The NFL draft has been around for 84 years, and in the tradition-rich history of Altoona Area High School football, 10 Mountain Lion players have been selected in the draft.

Of those 10, amazingly enough, three were picked in the 1970 draft alone — Mike Reid, John Ebersole and Dick Beard.

“It’s incredible,” Beard said of the local ties in that draft 50 years ago.

“It was pretty amazing, a rarity,” Ebersole said. “I don’t think that happens very often.”

“I would be extremely surprised, as I am, when you tell me,” Reid said when reminded of that Altoona draft factoid.

In fact, Reid didn’t recall that there had indeed been three Altoona players drafted in 1970. He wasn’t aware until being reminded this past week that Beard was selected in the 17th round by the New York Jets.

“I lost complete track of Dick,” Reid said, before offering some high praise for his high school teammate of long ago. “Although I can see him in my mind’s eye like it was yesterday. This guy in high school was chiseled out of stone. He was an amazing physical specimen.”

Reid, a college star at Penn State, was the No. 7 overall pick of the first round in 1970 by the Cincinnati Bengals. The defensive tackle enjoyed five outstanding seasons in the NFL — being named first-team All-Pro twice (1972 and ’73) and to two Pro Bowls — before deciding to retire early and pursue a songwriting career that resulted in a Grammy Award in 1984.

Ebersole, a teammate of Reid’s at Penn State, was selected in the fourth round with the 98th overall pick by the New York Jets. A linebacker, he enjoyed a solid eight-year NFL career, playing in 108 games (59 starts) and being a disruptive force on defense with eight interceptions and 11 fumble recoveries in his career.

Beard, a running back, played his college ball at Kentucky before being drafted in the 17th and final round, as the 436th pick out of 442 that year. He had a good training camp with the Jets but didn’t make the team, then decided to give up football and move on with his life.

Having three players drafted from the same high school in the same year is notable enough, but Reid, Ebersole and Beard also have other interesting stories about their draft experiences and careers.

A very different draft

This year’s NFL draft begins Thursday, will be televised and will be by far the biggest story in sports for several days. It’s like that every year, with massive attention paid to players and the draft itself in the weeks and months leading up to the event.

Things were very, very different back in 1970.

There was no NFL combine, for starters, and college players had very little contact with any NFL teams — sometimes none at all — prior to the draft.

The 1970 draft was held in late January — less than a month after the college season had ended — and it wasn’t televised, so players had no idea what was going on until they received a phone call saying they’d been selected.

“It’s not like you see with these kids today,” Reid said from his home in Nashville. “It’s a long, long time ago. It wasn’t like all this courting of what everyone believes are potential superstars.

“You got a call, and I remember there’s a picture of me sitting on the couch with a phone with my mom and dad and my brothers and me talking to the Bengals and being informed that I was drafted by them.”

How did Reid end up getting drafted by the Bengals? A big part of it apparently came down to one brief conversation he had with a Bengals representative at the Senior Bowl in early January of that year.

“He came up to me and introduced himself to me and said, ‘I’m with the Cincinnati Bengals, we want to draft you, and are you interested in playing with us?'” Reid recalled.

A polite young man, Reid noted he wasn’t the kind of person to tell someone no in that type of situation. So …

“I said, ‘Yeah,'” Reid recalled.

And that was pretty much that.

“After I told them at the Senior Bowl, ‘Yeah, I’ll play for you,’ I don’t think I ever heard back from them,” Reid said.

Until draft night.

If it were modern times, a projected first-round pick such as Reid would be invited to the draft to be brought up on stage after getting picked. But he was back at home in Altoona when the Bengals called him on that January evening in 1970.

“It wasn’t anything remotely like what you see today,” Reid said.

“If you think in relation to what the draft has become, it’s become a pageant. It’s not even a draft, it’s more like a pageant.”

The Bengals had gone just 4-9-1 in 1969, so Reid was going to a struggling team that was trying to figure things out. He wound up having an excellent run with the club, retiring as the Bengals’ all-time leader in sacks at the time.

“I knew that I was going to probably have a chance to play right away,” Reid said, “where maybe if I had gone with a more established franchise with established guys, I might have had to ride the pine.”

SUBHD: Kentucky tried decision

Ebersole wound up having an excellent career at Penn State — playing on undefeated teams in 1968 and ’69 — before going on to the pros, so things certainly worked out for him in a lot of ways.

But as he tells it, Ebersole initially was all set to join a couple of his friends from Altoona High on the football team at Kentucky.

Mountain Lion teammates Ebersole, Beard and Dick Frasca all made a visit to Kentucky during the recruiting process, and all three decided they would play for the Wildcats.

“We had a good visit, enjoyed the campus, enjoyed the coaches and liked everything about it,” Beard said by phone from his home in Dillsburg. “Coming back, we made a commitment to ourselves to go there.”

“It was pretty down there,” Ebersole said from his home in South Carolina. “We went over to the Derby, plus two of your friends and teammates going there. It seemed pretty easy.”

Easy for the young man, but not easy for his mother.

“While we were there, Penn State coaches came in and talked to John’s mother,” Beard said.

They convinced John’s mom that Kentucky was “too far away,” Ebersole recalled, so he changed his mind and decided to go to Penn State.

“I’m glad I did,” Ebersole said. “It worked out better.”

It certainly did.

Ebersole’s career at Penn State attracted the attention of scouts and helped him embark on an NFL career that lasted eight years.

How he wound up with the Jets, though, remains a mystery, since Ebersole never spoke to team officials leading up to the draft.

“I thought I was going to go to the Steelers,” he said. “I didn’t know when, but that was the only team I talked to. Then I ended up going to the Jets.

“It sort of was (a surprise). But I was just happy to be drafted.”

Ebersole said he has “no idea” how the Jets found out about him, and he’s not exactly sure what it was like finding out he had been drafted by the team.

“I think it was a phone call,” he said. “I don’t know. I wasn’t watching (the draft), that’s for sure.

“I don’t have many memories. I’ve had so many concussions, I don’t remember a whole lot about anything.”

Ebersole had a long and productive NFL career, then went on to become a longtime Blair County commissioner. He’s now retired, lives in South Carolina and said he plays a lot of golf.

One thing Ebersole does remember is how many good football players Altoona Area High School had back in the day.

“We had tons of good players,” he said. “There were so many good players back then, holy smokes.”

SUBHD: Beard’s journey

Beard did end up going to Kentucky, as did Frasca, who only stayed one year. Beard spent his entire career with the Wildcats, but he endured some obstacles during his senior season.

“It was a good experience,” Beard said. “I enjoyed it. I don’t think I made a wrong decision going to Kentucky.”

He was a running back his first two seasons in 1967 and ’68, rushing for 452 yards. But the program had a coaching change for his senior year in 1969, bringing in John Ray from Notre Dame to replace Charlie Bradshaw.

“(Ray) decided to change the program around,” Beard said. “What he did with me, the running back position was pretty well mine. He thought I’d be better off for the program if I moved to a defensive player.”

He wasn’t just going from offense to defense, either. Beard was asked to make the highly unusual switch from running back to defensive tackle, something you’d never see in today’s game.

Beard, 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds, said he did his best to learn the new defensive position in his final year of college. But ultimately, it proved to be an ill-fated decision by Ray.

“You don’t just pick up (defensive tackle) overnight,” Beard said. “The change was more than I could handle, I guess. So this kind of messed me up a little bit as far as my senior year as a running back. I went and said, ‘Coach, I don’t think this is working. I’ve got too much to learn to be a good defensive player.

“As a team player, you do what they ask you to do and did it to the best of my ability. But I think I was wasted (on defense). It wasted my talent.”

Beard did go back to running back but carried just nine times for 29 yards his senior season at Kentucky. Still, the Jets were interested in him enough to select him in the 17th round of the draft.

Beard said he had no idea he would be drafted and added, “I was really surprised when I got the call.”

Especially, he noted, because of how it all went down the day of the draft.

“We were back in the dorm, it was late in the afternoon and we had just come back from dinner,” Beard said. “The phone rang, my roommate answered it, and he was kind of a jokester. I thought he was putting me on when he said, ‘The New York Jets want you.’

“I honestly didn’t take him serious, and then finally got on the phone and realized it was them.”

Beard didn’t know the Jets were interested in him.

“What I heard later through the vine was the Jets really did not need running backs,” he said. “That year they had some really, really good backs. What they were really after when I was drafted, they wanted a kickoff return person.”

It came down to Beard and one other player for that spot.

“There wasn’t much difference between me and the other guy,” Beard said. “They had to pick one, and unfortunately, I didn’t fare out.”

After he got cut late in training camp, Beard didn’t pursue any other football options. He had given so much of his life to the sport and figured he had given it his best shot, so he decided to give up football rather than seek an opportunity with another team.

“Once I was cut, it was, ‘That’s it, I’m done,'” Beard said. “I wish I would have pursued it more than I did.

“I did the whole course, the whole gamut, now I’m done. But I really wish I had somebody pushing me back then and say, ‘Why don’t you try for somebody else?'”

Beard instead wound up moving to eastern Pennsylvania and eventually started a family with his wife, Kim (Gray) Beard, an Altoona native who went to Bishop Guilfoyle High School. The couple have two children, and Dick spent his career working at Bermudian Springs High School in York Springs as the head groundskeeper for all of the athletic fields.

“I got into something that I really really enjoyed,” he said, “because I was on my own and didn’t have anyone standing over me. I ended up doing that for 30 years.”