The day Blake Moore took his LSAT's, he had every intention of beginning the paper chase immediately after graduation. The next fall, however, he found himself not in a classroom studying legal briefs, but in the locker room studying football plays.

Now, a first-year law student at Harvard, Moore is pursuing his original goal, but only after a detour on the field. For six years, Moore played professional football, first for the Cincinnati Bengals and then for the Wisconsin Green Bay Packers, in a career that included a trip to the Super Bowl. Not bad for an ex-Division III center who describes his college football experience as "no big deal."

Moore, who has played football since the seventh grade, did not choose his college for its football program. He left his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee 10 years ago to attend the College of Wooster in Ohio, not exactly a national football powerhouse. And neither was Moore, who began with a modest view of his own athletic prowess.

"I went there to get a good education, your basic liberal arts education," says Moore of his alma mater. Although he began college with thoughts of medical school, those quickly disappeared after a freshman year filled with lab courses, and he decided to study history instead. Football was little more than another extracurricular activity, an afternoon of snapping footballs and and pushing around sweaty, grunting bodies.

According to Wooster athletic director Al Van Wie, Moore was an obvious standout in college. "Blake was probably the true student athlete," says Van Wie. "He was a leader both in football and in campus life."

Moore says his attitude toward the sport in college was pretty relaxed. He recalls, "I enjoyed playing football at that level--it was a good outlet for my competitive nature. But it was no big deal."

Football became a much bigger deal after his junior year. As he explains, he himself was "getting bigger"--he weighed close to 250 pounds. Wooster's would-be attorney began to attract some national football attention.

No Nails for Lunch

"Some scouts started coming around," says Moore. But he adds, "I'm sure I was smaller and slower than a lot of the other people they looked at." His size just didn't measure up to that of kids from Division I schools who ate steroids for breakfast and chewed nails for lunch.

But at 6-ft., 5-in. and a trim 250 pounds, Moore was not pushed around by law school admissions officers. After he was ignored--as he expected to be--in that spring's NFL draft, the Phi Beta Kappa athlete made plans to follow his father's footsteps at Duke.

Given that Wooster's football team had only launched two professional players in its entire history--one to the NFL 50 years before, and one who became a Canadian league punter--he made school history when, before the end of the year, he was approached by pro scouts from the Cincinnati Bengals and the Cleveland Browns.

He chose to sign as a free agent with the Bengals, basing his decision on the teams' recent seasons. "I decided I'd have a better chance with Cincinnati since they were coming off a bad year," he says.

So in the summer of 1980, his legal aspirations temporarily sidelined, Moore started to train with the Bengals. At first he found pro camp very tough. "The only advantage I had over other people was mental," he says.

During Moore's four years for the Bengals, he played as a center, guard, and tackle. He appeared on Monday Night Football and played in the 1982 Super Bowl, when the Cincinnati team lost to the San Francisco 49ers. But the sporadic starter sensed an end when line coach Forrest Gregg--himself a legendary lineman--left to work with the Green Bay Packers.

"They got a new coach, but my days with the Bengals were numbered," he says matter-of-factly. "I was cut right before the [next] season started."