The call came to my desk at The Sporting News in St. Louis several weeks before the 1980 NFL draft. I had been with the publication for two years and had started writing a weekly NFL notebook (even in the offseason) the year before. That was a leap for the venerable Baseball Bible at the time, but I convinced then-managing editor Lowell Reidenbaugh that we should expand our coverage of the NFL. But a bigger leap was what ESPN wanted to do. The decision to televise the draft had been made in February of that year amid a certain level...