By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

Curtis Brown of the Bills

Taken in Round 3 in 1977

Other picks in that round: It was a good round for running backs, as Wendell Tyler, Terdell Middleton and Rob Carpenter were selected. Tony Hill was an explosive wide receiver for the Cowboys.

The details: Brown arrived just in time to see O.J. Simpson play his last year with the Bills. Simpson’s trade opened up some playing time for Brown, a 5-foot-10, 203-pound fireplug of a runner. He had three straight seasons where he ran for more than 500 yards. Curtis finished his career in Houston in 1983.

Other 59s: Eugene Marve had a similar career  to Brown, but at a different position. He spent six seasons in Buffalo, and was a starter for four of them. Unluckily for him, Eugene played on some bad teams in the mid-1980s. Ondrej Steine was a third-round pick of the Sabres in 1992. He has played a lot of hockey since then, but all of it was an ocean away in Europe.

(Follow Budd on Twitter @WDX2BB)

Budd Bailey

Budd Bailey has been involved in almost every aspect of the local sports scene for the last 40 years. He worked for WEBR Radio, the Buffalo Sabres' public relations department and The Buffalo News during that time. In that time he covered virtually every aspect of the area's sports world, from high schools to the Bills and Sabres and everything in between. Along the way, Budd served as a play-by-play announcer for the Bisons, an analyst for the Stallions, and a talk-show host. He won the National Lacrosse League's Tom Borrelli Award as the media personality of the year in 2011, and was a finalist for that same award in 2017. Budd's seventh and eighth books, one on the Transcontinental Railroad and the other about Ichiro Suzuki, are scheduled to be released in the fall.

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