[Reginald Rutledge]

Back in 2000, I remember stopping by one of my coaches office and he had a figure of Emmitt Smith from McFarlane. The figure looked oddly familiar to me, very familiar as a matter of fact. Anyone who followed the career of Emmitt Smith knew he mostly carried the ball unorthodoxly in his left hand. Even if he was running out of bounds toward the right, oddly he still had the ball tucked in his left hand. I was always dumbfounded by how he never got it stripped more often.

Anyhow, the point was when we originally created our stock poses at Footballfigures.com, our intent was to create each figure off real life images. So we went through more than 500 photos and got the most realistic of each one. The pose called "The Dominator" is a picture we found of Emmitt Smith that symbolized his running style. We never knew that a company called McFarlane would have the exact stance of the same player.

I had painted Emmitt very much similar to what McFarlane had. That's why it was so amazing. So I did a little research on this McFarlane company only to find that I was inspired by its work. I saw this one pose, the Randy Moss leaping pose, which caught my eye. I thought to myself would this be a functional EFL player. So I created it. And to my amazement, he was outstanding. This is one of the hardest figures to check. Here is the inspiration and here are my results.