Feeling a draft 

From my first days as a football and New York Giants fan, I realized the importance of the college draft. 

In 1971, I was home from school for some reason and desperate for an update on the NFL draft being conducted that day. Nothing on WINS, the news station, or WNEW, “home of the New York Giants” – only Knicks and Rangers scores from the night before. It wasn’t until the 5 p.m. news on WNEW that I learned that the Giants’ first round pick was, and this is as it was announced, Ralph “Rocky” Thompson of West Texas State. Wait, we took a guy named Ralph? West Texas State? 

Draft coverage in our local newspaper The Bergen Record was pathetic: a list of teams with names underneath. I needed to know who got picked, by which team and in what round. In order. I began buying The New York Times on the day following the draft, with its complete listing in order, cryptic shorthand explaining the lineage of each pick, traded from one team to another. At one point in the 80s, with the draft occurring while we were visiting Florida and with The Times nowhere in sight, I found that USA Today gave a similar recap. 

The Times draft posting was valuable enough that at one point, I went through back editions at our city library on an ancient microfilm viewer with dials you turned to advance each page and made copies of previous drafts. 

The NFL opened its doors to the proceedings to spectators at some point, and in 1975 I drove to midtown Manhattan, and with absolute faith in my ability to parallel park my Toyota Corona into the tightest spaces possible, found a spot on the street and attended the draft at the New York Hilton. Sitting in the ballroom balcony, I stayed for an hour or two; my recollection is hazy. I remember Pete Rozelle announcing a couple of first-round choices, and I took a sheet that the NFL passed out detailing the trades that had been made thus far that morning. One of those things I wish I’d held on to. 

Rozelle and fans at the 1975 draft

In 1980 ESPN began broadcasting the draft live. When I was reading meters, I could track the draft’s progress, house by house, sneaking a peak at televisions tuned to ESPN or in a quick conversation with a customer. Much later, on a business trip to Detroit, I put the draft on the hotel TV, fell asleep, then woke up in the middle of the night with the first round well over. 

I won’t fall asleep in front of the TV tonight, but once the Giants make their pick, I’ll head for bed. And the journey of how we get our news keeps changing. With the draft now broadcast on something like eight different channels and services, and online coverage eating up as many column inches and megabytes as a presidential election, there’ll be no need to buy tomorrow’s Times.