Our next inductee is a 1947 graduate of Hingham High School. Unfortunately for us however Cliff Blair is unable to join us here today. He lives in Florida and for the last 8 years has been suffering with Parkinsons disease. I think a lot of his personality and humility can be seen in a note he wrote to me saying, “Thank you very much for your thoughtfulness and interest. I am amazed people still remember me. My son Brian was only 4 when I was inducted into the BU Hall of Fame and of course too young to remember. His wife Debbie is a lovely woman, CEO of a major HMO with over 8oo employees. Quite a gal. They get along better than any couple I know.” Cliff is obviously very proud of his son and daughter-in-law and sounds like a very nice person. What an athlete Cliff Blair must have been. His career really exploded after high school but the story of how he got to B.U. Is very interesting. Cliff was mainly a shot putter while at Hingham H.S. He didn't think he was going anywhere until coach Doug Raymond at BU brought Cliff in for a look/see. On the recruiting trip, Coach Raymond showed him a new event called the discus, and after a brief lesson, Cliff was throwing further than the other athletes already at BU. This meeting with Coach Raymond and the introduction to the discus led to Cliff's claim to fame “The hammer.” His induction into the B.U. Hall of Fame discribed his career very well. So I quote form that induction ceremony, “Cliff Blair was the first collegian to ever throw the 16-lb hammer more than 200 feet. He would later set a world record in the event and may have added Olympic gold to his resume, if not for a last minute decision. Blair, a journalism major at BU's School of Public Communications, earned a berth on the U.S. Olympic team that competed in Melbourne, Australia in the summer of 1956. Just months earlier, on July 4, 1956, performing at an AAU meet, he set a world record in the hammer throw, his toss of 216'4.75” besting his own national mark of 211'3” and the world mark of 216'1/2” held by Russian Mikhail Krivonosov. Leading up to the Olympic Games and while at the Olympic venue, Blair was filing reports on the Olympics for the Boston Globe that year. Although he was not being paid for his reporting and there was no rule barring athletes from writing newspaper articles, Blair's coach decided it was not in the Olympic Spirit and dropped him from the team the day before the Hammer was to be contested. Blair was far from dejected. “Earning that spot on our Olympic team was the greatest thrill of my athletic career. I would loved to have participated. I guess I just wasn't enough of a politician. If you can just bear with me, I'd like to read part of the article that is an example of what he wrote to the Globe. He was writing to Jerry Nason. I also love this article because it gives us mere mortals a true feeling of what it was like to be an Olympic athlete at the time.
Class: 1947 Inducted: 2011