Hank Hartong, who 40 years ago became the first player ever to kick soccer style in college football, was dressed in khaki slacks and penny loafers the first time he kicked at the University of Cincinnati.

        It was the fall of 1959, and the Bearcats were on the Nippert Stadium field getting ready for practice when Hartong walked over to his dorm mate, quarterback Jackie Lee, who doubled as the Bearcats' kicker for extra points. Lee was practicing his kicking, using the traditional, straight-ahead method employed by every football kicker in the country at the time.

        Hartong, a soccer player in his native Holland, thought he had a better idea. He would kick the football from the side, the same way he kicked a soccer ball, and he would get better results.

        “I said, "Let me try that,'” Hartong recalled. “I know this ball isn't round, but it makes no sense to kick it that way. You've got to kick under it and scoop it from the side. I'm a lefty. I lined up on the left-hand side and said, "Let me show you.' I kicked the first one, and it went through. They thought I was from Mars.”

        As other players gathered to watch this newfangled approach to kicking, Hartong bet Lee $1 that Lee would miss before Hartong did. Hartong doesn't remember how many they kicked, but he does recall that he never missed.

        Not that it mattered. Regardless of how successful he was in practice with his soccer-style approach, he would not make the Bearcats' football team the following year because the coach, George Blackburn, couldn't afford to try something new. According to Hartong, Blackburn sensed that his job was in jeopardy and wasn't about to be ridiculed for using a soccer kicker to kick field goals and extra points.

        “He approached me and said, "I'm on such thin ice, if I show up for our first extra point and have a guy lining up from the side, they'll think I lost it,' ” Hartong said. “He didn't want me to come out for the team.”

        Blackburn did, in fact, lose his job after a 4-6 season in 1960 and was replaced by Chuck Studley, who was more than willing to give Hartong a shot — and a scholarship. In the season opener against Dayton, Sept. 16, 1961, Hartong kicked two extra points, four days before Pete Gogolak made his first conversion for Cornell.

        Gogolak and his brother, Charlie, went on to star in the NFL and generally are credited for pioneering the now-common, soccer-style method of kicking. But that distinction really belongs to Hartong, who has a letter from Pete Gogolak acknowledging that he was the first.

        Hartong, now 62, kicked only one season for UC, converting five extra points and two field goal attempts. He graduated from UC in 1962, then turned down a chance to try out for the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. He entered Harvard Business School instead and today runs his own investment firm in Greenwich, Conn.

        And he's still proud of his status as football pioneer.

        “Hey, I invented something,“ he said. “I play golf, and I'm such a head case that I chip one-handed. My friends tell me that in 10 years a lot of people will be chipping like that and they'll say, "You invented it.'”

Hartong was a kicking pioneer NFL could be next for Ruffin Hoping to get right vs. Wright

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