Blaine rose from mud into journalism
Ask UO journalism professor Mark Blaine what he remembers about his college athletic days, he'll describe his University of Missouri rugby team's loss to Air Force on a "very muddy field" in a 1992 Sweet 16 game at the University of Kansas.
Blaine, a former prize-winning investigative reporter for the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times who holds a master's degree in literary nonfiction from the UO, also will tell you some of his best friends were teammates on the football team at Washington University in St. Louis, where he entered college with dreams of following his former pro-football father into a medical career.
"My father was an All-American lineman at Missouri and was drafted by the Packers in 1962," Blaine said. "He played five years in the pros and then left at the top of his game to get his Ph.D. in physiology. I always knew my father as a scientist, not as a football player."
Blaine's father Ed was traded at the end of the Packers' 1963 championship season to the Philadelphia Eagles. After leaving the NFL, Ed Blaine became a professor of medical pharmacology and physiology at the University of Missouri.
"Football was central to my life when I went to college, and looking back that obsession is strange," Mark Blaine recalled. "No scholarship, little recognition on campus. But something got you going for two-a-days, something kept you working out in the off-season. I was recruited by a number of schools at the D3 (Division 3) level, and I made my decision about college based the best academic schools where I could also play football."
Blaine, however, decided in his second year at Washington University that he was better suited to writing, so he entered Missouri's journalism program. He also gave up his football uniform -- he was an offensive tackle -- to take up rugby, a college club sport sanctioned by USA Rugby rather than the NCAA.
Rugby was a better fit for Blaine. "It's less regimented and when done well has an almost improv feel to it," he said. "I felt that I could do things on the field that weren't scripted and had a significant outcome on the game. I loved it and continued to play for another six years after college."
That muddy loss to Air Force was his day on a championship stage. "It's one of the things you strive for as an athlete or an academic," he said. "Your natural curiosity -- whether physical or intellectual -- gets you out of bed every day to do the thing you love to do, but you're always looking for the opportunity to push yourself. Great competition does that. Whether it's deadline pressure or the must-make blocks on a critical series, there's a common experience, a higher level, that's good for you, good for the team, good for the institution."
Blaine today focuses on storytelling and new media with his students, but he's also working on a book on college football, specifically "about the brutal college football season in 1905 that spawned the NCAA." At the heart of that research, are the ethics of
amateur athletics and questions about "why we play, even when it can get you seriously hurt or killed." (NCAA's birth)
"Eighteen players died that season, and football was almost banned by a coalition of college presidents," he said. "It almost ended football, because the soul of the sport was maintained by the colleges for the first half of the 20th century.”
