Don Chandler, who played on four NFL championship teams with the Giants and the Green Bay Packers, becoming one of the leading punters and place-kickers of his era, died Thursday in Tulsa, Okla. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Pat, said.

Chandler was only a fifth-round pick when the Giants selected him in the 1956 draft, but he went on to be chosen as the punter on the NFL’s all-decade team for the 1960s.

In his rookie season, Chandler punted for the Giants team that won the NFL championship at the outset of the franchise’s glory years. .

Chandler was traded to the Packers after the 1964 season and played on three consecutive championship squads.

But his career almost ended when it had barely begun.

Chandler and his fellow rookie Huff, discouraged about making the team at the Giants’ 1956 training camp in Vermont, awoke Lombardi, then the Giants’ offensive coordinator, from a nap one morning.

“We held out our playbooks,” Huff was quoted as recalling by David Maraniss in his Lombardi biography, “When Pride Still Mattered” (1999). “We’re quitting. He says: ‘We’ve got two weeks invested in you guys. You may not make this ballclub, but you’re sure as hell not quitting on me.’” Chandler and Huff went to the Burlington airport that night, but before they could board a flight, Lombardi showed up and took them back to camp.