago. About 10 minutes of the strategy session passed before Lombardi again turned and peered at Agajanian.

"Aggy! What's the Yankees' score?" Lombardi yelled, breaking up the room. The Giants defeated the Bears, 47-7, for the title.

One of the most renowned field goal kickers in football history, confirmed by no less an authority than former Dallas coach Tom Landry, Agajanian has been keeping score in gin rummy for decades.

That's the game that brought Agajanian, an 84-year-old resident of Long Beach, Calif., to town Saturday, and he's been playing in the four-day World Series of Gin Rummy in a Riviera penthouse since Sunday.

He and nephew Mark Cardelucci were ousted in the partners competition Sunday. Four consecutive singles victories by Agajanian on Monday enabled him to reach today's rounds.

He once so soundly beat former Cowboys assistant coach Mike Ditka, who later gained acclaim in Chicago as the Bears' coach, at the card game that the fiery Ditka punched a hole in a wall.

"He's crazy," Agajanian said. "It got to where I wouldn't take his money."

At a pai gow table Saturday night, a steady stream of fans asked Agajanian for an autograph or a closer look at the 1961 championship ring he earned with the Green Bay Packers.

When Paul Hornung was called into the U.S. Army in the middle of that November, Lombardi plucked contract-less "Bootin' Ben" from the Dallas Texans of the AFL. Courtesy of weekend passes, Hornung missed only two games.

"I was so excited," Agajanian said of playing a role in the first of Lombardi's five championships in Green Bay. He made all eight of his extra-point attempts and one of two field goals for the Packers.

Agajanian's nomadic professional career began when he was drafted by Philadelphia, then traded to Pittsburgh, in 1945. A year later, he led the All American Football League with 15 field goals. He also played in Los Angeles, Dallas, Oakland and San Diego.

Lombardi was his favorite.

"Vince always said, 'If you're not 15 minutes early, you're late,' " Agajanian said when a recent visitor excused himself for being five minutes late. "He was beautiful, with that gap-toothed grin. When he died, his wife, Marie, told me, 'You know he loved you.' "

Agajanian did not have to rely on football for a career because a sporting goods venture proved to be lucrative, spawning into eight West Coast stores and a distributorship.

Kicking is more of a passionate hobby, and he still gives free lessons to teens when he's home. He is famous for kicking clinics in Texas and California.

Former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne once summoned him to Lincoln. Agajanian showed Osborne one of the kickers' bloated footballs, the one with the loose lace, and told him it was the same piece of crud that Agajanian booted at Yankee Stadium in the 1950s.

A steamed Osborne slapped the ball away. Within 15 minutes, the Cornhuskers' kickers each received a new football for practice.

Agajanian was a valuable conduit to the UCLA program during Terry Donahue's run as coach from 1976-95. Norm Johnson, John Lee and Brad Daluiso were a few gems that Agajanian evaluated/sent to Donahue.

Daluiso and former Cowboys kicker Rafael Septien, among others, can thank Agajanian -- "Uncle Ben" to many he has worked with -- for their hefty NFL pensions.

Agajanian said he receives about $2,600 a month from his own NFL pension.

In 1969, he traveled to Chicago, at the request of Bears owner George Halas, to critique the team's kickers. Ugly, he surmised.

So Halas asked Agajanian if he would kick for the Bears that season.

"George," Agajanian said, "I'm 50!"

The soccer-style, three-steps-back-and-two-over method of kicking and bowing the line to make it more difficult for ends to cut corners are among two dozen innovations attributed to Agajanian, credited for being the game's first field-goal specialist.

His contributions to the game once compelled Landry to inform NFL executives, via a letter, that Agajanian "has done more for the kicking game than anyone in the last 50 years."

Which is amazing, considering the first four toes on his right foot were severed in an accident in a Coca-Cola plant in Albuquerque, where he attended the University of New Mexico, 64 years ago.

One of his duties at the part-time job was hauling barrels of syrup up a freight elevator. One day, Agajanian sat on one, swinging his legs, when his right foot got caught in the open elevator between the floor and a jagged concrete edge of the building.

"The hospital was very close, and I hobbled to it," Agajanian said. "A nurse who had been there 15 years said she had never seen anything like it, the toes were mashed and it was all bloody and dangling. I just said, 'Fix 'em so I have a flat front.'

"I still wanted to kick. I'm a funny guy. Pain is all in your head."

Or in the cards you're dealt in gin rummy.