Good morning Good Counsel

My name is Joey Wu, and my name is Rebekah Sun, and as Executive Co-Editors of The Talon we are honored to introduce Mr. Kevin B. Blackistone as our speaker today. 

Mr. Blakistone is a fellow Falcon and a Good Counsel graduate from the class of 1977. Having earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, he has worked professionally as a journalist. His career of more than 40 years has taken him from the Boston Globe, where he worked as a city reporter, to the Chicago Reporter, where he worked on reporting about racial and social issues, to the Dallas Morning News where he covered economics. Covering Olympic games and covering Nelson Mandela’s U.S. tour are just a few of his exciting news assignments. Currently, he is the Professor of the Practice for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park where he teaches sports journalism, and he writes national sports commentary for the Washington Post. He is also a frequent panelist for the ESPN show Around the Horn and a contributor to the National Public Radio.

Mr. Blackistone’s many accolades include awards for sports column writing from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, a Chicago Newspaper Guild award for investigative reporting, and a National Association of Black Journalists award for enterprise reporting. Mr. Blackistone was a Davenport Fellow at the University of Missouri, a Wharton Business Journalism Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and as a graduate student, a Martin Luther King Fellow at Boston University. Mr. Blackistone is on the board of directors of the Society for Features Journalism Foundation and serves on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Task Force on Recruiting for Academic Diversity.

In March of 2020, just before the arrival of COVID, Mr. Blackistone was recognized with Good Counsel’s Brother Robert Arrowsmith ’63 Distinguished Alumnus Award.

We would like to thank Mr. Blackistone for his efforts in restarting our beloved school newspaper, The Talon.

Thank you for coming, Mr. Blackistone! The floor is yours.

                   –Introduction of Kevin Blackistone, OLGCHS February 4, 2022

Joey Wu ‘22 and Rebekah Sun ‘22

Good Counsel had the great pleasure of welcoming back Mr. Kevin B. Blackistone, class of ‘77. Kevin Blackistone is a sports commentator and journalist who you may be very familiar with because of his appearances on ESPN’s “Around the Horn”. Not only is he a journalist and sports commentator, he also is a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. Mr. Blackistone has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, Chicago Newspaper Guild, and many more. 

Mr. Blackistone started his day off at GC, in Large Community with all the Falcons together to talk about primary sources, media literacy and finding the truth in false information that is spread across the Internet. After his visit to all the Falcons, he proceeded to pay Mr. Durkin’s English 9’s class a visit. Being able to have a personal conversation with Mr. Blackistone and ask genuine questions was a great privilege. Not only did he give us well-spoken answers, he asked us questions regarding our English class and told us inspiring and possibly even life-changing stories. Beforehand, my class and I wrote questions and all asked them together due to our genuine curiosity regarding the sports commentating GC alumni. Here are the questions and answers from our beloved alumni:

Question 1: As a sports commentator and journalist, what continues to drive you to write?

Mr. Blackistone: “I often joke that if I didn’t write, that I’d be on a street corner somewhere with a cardboard sign. I like to do it, like I said, to me it’s therapeutic, it’s like I get an idea and I feel like I have to flush it out of my system with words and thoughts, and there’s so much that goes on now. The flow of information is so fast, so furious, and it changes people’s thoughts in a millisecond. And I just like diving into that, and over the years, I have developed a different tact on issues that we talk about everyday of sorts that other people may not have, so it engages the public and different perspectives.”

Question 2: How would you describe working with ESPN, especially with “Around the Horn”?

Mr. Blackistone: “It’s a blast, number one. It’s fun, we all get along, it’s a fun time. But, the three biggest help for me is, number one, hearing the opinions of other people that I respect cause we all don’t have the same opinions. And so, when they say something about something that I have not considered and that becomes a part of the recipe for me if I’m about to write about that situation. Number two, ESPN is a huge company that has a gigantic research group, so we have a researcher dedicated just to our show. So, all the topics that we pick, and decide that we’re going to talk about, that researcher compiles information about it. So by the time we’re about to do the show, we’ve already reviewed all of this research material, some of which if I’m writing about that particular issue, it goes into my writing. So I get the research out of it. The third thing is, exposure on national television, or actually international, but a national television show gives everyone on the show identity in sports that you wouldn’t have before, so people know you. So I can call up a player or a coach who I don’t know or walk into a clubhouse or locker room that I don’t go to and I don’t have to explain who I am when I’m there. They’ll know me from television and that just breaks the ice. So those are the three really practical things of being on the show.”

Question 3: What are some of your favorite topics to write about?

Mr. Blackistone: “My favorite topics to write about would be race politics and culture and sports. My first ever sports column, many many years ago, was on that very topic. And, I think that’s pretty much the arena that I’ve written in. I write about whether this team is any good, or that team is any good, whether or not Tom Brady is the best quarterback ever, whether or not someone else is. I do all that too, and I occasionally cover games these days. But the biggest thing for me is that intersection of sports and the rest of society. For example, the other day I wrote about the new name for the Washington Football Team and how problematic I even think the new name is and why that is. Rather than just writing a column saying whether or not I like the name or not. So I gave people reasons about why I’m troubled about the new name. So that’s what I do and what I’m most comfortable with.”

Question 4: How do you think social culture has affected your writing? 

Mr. Blackistone: “You do write about what other people are talking about. It’s hard to convince an editor to let you write about something that nobody is talking about unless it’s a particularly good story. So generally, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of the sports environment and hone in on things that are newsworthy to talk about. But sometimes I will veer off into something I’m interested in that I think I can make of interest to everyone else. So a good example would be that back in the 1960’s, for one year, there was another basketball team named Washington Capitols, just like the hockey team except they spelled Capitol with an “o” and not an “a ”. They were here for one year and a lot of stuff happened around the team, and I’m wanting to write about that team at that time. Which I did, and I tried to track down all the players and the coach of the team and there was one guy I tried to track down and when I finally found him, I was told that he wasn’t in very good condition and he couldn’t talk. And, I didn’t think anymore about it, I wrote my story, and it was pretty cool. And then sometime later, someone called and said ‘Hey, I heard you were looking for this particular guy’, I said ‘Yes, I was’, he said ‘Well, he just died. I said ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that’. Then they said ‘He died penniless, with no family, he has a pauper’s grave and his old teammates have put together the money to exhume his ashes and have them buried on his college campus’. And I was like, ‘Really?’ So, I went to the burial at St. Bonaventure which is in Western New York, and I had to write a story about just what I told you, about his old teammates rescuing his body from a pauper’s grave in Las Vegas and bringing him back home to Western New York. And everyone was there. The new St. Bonaventure’s men’s team had no clue who this guy was. Turns out, and I didn’t know this until I started reporting and talking to people, he is the only athlete to be drafted in three sports. Ever. He was drafted in the NBA, he was drafted in Major League Baseball, and he was drafted in the NFL. The guy’s name was George Carter. And I had never heard of him, never heard of him. And to hear people talk about what a great guy he was. His family had lost contact with him, some of them showed up. They hadn’t seen him in 30 years. So I just had a sense that this was something that might resonate with people even though it’s not necessarily in the news stream.”

Question 5: Who do you admire the most?

Mr. Blackistone: “There was a guy named Paul Robeson. Anybody ever heard of Paul Robeson?” The class shook their heads no. “Probably haven’t. If you’re a sports fan, he was considered at one time, the greatest football player ever. Of course, this was over 100 hundred years ago. 1917, 1918. He was on the all-American team, and he played football at Rutgers. He was the first Black football player, I believe at Rutgers. He played professional football for a while but then decided to go to law school at Columbia, I believe. Gets a law degree. He had a talent for acting, and became a legendary actor. He can sing, and becomes a legendary singer. Not sure if you’ve ever heard the song called “Old Man River”. He crashed that song. Everything he did was better than anyone who had done it before. Then in the 1930’s and 1940’s, he became a human rights activist. He was, in the 1930’s, 1940’s arguably, the most popular singer in America. There are some new photos of him in which his body looks like it was chiseled out of stone. The guy was incredible. They labeled him a communist and effectively ruined his career. He went into exile for quite some time over in Europe before returning to the United States in the 1970’s, very much a broken man. But there are few people that I probably admire more than Paul Robeson. There is an incredible exchange that you can listen to on Google between him and the Congressional panel that accused him of being a communist. And he is so intelligent and so well-spoken and he had a deep voice that just commanded authority. So he was just a great athlete, great singer, great actor, great human rights activist, just amazing.”

Question 6: Who or what inspired you to start writing?

Mr. Blackistone: “I would say my father. My mother and my father. My mother because I was a poor typist so I would write things out and she would type it out for me. And then my father was one of these guys who would always write letters to the editors or write guest columns in the newspapers about political issues or social issues. So that was always something that was in our household. Sitting at the dinner table and dad was always yapping about something. And, he would always shove things to me to read. He was always tearing things out of the newspaper magazines and getting some cool books. So when I got [to Good Counsel], probably about my junior year, I decided that this journalism thing was interesting. I always delivered the newspaper and I loved reading the newspaper. Then there was a journalism class [at Good Counsel]. But it was very rudimentary and there were paper textbooks that showed you the basics, and we went on a few field trips. Then we did some stuff at the Talon. But we did it, we did it, I knew my junior and senior year that I wanted to do the journalism thing, went to journalism college at Northwestern, and I’ve been a journalist ever since.”

Question 7: Do you feel as if you’ve reached all the goals that you’ve set for yourself?

Mr. Blackistone: “No, and you know what, I don’t set goals for myself. You know why? Because, this is the way I feel, if I set a goal and I don’t reach then that could be seen as failure. So, I don’t really set goals. I decide what I want to do and then I go do it. I decided in 2014, 2015 that I want to make this film, and here it is, 2022, and it’s finally getting ready to premiere. So I didn’t say, my goal is to do it by 2017, I just said I want to do it and I’ve done it. So, yeah, I don’t really organize my life around goals.”

Being able to interview Mr. Blackistone was truly an amazing experience—not only were we able to learn as to why he chose this certain profession, but we could hear stories from when he was a Falcon like all of us. Hearing Mr. Blackistone’s answers and stories gave us all a sense of hope and inspiration. To Falcons who wish to follow in his footsteps as a writer/journalist/sports commentator, or Falcons who want to do the complete opposite, Mr. Blackistone should motivate us for the future and the greatness that it holds for all of us. Even beyond the news we can still find the truth in false information. When we feel something is wrong, we must find a way to seek the true answer.