Number 33 enchanted the press and filled the stadiums from the time he played ball at Lynn Classical High School.

In 1948, with virtually every major college football coach in the country trying to recruit him, Lynn, Massachusetts, high school football, basketball, and baseball sensation Harry Agganis chose Boston University. Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy called Agganis "the finest prospect I've ever seen."

Named Aristotle by his Greek immigrant parents, called Ari by his mother, and nicknamed Harry by his friends, Agganis (SED'54) wanted to stay near his widowed mother. He entered the School of Education and played Terrier football under Coach Aldo "Buff" Donelli, head coach from 1947 to 1956 - considered by many fans the golden era of BU football. Agganis more than fulfilled his athletic promise, winning innumerable awards for his exploits on the gridiron and the diamond. An All-American quarterback, Agganis holds the Terrier record for most interceptions in a season (fifteen in 1951) and career (twenty-seven). Says former football teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Frank Giuliano, Jr. (SED'55,'62,'70), "Harry was an outstanding person and athlete; he helped you win the game." He credits the versatile Agganis, who could kick sixty yards, with revolutionizing aspects of the game, for example designing the spread punt formation with Donelli. "Harry was just unbelievable," he says.

Agganis had long dreamed of entering the pros - he just needed to choose the sport. He turned down a $50,000 offer as the number one draft choice of the Cleveland Browns football team when he was only a junior, becoming instead the Boston Red Sox starting first baseman. A left-handed batter, he quickly became the leading Sox hitter, with an average of .313. One Sunday in 1954, he hit a home run at Fenway Park, then raced up Commonwealth Avenue to receive his BU degree.

But Agganis died on June 27, 1955, at age twenty-six, of a massive pulmonary embolism. Nearly fifty years later, his legend endures, especially at BU and in Boston's Greek-American community. The Harry Agganis Arena in the Student Village is only the latest evidence. A public square in his hometown of Lynn is named for him, as are the athletic stadium at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina (where he played football in 1950, when his Marine Corps Reserve unit was activated at the start of the Korean War), a street on the Charles River Campus near Nickerson Field, and a BU scholarship. The Golden Greek is also memorialized at the Sports Museum of New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in a biography, Harry Agganis, The Golden Greek, by Nick Tsiotos and Andy Dabilis (COM'76), with a forward by former Boston Globe sportswriter and Agganis aficionado George Sullivan (CGS'53, COM'55,'76).

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— Jean Hennelly Keith