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INDIANAPOLIS – He spoke to his dad before every football game, the tears forming, the rage coming. David Overstreet II spoke to his dad because he wanted this to happen: He wanted to get angrier and angrier until it was time for kickoff, and someone had to pay.

Back then, before he became the assistant coach he is today with the Indianapolis Colts, David Overstreet II was an All-Big 12 safety at Missouri, and when he was talking to his dad before games, he wasn’t talking to his dad, the superhero: Texas high school football legend, star at Oklahoma, first-round draft pick of the Miami Dolphins.

No, in those days David II was talking to his dad, the mortal:

The man who chose on June 25, 1984 to drive through the night, all the way from Detroit, where he’d appeared at Billy Sims’ football camp, to his home back in east Texas, where Overstreet’s wife and son – little David II, all of 13 months old – were waiting. He was talking to the dad who fell asleep behind the wheel of that Mercedes 450 SL, took out a utility pole, drifted into a gas station and smashed two gas pumps.

He was talking to the father he never knew, dead at age 25, identified by his teeth.

He talked to his dad, and the tears were streaming down his face. This wasn’t sadness. This is what fury feels like.

“That was my fuel,” says David Overstreet II, now 35. “My mom used to always tell me, and (my coach at Missouri) told me this too: ‘You play better when you’re mad. You got to find something to be angry about.’ And that was what I had to be angry about. That my dad wasn’t there to physically watch me play. He wasn’t there to throw balls, to teach me how to run, stuff like that.

"I was mad at him. Why'd you try to drive the whole way? Why didn't you just stop?"

From Barry Switzer’s wishbone to Dan Marino’s Dolphins

Senior year at Missouri. Art class.

David II was gifted athletically, and artistically: painting in oils and acrylics, sculpting, ceramics, relief printmaking, you name it. Working toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he was taking one final art class and given one final assignment: A self-portrait, without painting yourself.

Overstreet painted a football, and embedded two numbers. No, not the No. 7 he wore at W.W. Samuell High in Dallas, or the No. 8 at Missouri. For this project – “Express yourself without showing yourself,” Overstreet says – he embedded No. 20 and No. 22. Those were his dad’s numbers, in high school and then college. That’s how he showed himself. By showing his father.

“The thing is,” Overstreet says, “he is me.”

Well, that’s what everybody had always told him. He remembers the first time he spoke with current Illinois coach Lovie Smith, who had grown up with his dad in Big Sandy, Texas. It was after David’s senior season at Missouri, and Lovie was coaching the Chicago Bears. He’d called his buddy Matt Eberflus – Recognize that name? We’ll come back to it – for a scouting report on Overstreet, then asked to speak to the young man. David remembers grabbing the phone and saying something like, “Hello, this is David,” and hearing laughter from Lovie Smith.

“Boy,” Lovie told him,” you sound just like your father.”

Acts like him, too, so gregarious and outgoing, the kind of guy that people would say of David, and then of David II: great player, better person. And physically? Every bit as fast as his old man. David II ran the 40-yard dash in 4.36 seconds, and you should have seen the way his old man ran at Big Sandy High, floating along the grass, hovering above it, running for 3,032 yards and 52 touchdowns as a senior.

That drew the attention of Barry Switzer at Oklahoma, who in 1977 added Overstreet to the Sooners’ wishbone with future Heisman Trophy winner Billy Sims and NFL running backs Elvis Peacock and Kenny King. As a senior against Colorado, Overstreet ran for 258 yards on 18 carries, with touchdowns of 84 and 53 yards, and the Dolphins picked him in the first round of the 1981 NFL Draft.

After two seasons in Montreal in the Canadian Football League, Overstreet joined the Dolphins in 1983 and hit his stride behind rookie quarterback Dan Marino in the final two games, running for 179 yards on 27 carries in wins against the Falcons and Jets.

Before David Overstreet’s future could explode, two gas pumps in Eastern Texas beat him to it.

'I am the second coming of him'

He left behind a wife, Johnnie May, he’d been dating since fifth grade, a woman who in 34 years has never remarried, who even now mourns the bookend days of her late husband’s life: born Sept. 20, died June 25. He left behind a 4-year-old daughter, Dayetta, who would later say it’s “like seeing a ghost” to acknowledge the man, a replica of their father, that her baby brother has become.

And he left behind that baby boy, 13-month-old David II, a boy who never knew his father, who has just one picture with his dad, just the two of them and a tiny football.

The boy grew into a college football player who drove home to Texas for holidays and had to call Johnnie May every time he took Interstate 44 back to campus in Missouri, knowing his mom had been terrified and crying from the moment he’d left 9½ hours earlier, fearing another unspeakable accident. The boy grew into a man with his own fears, waking the morning he turned 25 and wondering if this was it, if this was the year he’d die. Same as his dad.

Miami Dolphins running back David Overstreet left a son bearing his name, a son he refused to name David Jr.

“High school football in Texas is king, it’s a big deal, and everywhere I’d go people knew my dad and they’d have stories,” says David II. “My mom used to always tell me that I was living in a legacy. That’s why my dad named me ‘the second’ and not junior, because I’m the second coming of him. I’m not an underclass, like a junior. I’m just the next one, and now my son is the next one, the third. That’s why we call him Trey.”

Right, Trey. And you haven’t forgotten about Matt Eberflus, have you? There’s so many layers to this story, and we’ll get to them, promise. But if you’ll forgive this quick left turn, I’m going to introduce another layer to David Overstreet’s story:

Mine.

What I remember is crying

Being just 13 months old, David II doesn’t have a memory of the day his father died, of June 25, 1984 – but I do.

My parents attended Oklahoma and raised me on OU football, and as a second-grader I attended Meet the Sooners Day in 1977. Had my picture taken at Owen Field with my favorite players, magical names like Billy Sims and Thomas Lott and Elvis Peacock and yes, absolutely yes, David Overstreet. Seven years later I’m 14, living now in Oxford, Miss., still an OU fan, reading the Sunday Oklahoman newspaper that my grandfather in Shawnee, Okla., mailed every week. He knew I loved the Sooners.

My dad knew it, too, which is why he wanted to be the one to tell me. He called from his office at Ole Miss, where he taught law school. I don’t remember the words he used, but he told me: There was a car accident in Texas, and David Overstreet was dead. I don’t remember hanging up. I just remember crying.

That was 1984. Let’s move ahead to Feb. 27 of this year. That’s the day the Colts announce several additions to new coach Frank Reich’s staff, including this name: David Overstreet II. Immediately, I fire off two emails of my own. The first is to our Colts writers at IndyStar with the subject line: “David Overstreet II is mine.” The second email is to the Colts, asking to speak with David II as soon as I can.

The first meeting happens in August at Colts training camp in Westfield. I approach Overstreet holding two things: my phone, and my scrapbook. The phone has my Facebook page, where my wallpaper photo shows me as a small boy at Meet the Sooners Day in 1977, smiling next to Elvis Peacock. The scrapbook has other photos from that day, and as David II stands there, I’m telling him his dad is in here somewhere, let me find it, ah yes here it is …

Here’s me and Billy Sims. Here’s me and Kenny King. And here’s … no, that’s all there is.

David II is fine, and he’s telling me it’s OK, but I’m mortified that the picture is gone. His dad should have been here.

It’s not until I drive home that I think: Well, he's used to that.

“You missed my birthday. Why?”

A big safety, 6-0 and 210 pounds, fast like his father, David II made the 2005 All-Big 12 first team and was going to enter the NFL Draft after his junior season, but his mom nixed that: “You promised me you’d graduate.”

Overstreet returns for his senior season, and sure enough, first scrimmage of spring ball, a teammate rolls into his leg. Microfracture surgery is next.

“Microfracture surgery can go really good, or really bad,” Overstreet is telling me. “And mine went bad.”

To this day he can’t straighten that leg all the way, but he played his senior season — he was a captain — and made the 2006 All-Big 12 second team. Undrafted, he had a tryout with the Bears, coached by Lovie Smith, but the knee wouldn’t cooperate. The Bears released him, nobody picked him up, and David Overstreet II was done with football.

And I mean, he was done.

“I didn’t even watch football for a whole year. I just couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t understand why I loved the game so much, and it didn’t love me back."

Overstreet worked in graphic art and marketing, had a hand in two companies, one that still stands today – Vincero, a marketing firm in San Antonio – but in 2015 he was ready to forgive football.

“I wanted back in,” he says.

For years Overstreet had stayed in touch with his old position coach at Missouri, Matt Eberflus – “Like a father to me,” he says – and in 2015 he asked Eberflus for a letter of recommendation. By 2015 Eberflus was coaching linebackers for the Dallas Cowboys. He wrote the letter. Overstreet sent the letter and a resume to more than 100 schools and got one bite: Holmes Community College in Goodman, Miss. After a year there, he spent 2016 and ’17 at Garden City (Kan.) Community College.

For financial reasons, his wife Chelsea spent those three years in Texas, surrounded by family, raising Trey. David II visited when he could.

“I missed so many of his birthdays,” David II says. “He didn’t really care when he was 3 and 4, but when he was 5 it changed. He said something to my wife.”

And then he said something to his dad.

“You missed my birthday,” Trey told David II last year. “Why?”

“You’ll see,” answered David II, but he didn’t know how. And then his phone rang in January.

Now with Colts, he still talks to Dad

New Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus (remember?) was inviting him to Indianapolis, fulfilling a vow he’d made years earlier to his wife.

“I’d always told my wife, Kelly, that if we ever get an opportunity to hire David, we’re doing it,” Eberflus says. “So when we got this opportunity, we called him up to see if he was available.”

So now I’m asking Eberflus a question: All those years you coached in college (17), all those players, how many of them did you tell your wife you’d hire someday?

“A couple,” he says. “Just a couple. To be a coach takes the right temperament. Have to be confident and a hard worker, and have a lot of patience. Have to really have the players’ best interests at heart. And that’s David. What a magnetic personality he has. What a positive person.”

As the Colts’ defensive quality control coach, Overstreet works with the secondary on technique, and breaks down film on that week’s opponent.

“He knows their personnel in and out,” says cornerback Kenny Moore, which means Overstreet knows more about the Colts' opponent than the Colts know about Overstreet. Watch this:

Do you know about his dad? That’s me, asking Moore on Sunday after the Colts’ fifth consecutive victory, 27-24 against the Dolphins.

“His dad?”

Yeah. His dad was a first-round draft pick of Miami.

“Really? For real?”

So David doesn’t talk about that with you?

“Nah,” Moore says. “He’s very selfless. He doesn’t talk about himself.”

Next I find safety Mike Mitchell, who tells me the same thing. Has no idea that Overstreet’s father played in the NFL. Mitchell wants me to know that “D.A. does everything, from the video to coaching to lifting spirits up. Man, he’s done it before, he played the position, he played safety, so he knows a lot of the stresses we feel. It makes you as a player trust him that much more.”

But, I’m saying to Mitchell, you didn’t know his dad was a first-round pick?

“I did not …”

Out of Oklahoma.

“… until you just told me.”

Played for the Dolphins.

“Nuh-uh.”

A few days later I’m asking Overstreet about this – They don’t know? – and he’s surprised by the question. He’s here to coach the Colts, not to tell them about himself or his dad. But he still talks to his dad, every Sunday before kickoff, up in the coaches’ booth where he works the game.

“Be here with me,” David II asks his father. “Be an extra set of eyes for me, help me be vigilant, give me your wisdom.”

Years have passed, and David Overstreet II is at peace with his father's death. He doesn’t cry anymore when he talks to a man he never knew, not tears of rage or even sadness, though tears come at other times for a fatherless son who has become a father himself. A year ago, David II was stung when Trey asked him that question:

You missed my birthday. Why?

A few weeks ago, something else happened. David and Trey are in the car, driving somewhere together, and Trey looks at his dad and says just as seriously as a 6-year-old can say: “You’re my best friend.”

In the front seat, David Overstreet II starts to cry. This wasn't sorrow. This is what happiness feels like.

​​​​​​ How long will a $5 cup of coffee keep you warm? Try this Gregg Doyel story — and the rest of IndyStar— three months for $5, an introductory offer for new subscribers.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.