“The book starts with a 'what the f**k? I've allowed my childhood obsessions to take over my life',” he said. 

“Instead of them serving me and giving me the enthusiasm to ring people up, they've now started to hurt me and making me do things I shouldn't be doing. And they're stopping me forming relationships, normal relationships with people.”

Pursuing these passions, rugby league and rock music, contributed to him at one stage racking up $55,000 of credit card debt, and ceasing to be a “half-functioning adult”. 

At the age of 47 he owned hundreds of records and CDs, and almost every edition of Rugby League Week ever published. But he was unmarried, and had no car or property. 

He soon set himself a goal; for a 52-week period, attend a rugby league game and a rock show each week. 

The ensuing league aspect included visits to France and Delaware. The rock side of the equation took him to Nashville to see Guns ‘N Roses, and AC/DC in Manchester. 

What he encountered, as well as his own life experiences, reflections and interviews, are featured throughout Touchstones. 

Sitting in a hotel bar in Leeds, after pointing out to the Mercury the seat where league supercoach Wayne Bennett once sat while ticking off the names of Australian players as they returned from the pub, Mascord said Touchstones proved cathartic. 

“I started the year still like the person that you know, really obsessed,” he said. 

“But by setting myself an obsessive schedule I actually became less obsessive.

“Before I would go to four games in four cities in four days. Not just like once or twice, but I did it 10, 13 years.

“And when the newspaper couldn't afford to send me any more, I paid for it myself and just claimed it as a tax deduction, because I thought it was disrespectful to our profession that they weren’t paying any more.

“It was excessive and expensive, and even if no one buys the book it's been good for me because I've relaxed a bit over the past 18 months. It's public therapy.

“It's a footy book and a music book, and if you want to get something else out of it I'd like to think there's something else there.

“But if you don't, and just want to read a few stories about Mötley Crüe in 1990, covering football and the state of journalism, that stuff's there as well.”

Mascord, now 48, was born Andrew John Langley in Sydney. He was adopted by a couple in Windang and told at a young age that his parents had died in a car crash. The first line of the book reads, “I was conceived in an insane asylum and don't know for sure who my natural father is”. 

The book details discoveries he made later in life regarding his birth mother's family. 

Mascord attended Port Kembla High School, and developed an interest in league. 

“When I was searching for an identity, everyone was swapping  footy cards at school and I thought, 'what's this?’ My uncle used to have crumpled up copies of Rugby League Week, so I took an interest in it. Initially I'm not sure if I took an interest in actual football; it was the footy cards, the scarves and the socks.”

A self-professed “early adopter”, Mascord quickly embraced the Illawarra Steelers. 

He was among the first to buy their jersey, attended the club’s debut training session at Stuart Park in November 1981, and has the corner post from their first trial game at Dapto Showground. “I've still got it in my storage room... It's not in a good state.” 

His family also became embedded in the club, helping out off the field. 

Mascord started covering Steelers games for Australian Associated Press while still in his teens, landing a cadetship there. 

He was later offered a place on the AAP Olympics team to cover the 1992 Games, but declined. “I said I definitely could not possibly go to the Olympics if the Steelers were in the finals, and I have absolutely no regrets about that,” the reporter said. 

The Steelers and St George Dragons fought out a tough, controversial 1992 preliminary final, won 4-0 by the Dragons.

“Brisbane would still have won the following week (in the grand final), and the Steelers still would have merged with St George, so I don't think it really would have made that much difference,” Mascord said of the still contentious contest. 

A champion of expanding the sport’s global reach, did some of his passion for the Australian club competition subside when the Steelers merged in 1998? “I wasn't against the joint venture, but I haven't lived in Wollongong since it (happened), so I just don't have that emotional attachment. 

“If they (the Dragons) wear the (Steelers’) strip I suddenly have an involuntary reaction and I want them to win more... I'd go and watch the Cutters if they were called the Steelers, and I'd probably get on a train to go and watch them. (Now) I go and watch the London Broncos and I love doing that. And I love Toronto (Wolfpack). They feel more like my team now.”

On the music front, as a youngster Kiss were his “gateway drug” to heavy rock. In his early journalistic years Mascord also wrote for music publications such as Hot Metal and UK magazine Kerrang!, interviewing his hair metal heroes at home and overseas. 

“I never really wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi; I never wanted to be Peter Sterling,” Mascord explained. “I just wanted to be close to it, I wanted to experience those things. 

“I kind of did it, and then this (Touchstones) is what happens when you reach that point. Whatever you're into, what happens when you push that as far as you can? You're an adult, you've made your 14-year-old self proud, but then you’ve still got half your life to go. What do you do then?”

Mascord has worked in radio, television and print media, and for the past decade primarily operated on a freelance basis. Now married and living in London, returning to Sydney on occasion, his ventures include a business selling international league jerseys. 

“Most people, they build foundations and they build a frame and they put walls and a roof on a house,” he said. “I've built a whole street full of houses with just frames, and now I'm trying to find a way to fill in the walls and put roofs on them all.”