MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Pete Gogolak is probably not a familiar name to most casual football fans.

It requires some Googling, but when you begin to pore over the totality of Gogolak’s accomplishments, it is apparent that he has to rank among the most influential football players the game has seen in the last 50 or 60 years.

Gogolak was an immigrant refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution who ended up in Ogdensburg, New York, and later Cornell University where he became a standout place-kicker on the Big Red football team.

What made Gogolak different than other place-kickers in the early 1960s was his style of kicking the football, choosing to come at it from an angle and kicking it with his instep instead of straight-on with his toe.

Before Gogolak, field goals and even extra points were at best a 50-50 proposition for kickers, the one exception being Lou “The Toe” Groza, who once converted an amazing 88.5 percent of his field goal tries for the Cleveland Browns in 1953.

But kicking was Groza’s second job; his first was as the team’s defensive tackle.

Football teams back then did not have room for specialty players. Mose Kelsch once did it for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the mid-1930s, and he is generally considered to be football’s first kicking specialist, but the value of Mose kicking extra points and field goals wasn’t great enough to the Steelers to warrant him continuing in that sole role on the roster.

Thirty years later, when Gogolak was kicking those long, majestic field goals for the Buffalo Bills, teams finally began to see the true value of having a kicking specialist.

The New York Giants, stung by the publicity the American Football League New York Jets were getting with their $400,000 quarterback Joe Namath, broke an unwritten rule between the NFL and AFL of not negotiating with its free agent players by signing Gogolak to a three-year contract.

Gogolak’s surprise signing began a bidding war for players that ultimately led to the two leagues merging in 1970.

The publicity Gogolak got for his soccer-style kicking quickly filtered down to the college ranks where teams began to consider making room on their rosters for kicking specialists.

At West Virginia, for many years its place-kicking was a haphazard exercise at best. Field goals were rarely tried and when they were, it was usually done as a last resort. Extra points were the responsibility of the team’s best athlete, such as Ira Errett Rogers in the late teens or Pete Barnum during the mid-1920s.

Many games were decided because of made (and missed) extra points.

For decades, whenever the Mountaineers lined up to try an extra point it was done so with bated breath.

Then in 1948 came little Gene Simmons, a 5-foot-7-inch, 140-pound halfback from Elkins who once made 15 straight drop kicks while playing at Elkins High.

Coach Dud DeGroot understood the value of place-kicking during his days coaching professional football, and he found a spot on the team for Simmons as an extra halfback. There was not much Simmons could contribute to the team as a runner, but DeGroot figured he could be helpful when inserted into the game to kick field goals and extra points.

Simmons’ short third-quarter field goal was the deciding score in West Virginia’s big 16-14 victory over Maryland that led to the Mountaineers earning a 1949 Sun Bowl bid.

Simmons successfully booted 79-of-90 extra point tries and four field goals during his career for a then-school record 91 points.

When Simmons graduated following the 1950 season, the Mountaineers’ place-kicking went back to the stone ages. During an eight-year span from 1951-58, West Virginia successfully converted just two field goals, one each in games against Pitt in 1953 and 1954.

Halfback Jack Stone punched through a 15-yarder in a 17-7 victory over the Panthers in 1953, and two-way lineman Chick Donaldson got an 18-yarder to go between the uprights in a 13-10 loss to the Panthers a year later.

The next field goal wasn’t made until 1959 when Beckley’s Johnny Thackston hit a 24-yarder to give West Virginia a 10-7 win over Richmond.

But Thackston’s winning field goal wasn’t much cause for celebration, however, because fans were more concerned about the Mountaineers scoring just 10 points against such a weak opponent.

Like Simmons, Thackston was only on the team because of his kicking. When he was a student manager at Woodrow Wilson High in the mid-1950s, Thackston demonstrated to coach Jerome Van Meter his kicking prowess, which led to a spot on his high school team solely to kick field goals and extra points.

From there, Thackston went to Beckley College, Cincinnati and then the U.S. Military Academy before using his final season of college eligibility at WVU in 1959.

Thackston kicked four field goals and six extra points in eight games for the Mountaineers that season.

The next kicking specialist to arrive on the scene was St. Albans’ Chuck Kinder in 1963.

More famous for wearing the jersey No. 100 to recognize the state’s centennial birthday than his kicking, Kinder was by far West Virginia’s most accurate and successful place-kicker up to that point.

He made a 47-yarder in a game against Boston University in 1963 and was the first Mountaineer kicking specialist to eclipse 100 points for his career.

“The field goal was still kind of viewed as a give-up point back then,” Kinder recalled in 2013. “People thought of it as a short punt rather than a scoring event.”

When Kinder first arrived in training camp, the other players on the team really didn’t take him too seriously.

“They made fun of me for just being a kicker,” he said. “When I went up there, I made no pretense of being a player, nor did I have any interest in learning any position. I was just a kicker. That’s all I was and if I didn’t make it as a kicker then I wasn’t going to make it.”

One of the things Kinder was able to do was persuade the coaches to let him remove some of his padding to help him with his kicking. 

Coach Gene Corum permitted him to do so.

“I didn’t wear hip pads, and I didn’t wear thigh pads and my knee pads were only half-sized because I had convinced myself that I needed as much flexibility in my kicking leg as possible,” Kinder explained.

Kinder’s collegiate eligibility expired right around the time Gogolak was making a big name for himself in the pro ranks.

By then, college football’s most resourceful coaches were beginning to look around on their campuses for soccer-style kickers, which is how West Virginia’s Jim Carlen discovered Ken Juskowich.

Juskowich, from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was a national-caliber soccer player at Bethel Park High who once performed for the U.S. Soccer team at the 1963 Guatemala Games, but two broken shins while at WVU prematurely ended a career on the pitch.

Even though he could no longer help the WVU soccer team, soccer coach Greg Myers thought Juskowich might be of value to the football team so he convinced Carlen to give him a tryout.

“I remember going out there at the end of a practice,” Juskowich remembered in 2011. “It was Chuck Kinder’s final year coming up, and they both said, ‘Let’s see what you can do.’ I started kicking and it wasn’t 20, 25 minutes later when Carlen came over to me and said, ‘Son, I want you to get your stuff wherever you are living on campus because you are going to move into the (Towers) dormitory with the rest of the team, and you are going to be on scholarship.’

“To make a decision like that for somebody who has never played a game or kicked a football in front of people ... people just don’t make decisions like that anymore.,” Juskowich said.

What made Juskowich so unique was that he kicked Gogolak style, with his instep instead of his toe.

He was the first to do so at WVU and among just a handful in college football to do it when he suited up for West Virginia’s season opening game against Villanova in 1967.

“There weren’t many,” Juskowich recalled. “The Gogolaks, Pete and Charlie, were doing it and UCLA had a Canadian soccer-style kicker,” Juskowich said. “There were a couple of other kickers at the time, but I don’t remember any American-born soccer-style kickers so I joke with a lot of people that I was one of the first American-born Division I soccer-style kickers.

"Nobody has refuted it.”

Juskowich’s college football debut resulted in a school-record four field goals to go with four successful PATs in a 40-0 victory over Villanova.

A month later, his five field goals were all of the points scored in a 15-0 victory over Pitt at Mountaineer Field.

At that point, Juskowich was becoming one of the most publicized players on the team.

“That first game against Villanova, coach Carlen and coach (Bobby) Bowden gave me all kind of pep talks because I had never kicked in a game before,” Juskowich said. “To be honest, I had a lot of power, but I was just OK in practice. And then in the game I said, Wow, this is fun.’

“So by the time we came to the Pitt game I was getting a lot of press and coach Carlen and coach Bowden had a lot more confidence in me,” Juskowich continued. “I had relatives from Pittsburgh come down to the game who were scattered all over the stadium and my dad was there. My mom said he couldn’t talk. He just kind of froze up because he was seeing this game, and I was scoring all of the points.

“I remember one of my uncles saying he was never coming to another game because he will never see anything like this again – and they didn’t come back again!”

Juskowich kicked a career-best 49-yarder against Kentucky during his senior season in 1968 and he finished his two-year career kicking 20 field goals and 41 conversion attempts for 101 points, just two shy of the 103 Kinder produced in four seasons.

“There weren’t that many so-called specialists then, although Chuck Kinder was here,” Juskowich said. “Chuck took it to another level, but he didn’t have as many (field goal) opportunities as I did.”

After Juskowich, the next reliable place-kicker to arrive on the scene was Ravenswood’s Frank Nester, a straight-on kicker who broke Juskowich’s school record with six field goals in a 25-6 victory over Villanova in 1972.

Nester passed the baton to Warwood’s Bill McKenzie, another straight-on kicker whose 38-yard field goal on the final play of the game helped West Virginia upset Pitt 17-14 in 1975. It remains the most famous field goal in school history.

Six years later, Falls Church, Virginia’s Paul Woodside kicked four field goals in West Virginia’s 26-6 upset victory over Florida in the 1981 Peach Bowl, and he earned All-America honors in 1982-83.

Woodside is still considered one of the most productive kickers in NCAA history.

Erie, Pennsylvania’s Charlie Bauman enjoyed great success in the late 1980s and other great kickers soon followed.

Todd Sauerbrun came to West Virginia in 1991 as a place-kicker and left as one of the most accomplished punters in NCAA history. Punter Mike Vanderjagt was here at the same time, and he wound up becoming one of the most accurate kickers in NFL history for the Indianapolis Colts.

A decade ago, Pat McAfee kicked his way into the WVU record books before becoming an All-Pro punter for the Indianapolis Colts.

He is now a rising star in the broadcasting profession.

West Virginia’s history of top-quality specialists continues to grow. Its roots date back to 1948 with Gene Simmons before really taking off in the mid-1960s with Chuck Kinder and Ken Juskowich when college programs began to see the true value in having kicking specialists – thanks to Pete Gogolak.

“Being a kicker then was considered semi-sissy, especially in the opinion of real football players,” Kinder recalled. “But I want you to know I was also a catcher on the baseball team.”

Juskowich believes Carlen was somewhat ahead of his time in the mid-1960s for making a spot on his roster solely for a kicker.

Juskowich’s value was amplified in 1969 when Carlen was forced to use All-America fullback Jim Braxton as his regular kicker. It turned out Braxton was far better when both legs were moving. 

He missed five of his eight field goal tries that year and from then on, West Virginia has always held spots on its roster for extra kicking specialists.