Years ago, I was coming back from New York on an Amtrak train when I encountered a man who struck up a conversation with me.
He saw my golf shirt, which had an Agganis Football Game logo on it (this was before the Agganis Foundation expanded into what it’s become today) and it struck a nerve with him.
He was a West Coaster who was spending some time up in this neck of the country. However, he’d heard of Harry Agganis. In fact, he recited to me the integral aspects of Agganis’ history (he played for Red Sox, and died tragically young, and very unexpectedly at that).
It made me understand that we weren’t being provincial when it came to Aristotle (Ari, which became Harry) Agganis, just as we’re not being provincial when we rhapsodize about Tony Conigliaro and the tragedy his life became. These were nationally-renowned athletes who had followings outside the City of Lynn.
Agganis came of age in the 1940s. Even then, noted several contemporaries, he was a cut above others his age. That kept up in high school, where he led Classical to heights it had never seen before, and then went to Boston University and did the exact same thing there.
Years before the likes of Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were establishing themselves in two sports, Agganis had the option of signing with the Cleveland Browns (Paul Brown really went after him) or the Boston Red Sox.
He chose the Red Sox, even though baseball wasn’t really his best sport. However, his father had died a few years prior to that, and as the youngest of his family, Agganis felt a familial pull toward his widowed mother. He stayed local.
Major League Baseball presented a challenge for Agganis — who completed his BU education while playing for the club — but he was making it. By June of 1955, he was batting over .300 and playing first base — on the same field with Ted Williams, Jackie Jensen, Frank Malzone, Ellis Kinder, Mel Parnell and Jimmy Piersall.
But he got sick at the beginning of the month. He missed a couple of games before attempting to come back, but suffered a relapse and was admitted to Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge (coincidentally, the same hospital that treated Tony C. after his 1967 beaning). It was there, on June 27, that he died of a pulmonary embolism. He was only 26.
I wasn’t even 2 years old in 1955, but in my memory, I’ve never seen a bigger funeral in this city than the one described in the stories about Agganis. Conigliaro’s, in 1990, came close, but it was in Revere.
Shortly after his death, Lynn attorney Charles Demakis asked The Item and the Red Sox to establish a scholarship foundation to keep Agganis’ legacy alive and to reward deserving scholar-athletes in the Lynn area.
Fifty-eight years ago, the Agganis All-Star football game was established as the principal fundraiser for that foundation. Over the years, that one game has expanded into nine: softball, baseball, boys and girls soccer, boys and girls basketball, boys and girls lacrosse and football. It’s gone from the Agganis Game to Agganis Week.
But most importantly, the foundation’s scholarship fund has — including the 20 awarded this year — given grants totaling $2,095,000 to 984 scholar athletes.
Obviously, others have come on board to assist the foundation and help it grow from its humble beginnings. Among those donors who have stepped up to the plate is the Thomas A. Yawkey Foundation, which donates for scholarships a year to students from the City of Boston.
Agganis Week kicks off Sunday (see the schedule accompanying this column) with an awards ceremony at Manning Field, followed by softball and baseball games at Fraser Field.
It continues Monday with basketball, Tuesday with soccer, Wednesday with lacrosse and Thursday with the 58th all-star football game. All games are limited to seniors, and most of the athletes come from schools whose leagues compete on the North Shore.
The poet A.E. Housman wrote, in “To An Athlete Dying Young,” “Now you will not swell the rout/of lads that wore their honours out/runners whom renown outran/and the name died before the man.”
Thanks to the efforts of the Agganis Foundation, and the lengthy legacy of athletes who have been honored in Agganis’ name, that will never happen.
