By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

Paul Maguire – Signed by the Bills in 1964

Can a punter make an impact on a pro football team? He can if he’s Paul Maguire, who has influence the game in a few different ways.

Maguire landed with the Chargers in 1960 after playing college football at the Citadel, where he led the nation in touchdown catches. He was a punter and linebacker for Los Angeles and San Diego, and was picked up by the Bills after being waived in a contract dispute by the Chargers. Maguire’s timing was superb – he arrived just in time to be part of two championship teams in Buffalo. The punter stayed with the team through 1970, and was one of 20 players who played in all ten years of the American Football League’s existence.

But the story doesn’t end there. Maguire always was one of football’s funniest men, and he used those talents to parlay his career into a second life as a broadcaster. Maguire worked locally and nationally for about four decades. It was quite a ride. What’s more, there’s never been a bigger booster of Buffalo.

Here’s Paul talking about his time with the Bills:

(Follow Budd on Twitter @WDX2BB)

Budd Bailey

Budd Bailey has been involved in almost every aspect of the local sports scene for the last 40 years. He worked for WEBR Radio, the Buffalo Sabres' public relations department and The Buffalo News during that time. In that time he covered virtually every aspect of the area's sports world, from high schools to the Bills and Sabres and everything in between. Along the way, Budd served as a play-by-play announcer for the Bisons, an analyst for the Stallions, and a talk-show host. He won the National Lacrosse League's Tom Borrelli Award as the media personality of the year in 2011, and was a finalist for that same award in 2017. Budd's seventh and eighth books, one on the Transcontinental Railroad and the other about Ichiro Suzuki, are scheduled to be released in the fall.

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