{"id":16623,"date":"2012-06-11T15:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T22:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/?p=16623"},"modified":"2012-06-11T15:07:54","modified_gmt":"2012-06-11T22:07:54","slug":"santa-monica-observer-article-on-dave-blackburn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/?p=16623","title":{"rendered":"Santa Monica Observer Article on Dave Blackburn"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Click for original story at Santa Monica Observer<\/figcaption><\/figure>By Mitch Chortkoff, Sports Editor, Santa Monica Observer<\/em><\/p>\n
\n

\tIn my younger days I played on a Slo-Pitch softball team at various local parks.
\n\tIt was a lot of fun and a few times we won the league championship.
\n\tI was just average, but our pitcher, Dave Blackburn, was outstanding. He was known well beyond Southern California. In fact, he was known all over the world.
\n\tYou see, Dave was the pitcher on the United States World Maccabiah Games Fast-Pitch team 6 times and was the winning pitcher on four championship teams. No athlete in any sport had competed as often in the event known as the Jewish Olympics held every four years in Israel.
\n\tThe United States and Canada have dominated Maccabiah Games softball, which is Fast Pitch, and Mark Bendahan, Canada\u2019s ace pitcher who has dueled Blackburn many times, calls his rival \u2018dominating on the mound.\u201d
\n\tBendahan offered his tribute at the Pan-Am Maccabiah Games and Blackburn was touched to be so recognized by his prime opponent.
\n\tBut in August of 2010 Blackburn, originally from a South suburb of Chicago but now a Santa Monica resident, was involved in an automobile accident that left him clinging to life. He and several friends were driving from Los Angeles to Prescott, Arizona for a softball tournament when their car was struck by another vehicle.
\n\t\u201cHe was in the front seat and he absorbed the brunt of it,\u201d said Jay, one of Dave\u2019s four brothers.
\n\t\u201cHe was in critical condition and heavily sedated. Two broken legs, a broken ankle, a fractured pelvis, nine fractured ribs, a hole in his colon that was torn, a hole in his lung which collapsed. In all, 27 broken bones.\u201d
\n\t\u201cI was unconscious for 54 days and bedridden for 117 days,\u2019 recalls Blackburn. \u201c I had bizarre dreams and thought I\u2019d been in a coma for years instead of months.
\n\t\u201cWhen I came out of it I was disoriented and didn\u2019t understand if I was dead or alive.
\n\t\u201cWhile I was in the medically-induced coma my mother passed away. I kept wondering why she didn\u2019t call. They didn\u2019t tell me, fearing what that would do to me.\u201d
\n\tDave, who is 6-foot-3, 270 pounds and a lifelong athlete, began the battle to restore his life. In February, this year, he became a below the right knee amputee.
\n\tHe has survived all that he\u2019s been through. I know because I saw him recently. He was in a wheelchair and getting around all right. And, believe it or not, he hopes to pitch again.
\n\t\u201cThere are prosthetic legs now that make it possible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a long-term goal but I\u2019ve been invited to the Maccabiah Games in Israel in 2013 to throw out the ceremonial first pitch and someday I may be back to pitch competitively in a game.
\n\t\u201cI\u2019m so happy to be alive.\u201d
\n\tBlackburn\u2019s father, Ernie, was a softball legend. He died in 1997 but Dave has fond memories of traveling to tournaments with his dad and brothers as a youth.
\n\t\u2018He taught me so much,\u201d said Dave.
\n\tUltimately, Dave became a legend in the sport just like his father. Dave has pitched 70 no-hitters and holds the Maccabiah Games record for career strikeouts.
\n\tFrom time to time I\u2019m somewhere and an old friend will call my name. When it happened and I saw Dave I was never so happy to see anyone.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Editor’s notes:<\/strong> For those who have followed Dave’s remarkable recovery, you may be interested to know that he recently served as co-tournament director for the Best of the West tournament, the longest running men’s open tournament in California (22 years and counting), and will be giving the ISC Streaming Broadcast equipment its annual “check-up”, this weekend, before sending it off to Midland, Michigan this summer for the ISC World Tournament. It was just a week after the last ISC World Tournament in Midland (2010) that Dave suffered his severe injuries in that car accident. Somehow, he managed to make it to Quad Cities, Iowa, for last year’s ISC World Tournament, where he not only served as Executive Producer of the Streaming broadcasts, but was also inducted into the ISC Hall of Fame for his contributions to the game, introducing streaming broadcasts to the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Mitch Chortkoff, Sports Editor, Santa Monica Observer In my younger days I played on a Slo-Pitch softball team at various local parks. It was a lot of fun and a few times we won the league championship. I was just average, but our pitcher, Dave Blackburn, was outstanding. He was known well beyond Southern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-people","8":"category-so-cal","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16623"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16630,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16623\/revisions\/16630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastpitchwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}