Today in 1971, the NFL began its annual draft.
The draft has become as big a spectacle as many football games, but back then it was strictly business.
Except for the moment when an NFL franchise appeared to draft one of the biggest names in Hollywood.
To be clear, people did pay attention to the draft back then, and for good reason.
The first two picks that year, Jim Plunkett and Archie Manning, went on to become star NFL quarterbacks.
So did Joe Thiesmann, the 99th pick overall, which is why ‘71 became known as the “year of the quarterback.”
But most people didn’t see the NFL draft as an event.
It didn’t show up on TV until 1980, and even then, it was still a lot of people standing at podiums naming players, for round after round after round.
Which was apparently not terribly entertaining to the coach of the Atlanta Falcons, Norm Van Brocklin.
According to Sports Illustrated, Van Brocklin was a former quarterback who loved both a good one-liner and the movies.
He’d even appeared in several movies during his football career.
So during round 17 of the draft, he said something along the lines of, how about we just put the roughest, toughest of them all in the draft.
And so a Falcons staffer reported that the team’s next selection was “a big, strong guy who has also had some success in a couple of movie roles.”
Or, more succinctly, “John Wayne, tackle, Apache U.”
The description was pretty accurate: before he became movie star John Wayne, the young man born Marion Morrison had been on the offensive line for USC.
Though by 1971, the big strong guy was also 63 years old and probably not interested in leaving his movie career to return to football.
Most of the people in the room recognized the selection as a joke, but the person who was keeping records of the draft added John Wayne’s name to the list… at least until NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle said no, that’s not their actual choice.
So if you look in the records today, you’ll see the Falcons’ selection as Willie Martin, a running back out of Johnson C. Smith University, and not one of the biggest movie stars of the 20th Century.
Today in 2021, Bryan Moss of Meridian, Idaho won the state lottery’s grand prize, $250,000.
He said he would put the money toward his daughter’s education, which is a typical lottery prize winner response.
Except that this was the sixth time Moss had won a lottery prize!
I won’t say no if he sends me some Powerball numbers.
Inside the 1971 NFL Draft, Where Atlanta Selected…John Wayne? (Sports Illustrated)
Man wins sixth Idaho Lottery, this time taking home $250K (NBC News)
