(Counting down our Top 10 most popular posts of 2011.)
#2 Steve Prefontaine and the Civil War football game
I’m not trying toot my own horn here when I say I know a thing or two about the history over the Oregon-Oregon State football game, which dates to 1894 and is the seventh-oldest college rivalry in the country. In my years as a newspaper reporter I detailed every game in the series — twice. And some of that reporting is represented in the wikipedia page on the game, although I have not contributed there.
The point is, I never knew that Steve Prefontaine had any connection to this game until last January when I strung together a sting of posts around what would have been his 60th birthday. I had no idea he had run into Parker Stadium in Corvallis at the end of a long relay race between students the two universities.
It felt like unearthing a long lost piece of state history. So far, it has netted 10,338 pageviews.
