A few years later, after graduating from Denison and returning east for law school, Blattner moved back to Ohio as an environmental attorney for the Dayton firm of Smith and Schnacke.
A friend asked him to join the Dayton rugby team — then called the Argylls — and he quickly realized he’d assessed things perfectly at Denison:
Rugby was a great time.
When he joined the team in 1981, the sport already had a foundation here thanks to Bob Borgerding and John Guhde, who had co-founded what’s become known as the Dayton Area Rugby Club (DARC) in 1974.
Before that — in the fall of 1969 — Borgerding had introduced rugby at the University of Dayton.
He’d come to UD the year before out of Meadowdale High and played offensive guard on the Flyers freshman football team.
“During spring ball in ‘69, I got run over by two NFL guys and broke both my legs,” he said.
As he contemplated a future without football, he received a gift from his great grandfather, who’d grown up in Scotland.
“He gave me a ball and a book on rugby,” Borgerding remembered the other day. “He said, ‘I think you’ll like this sport.’”
As he read the book, Borgerding got enthused and convinced some friends to join his grassroots effort to start a rugby team at UD.
They hung up homemade recruitment posters across campus.
This being the late 1960s, one set read: “Rugby is best played on grass.”
Others said: “Give Blood! Play Rugby!”
Borgerding said their first meeting at the fieldhouse drew 70 guys, none of whom had ever played the sport. Most knew nothing about it.
“I remember during some of the early practices, guys would be looking at me and I’d have the book with me, and I’d say, ‘Well, this is what it says in the book!’” Borgerding said with a laugh.
A couple of years later, when he was a senior at UD, Guhde went to Mardi Gras with his buddies.
“After driving all night, we pulled into Tulane University — they used to let people sleep under stadium where they played the Sugar Bowl then – and we saw this game going on in the commons area,” Guhde recalled.
“My brother Mike and I both said, ‘What the hell is that?’”
Gudhe — who’d grown up in East Cleveland in a family with eight kids and gone to St. Joseph, a football powerhouse in Ohio — said his familiarity of physical sport began at home: “Growing up in a house with eight kids is a contact sport.”
After watching the Tulane game, he was fascinated and joined the UD team when he got back to Dayton. After graduation, he and Borgerding and others continued to play for the Flyers until current UD students urged them to start their own team and quit taking all their roster spots.
After an aborted effort with a team they called the Triangles in 1973, they launched a local team that took root a year later.
In the coming decades the team — nicknamed The Flying Pigs — took on various forms and names, merging with a club that had sprung up at Wright State and another at Wright Patterson AFB.
Playing Division I rugby against bigger Midwestern powers from Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Michigan, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Columbus and other places, Dayton more than held its own.
Their 15-man teams were a regional force for several years, especially in the mid-1990s, and the club’s 7s team twice made it to the Elite Eight of the national tournament, finishing seventh in 1985 and sixth in 1986.
Thanks especially to the efforts of Lola Akinmade, they added a women’s club in 1999, and it won a Midwestern Division II championship and finished third in the nation in 2002.
Over at UD, the Flyers’ women’s team won the Division II Women’s Collegiate Rugby national championship in 2003.
This weekend — all those past successes, oft-told stories and the ongoing good times — will come together as the Dayton Area Rugby Club holds its 50th reunion.
The club still fields two men’s teams who play at the Division III and IV levels and a women’s team. It also sponsors a high school team, The Northern Force, that has won the state title two of the past three seasons, Borgerding said.
Guhde said close to 200 former players — from as far away as Alaska, Texas and Colorado — are returning for the festivities that include a golf outing followed by a gathering at Warped Wing Brewing today.
Saturday there will be three games at the team’s rugby grounds, a 12.5-acre facility adjacent to Shiloh Park in Harrison Township
That evening there’ll be a banquet at the Liederkranz Turner club on E. Fifth Street that will be highlighted with announcement of the inaugural induction class — 10 men and two women — into DARC’s newly-formed Hall of Fame.
And Sunday at noon, the club’s high school 7s will have a match.
‘A brotherhood’
One of the best players — and storytellers — in Dayton rugby history is Kevin O’Donnel, who was a multi-sport athlete at Miamisburg in the mid-1970s, went to Defiance College as a wrestler, discovered rugby, and said he soon found himself more interested in his new sport than his schoolbooks.
He ended up at Wright State and played for its rugby team until it merged with Dayton.
He played much of his career with his two brothers, Steve and Rich, and said: “It took me until the end of my career to realize it, but that was the biggest thrill of my life. It’s a very cherished memory.”
And yet there’s one instance when brotherly love took a backseat to rugby passion.
“We were playing Indianapolis, and as I was passing the ball, the guy tackling me put his head right into my face,” O’Donnel said.
“I couldn’t close my mouth after that and I remember my brother running by and me saying, ‘Rich, I think there’s something wrong with my jaw!’
“Being a rugby player and trying to help us score, he said, ‘Just stay here and we’ll be back to take a look at it.’ And then he ran on down the field.
“It turned out I had a broken jaw, so after the game my girlfriend — she’s my wife now — took me to this doctor’s office, but they said he was out on the golf course and wouldn’t be back for two hours.
“So me being a rugby player, I came back to Ludwig’s — that was our team bar — to party with the Indianapolis team we’d played. My jaw wasn’t wired shut yet, so I drank some beers until I knew the doctor was back.”
Imbibing with the opponents is common practice in rugby.
“We call it ‘The Drink Up,’” said Borgerding.
To a man, the former Dayton players will tell you that’s what they love about their sport
“That’s the culture of rugby,” Blattner said. “You play hard on the field, but at the end of the game you shake hands and then have a celebration together that the home team hosts.”
O’Donnel agreed: “There’s a brotherhood. After the game —where each of you had been trying to kick the others’ butts — you don’t walk off the field hating each other. Then, you’re all just rugby players who love the same thing.”
Ruggers from all walks of life
Before getting its own rugby grounds, DARC used to play its games at Eastwood Metro Park.
“We were right there at the entrance to the park, but then they moved us out,” O’Donnel said. “Now it’s a bird sanctuary. There’s high grass and probably rabbits and birds in there.
“Maybe they wanted people to see birds and not us when they first drove in.”
Then again, the ruggers were pretty rare birds themselves.
As the old saying goes: “Rugby is a rowdy sport played by gentlemen.”
Over the years the team’s roster has included teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, servicemen, former pro football players and many other walks of life.
Borgerding taught geography and social studies at Stebbins, where he also coached football and wrestling. Before that he coached football and girls basketball at Chaminade Julienne.
O’Donnel still hangs wallpaper and Blattner — whose rugby souvenirs include a plate in his arm and scar on his face from an opponent’s front teeth that were knocked out in their collision — practiced law for 42 years.
Gudhe worked with special needs kids for 43 years, most of them with the Montgomery County Board of Developmental Disabilities and the rest with Dayton Public Schools.
Over the years, DARC was involved in the community, helping groups like the Alzheimer’s Association, Special Olympics, Five Rivers MetroParks and the Brighter Tomorrow Foundation.
“I’m excited about this weekend,” O’Donnel said. “Some of these guys I haven’t seen in 30 years. And there’s a whole generation that came behind us. It’s going to be good to get to know all of them, too.”
That’s why Blattner made a special request of his wife when they made a long-anticipated trip back to the New York City area this past week to see family and friends and enjoy NYC.
When we spoke the other day, he and his wife has just finished a walk down Park Avenue in Manhattan:
“When my wife and I made the plans to come here for 10 days, I said, ‘Aaah Honey? We can’t stay for this weekend. I’ve got to be back in Dayton on Friday.’”
He wasn’t going to miss the reunion.
It was rugby.
It would be a great time.
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