By Don Doxsie

 

Being a punter at almost any level of football is a distinctly unheroic pursuit. The position is almost an after-thought on most teams. The punter only gets to trot onto the field to do his thing for one play here and there, and only after the offense has failed to do its job.

 

Most punters aren’t recruited as scholarship athletes at the college level. They seldom are selected in the National Football League (NFL) draft. They’re almost never stars.

 

But Reggie Roby was no ordinary punter.

 

The Waterloo native became an icon at the University of Iowa and later in the NFL because he punted and kicked the ball with such robust ferocity that it was highly entertaining as well as tremendously effective.

 

“I’ve seen punters and kickers through the years and there’s a certain sound when the foot hits the ball and then there’s a Reggie Roby sound,’’ said longtime Iowa assistant coach Dan McCarney, who was primarily responsible for recruiting Roby out of Waterloo East High School. “There was an explosion on the ball when he punted.’’

 

McCarney frequently said he thought Roby did more than any other player to turn the Hawkeyes’ football program from a Big Ten doormat into a force with which to be reckoned in the 1980s. Roby was unquestionably the most important player on the 1981 Iowa team, which went to the Rose Bowl in head coach Hayden Fry’s third season, ending a 21-year drought of not going to any bowl game at all.

 

That Iowa team had distinctively unspectacular offensive personnel. It employed two fairly average quarterbacks and a committee of running backs and receivers who didn’t do much to scare opposing teams. The Hawkeyes did have a tremendously effective defense but one of the reasons the defense was so good was because opposing teams usually had to drive 80 yards or more to get to the end zone.

 

“The other team was going to start out inside their own 10 or 15 every time they got the ball,’’ Fry said in a 2005 interview with the Waterloo Courier. “It’s not easy to drive the ball the length of the field all the time. Our defense started with Reggie’s punting.’’

 

As members of that 1981 team gather for reunions this fall and share memories of what happened four decades ago, the first name that will come to their lips is Reggie Roby.

 

Sadly, Roby, who spent 16 years as one of the premier punters in the NFL, will not be present at the reunions. He died tragically at the age of 43 in 2005, the victim of an apparent heart attack.

 

But those associated with that 1981 team never will forget him.

 

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