Today's Tidbit... When The Shoe Isn't On The Other Foot

Kickers have always enjoyed their quirkiness, even before specialist or dedicated kickers exacerbated the problem. There's just something about thumping the ball that brings out unconventionality.

An example of kicking eccentricity is the barefoot kicker, a species many recall emerging in the 1970s and 1980s when the NFL saw Tony Franklin and a few other soccer-style kickers booting the ball without a boot on their kicking foot. Barefoot kickers variously claimed that connecting skin to leather enhanced their ability to grip the ball or strike the ball lower than they could when wearing spikes.

Of course, those boys followed in the bare footsteps of the shoeless of 50 years earlier, many of whom were Hawaiian, who had a long tradition of barefoot football, a game in which no one wore shoes.

Today's Tidbit... Factoid Feast II

('The Master Mind And Pupil Star,' Honolulu Star-Advertiser, December 31, 1925.)

Henry "Honolulu" Hughes was the first Hawaiian player to achieve fame on the mainland. As a halfback for Oregon State in the latter part of the 1920s, Hughes wore shoes in the Beavers' games but wanted to remove the shoe on his kicking football as needed. His coach preferred otherwise, but Hughes eventually got his way, especially when crowds at visiting stadiums, such as the Polo Grounds, chanted their desire to see Shoeless Hank. Hughes was talented and OSU's best kicker - punting, drop kicking, and placekicking - yet he was portrayed as an oddity, despite being good enough to later play for the NFL's Boston Braves.

('All Kinds, All Sizes, On Western Grids,' Tacoma Daily Ledger, December 25, 1927.)

(Hix, John, 'Strange As It Seems,' Los Angeles Evening Citizen, October 25, 1928.)

The OSU coach's reluctance to have his kicker go shoeless was the concern for his safety and the time needed to unlace the shoe, remove the sock, and reverse the process to defend punt returns. They solved the problem in due time when someone developed a zippered shoe for shoeless kickers.

Most barefooters of the era were Hawaiian, whose development was encouraged by contests pitting the top schoolboy barefooters from each island in contests held during top games over the Christmas break when a mainland college often played a game or two on the Islands. (Honolulu Hughes won the kicking contest when the Green Bay Packers visited the Islands in 1932.)

Despite the dominance of Islanders, mainlanders also proved to be effective barefoot kickers. Most of those were boys from the rural South, where shoes were sometimes optional attire, whether on a football field or not. Pete Rodriguez grew up in West Virginia and played for Salem College before joining the Buffalo Bison, sometimes punting 60 yards a clip.

Mississippi State's Hampton Potts, coached by former Notre Dame All-American back and kicker Frank Carideo, booted shoeless for his team and skipped halftime in the locker room to put on a demonstration for an appreciative crowd at Centenary. Even a few Southern high school students adopted the shoeless habit. Lefty Horton, kicking for the Hugh Morson Junior team of Raleigh, went shoeless, as did Fred Hall or Waco High School.

('Barefoot Kicker,' Morning Union (Springfield, MA), October 21, 1937.)

There were a few other Southerners like him, though a Northern outlier was Johnny Butts, who played for Menomonie High in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He learned to boot bootless while lifeguarding on a beach and decided to continue the practice on the gridiron, though it is unclear what he did when the gales of November came early to the UP.

Unfortunately for those who enjoy quirkiness, barefoot kickers are essentially a thing of the past. Jeff Wilkins was the NFL's last barefoot kicker in 2002, though he did not consider himself to be a barefoot kicker due to the heavy taping of his foot. Barefoot kicking remains legal in the NCAA, though practitioners are few and far between today. Let us know if you are aware of any out there in the wild.

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