IMG_0001.jpgIMG_0003.jpg
I only have a handful, nothing as sweet as the ones posted already. Mine has more of a sentimental attachment than anything else. It's fantasy football related so feel free to move on
I
posted the story on my blog a few years ago. I've cut-and-pasted it below. Sorry for being long-winded.
----------------------
Those of you that can't remember life before the internet will have to trust me when I say that back in the Dark Ages not everyone had the latest football info or up-to-the-minute cheat sheets and depth charts. Most guys bought a copy of Street and Smith Football or a similar magazine printed months earlier and drafted from the dated info it contained. Drafting a guy who'd been cut the week before wasn't unusual, especially if you didn't track the transactions in the paper every day.
If you made the effort to find a Pro Football Weekly season preview issue you were way ahead of most everyone else. Those things usually hit the shelves a day or so before the draft. I can remember checking for it at some pretty sketchy downtown Houston "newsstands" the night before the draft.
Given all that I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise when, during the first round of our 1984 draft, one of our owners took Dolphin runningback David Overstreet. He's been a star at the University of Oklahoma, played a couple of seasons with Montreal of the CFL (including a Rookie of the Year 1981 campaign) and, after finally settling his contract issues with Miami, showed promise with the '83 Dolphins.
Then as now runningbacks were a valued fantasy commodity and drafting a young star in a keeper league like ours could pay dividends for years. So, all in all, Oversteet made sense as a first round pick. Except for one small detail. David Overstreet, you see, had died about three months prior to our draft when he ran off the road on a north Texas highway and plowed his car into a gas pump island.
The instant the Overstreet pick was announced by the sadly out-of-touch owner eleven sets of eyes locked on him. I guess we wanted to see if he was making a poor attempt at fantasy football draft humor. After a few seconds it was apparent that he had made a serious pick of Overstreet and hilarity ensued.
I'm not proud of it, Overstreet's death was the cutting short of a promising life and he left behind a young son, but I have to admit that the 1984 Ed Hughes League draft will forever live on among our league's treasured moments.