The event honors Mark and his wife Linda’s late son, Blake, who was a poster boy for every parent’s dream child – handsome, popular, National Honor Society smart, a celebrated, multi-sport athlete – who died July 3, 2009, after a 20-month battle with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
He was just 18.
He was diagnosed in November of 2007, two months after an Adonis-in-pads performance – running for 237 yards and three touchdowns – in Vandalia Butler’s victory over Tecumseh.
The news of Blake’s cancer rocked the Vandalia Butler community. Not only was he a standout two-way player for the Aviators – a 205-pound running back who doubled as a middle linebacker – but he also had been a good wrestler until he opted for other sports.
He was one of the state’s best teen powerlifters and in track, he ran the 100-meters and the 4x100 relay and stood out in the discus and shot put, too.
“He was more like a decathlon athlete,” Mark said. “He was one of the strongest and fastest kids I’d ever seen at his age.”
Blake also was known for his compassion to others and did not hide the fact that he was a Christian athlete.
Two days after he got the devastating news, Blake sat in his room at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center with his older sister, Lauren, and had an extraordinary conversation.
Mark, who played on Wittenberg’s unbeaten national championship football team in 1973, shared that conversation not long after:
“Blake told her he knew why he had gotten leukemia. He said the Lord had given him a mission. It was so he could make a difference in people’s lives. So, he could change people for the better.”
All these years later Mark still is moved by that moment:
“I’m still floored by that. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? Who says that?’ Especially what 17-year-old kid? How does he have the presence of mind, the maturity and courage to understand that?
“I’m not pounding my chest about my kid, but would I say that?
“No…I’d be more like, ‘Get me the hell out of here!’“
As his youngest son battled the savagery of ALL, Mark wrote a daily journal that he posted on the non-profit CaringBridge site which allows families to provide updates to others during a medical crisis.
Blake’s story was so compelling that Mark had 120,000 followers from around the world.
Not only was it a way for him to inform others what Blake and their family was going through, but it was a way for him to cope.
Since then, Mark, who’s now 73, has found the best way to do that is through roll-up-your-sleeves deeds, not just written words:
“I wanted to keep Blake’s name alive. His legacy is alive. He was about paying it forward and helping others and that’s what our family tries to do.”
That’s what this weekend’s annual golf scramble is all about.
Soon after Blake died, Dan D’Arrigo, who played football at Wittenberg in the mid-1970s and once owned Windy Knoll, suggested the Father’s Day Weekend golf outing to Mark as a way to pay tribute to his son and raise money to help others,
The event includes a 1p.m. shotgun start (teams can register at the course right up to tee time); two meals (lunch by Christy’s Pizza, desserts provided by the Aviators football team), beer; and a multitude of individual and team prizes donated by Beau Townsend Ford.
Proceeds go to the Blake LaForce #41 Memorial Fund which is part of the Vandalia Butler Fund under the umbrella of the Dayton Foundation.
To donate, send checks to The Blake LaForce #41 Memorial Fund, 7140 White Water Court, Dayton, Ohio, 45414. For questions contact; mark.laforce64@gmail.com
To date, Mark said they’ve given away 28 scholarships – two a year - to a boy student athlete and a girl student athlete at Vandalia Butler.
The golf outing isn’t the only contributor to the LaForce Fund. Every year the Vandalia Butler home football opener – the Blake LaForce Game - is followed the next morning by the 41Hope 5K Memorial Run/Walk at Butler Memorial Stadium.
This year the Run/Walk is August 23.
Saturday’s field of golfers included several foursomes who take part nearly every year.
“A lot of people come home for Father’s Day, so what do you do on the day before?” Mark said. “People have gravitated to this. A lot of the groups are families, so you get grandfathers, fathers, and kids. And that’s really nice.”
Watching all that, it would be understandable if Mark felt a sense of real loss this weekend.
But he said that’s no longer the case thanks to the joy he and Linda have gotten from their two older children, Johnathan and Lauren, and their five grandchildren.
Mark still can visit his son’s grave at Dayton Memorial Park on N. Dixie Highway. It has a beautiful, cats-eye marble stone with a picture of Blake in the middle. There are benches on either side of it.
“That’s where Linda and I will be one day,” Mark said. “Blake will be between us.”
Until then, every Saturday this time of year he’ll be at Windy Knoll.
“Because I’m busy on Father’s Day Weekend, I’m not crying in my beer…as much,” he said “I’m more proud than sobbing.
“It’s a sense of ‘Let’s move on and do what’s right.’”
Making an impact
Three months after his diagnosis, I sat with Blake at a Shave-A-Thon held in his honor at the Just For Looks salon in Vandalia. He was going through chemo and had lost all his hair, but not his determination or that beaming smile that he still flashed on occasion.
That day nearly 100 of his friends, teammates, teachers, and coaches showed up and got their heads shaved in a show of solidarity with him.
People also got their cheeks swabbed to see if they might be a match for the bone marrow transplant he needed. The money collected that day would go to his medical expenses and, many hoped, his college costs one day.
“I don’t know how this is going to work out,” he told me in a private moment. “But I trust the Lord and I’m going to give it my best.”
Linda and Mark sent me a photo the other day from the Vandalia Butler Junior/Senior Prom in the spring of 2008. It was a couple of months after I’d talked to Blake and just a few days before he would get that bone marrow transplant.
In that prom photo, Blake, who’s flanked by his mom and dad, is wearing a white, three-piece tuxedo with a turquoise necktie and a pink rose just off his lapel. He has the aura of a beaming angel.
“I was glad he got the chance to go to the prom before his transplant,” Mark said.
But in August, some three months later, Blake suddenly developed toxoplasmosis, a crippling parasitic infection of the central nervous system that shut down his motor skills so that he could no longer eat, drink, walk or talk.
He still managed to communicate, Mark said, by blinking his eyes.
When the Aviators’ 2008 football season – Blake’s senior season – began without him, the Vandalia Butler cheerleaders put together a Play for a Cure game when Greenville came to play at Butler Memorial Stadium.
After the final gun sounded, a spectacle unfolded unlike almost anything that ever had occurred at a Miami Valley high school game.
Players, coaches, cheerleaders, and the fans from both teams encircled the field, shoulder-to-shoulder, and clasped hands to form a massive prayer circle for Blake.
Meanwhile, he lay speechless in his Cincinnati hospital bed with his parents at his side. Both listened on cell phones as one person after another at the game relayed an account of the heartfelt scene.
In the years since, Blake has been honored in so many different ways.
The Play for a Cure game continues, often with fans trading Vandalia Butler’s purple and gold colors for shirts that are orange, which is the symbol of leukemia awareness.
Blake’s No. 41 jersey has been retired at Vandalia Butler and that shirt and his picture hang up in the school.
Vandalia football players – peewee to varsity – have worn black 41 decals for years and at the end of the season one player is awarded the Blake LaForce TUFF award.
The Butler wrestlers raise money for the Memorial Fund each year by participating in the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot and by collecting pledges for the number of pins the team has each season.
“We have a great public school system and a great community,” Mark said. “Everyone supports our efforts and that’s huge.”
He once admitted: “Sometimes I’ve worried that with all this in Blake’s name, ‘Is it too much?’
“But then I think it’s not just about Blake, it’s about making an impact in the community and lifting up kids today.”
Mission Accomplished
Over 1,000 people showed up at the Christian Life Center on Little York Road for Blake’s memorial service, which was two hours of tears, love and laughter, especially when Blake’s cousin, Jack, showed a video clip of Blake and him as toddlers, both wearing Cleveland Browns’ No. 19 Bernie Kosar jerseys, as they took turns tackling each other.
When Blake’s metallic blue casket — covered with a large spray of white orchids, roses and lilies — was resting on supports at his grave site beneath a big magnolia tree, Mark stepped up as hundreds of mourners listened.
“Good job 41,” he said in a half-whisper. “Mission accomplished.”
The scene that day was proof how Blake had impacted the everyone, but no one more so than Mark:
“He taught me how to be a real man. He gave me a real purpose in life. Before that I didn’t know what my purpose was.
“I thought it was go to college, marry a beautiful woman, have kids, have a nice job. But he taught me there’s even more to life than that. Our kid, at 17, knew what his purpose was, and it made me rethink mine.”
If he wanted to make a real difference, Mark knew he had to follow his son’s lead. He had to make sure his son’s legacy continues to lift people today.
The scholarship fund does that.
This year 20 Vandalia Butler seniors who were student athletes applied for them. A committee judged the essays they wrote, the financial boost they needed and the way they had committed themselves in school and out.
Mark said what’s especially important to him is the way they had persevered through anything from injury to personal challenges at home.
That’s why this golf outing is so important, Mark said. Not only does it keep Blake’s legacy alive, but it helps “give kids direction and opportunity and hope.”
That’s why the father flips convention this weekend and honors the son.
And it’s also why we can take those words once used to define the son and now direct them at the father.
“Well done…mission accomplished.”
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