Whereas the world in 2020 is crammed with alarming narratives _ disease, corruption, environmental degradation, the accelerating erosion of American institutions, etc. _ and whereas the sports pages still function as a respite in times of deepening gloom, I thought you could use a factoid today that is just, uh, vaguely disquieting.
Franco Harris turned 70 this weekend.
Yeah, deal with it.
The Immaculate Receptor he remains, but the imagery of that indelible gallop beneath a ghostly December sky has as its central character, as of Saturday, a fresh septuagenarian.
"I really haven't had time to think about it," Harris told me this week, and not surprisingly, as he remains too busy for words. "Who would have thought at this stage I'd be as busy as ever? Who would have thought I'd keep getting more requests for community work? That I'd keep getting more requests for appearances? Who'd have thought I'd still be loving my businesses?
"When I look at certain people, like (Pitt Olympian) Herb Douglas and Ray Park, another friend of mine, these guys are in their 90s and they keep going. I'm like 'Wow, this is great to see.' "
That's the exact kind of reflexive, refractive modesty that runs so reliably in Franco Harris' DNA. You want to talk to him about being 70, but he wants to talk about someone who's 98. From his first days in Pittsburgh, as a 22-year-old riding the bus to Steelers practice from East Liberty, he's always been more impressed with somebody else, almost anybody else.
It's always "Me? What about him?"
Between the time he first sprang into the open field at Penn State in 1969 until the moment he stopped being 69 on March 7, Harris got asked just about every conceivable question about just about every subject in the public discourse, but the one I'd long wondered about had to do with how he handles a rare strain of public adulation, uniquely intense even for the 21st century.
People of all stripes have been known to lose their, well, let's say their focus or equilibrium, or something, around Franco Harris. Not only around the man, but around the idea.
"The Steelers got slaughtered 33-14; it was a terrible day," is a passage I read once in a book by Stephen Dubner called 'Confessions of a Hero Worshiper.' "I didn't cry when my mother gave us the news about my father but I was crying now ... (Jesus) did not live in my heart. It was Franco who lived in my heart. I wore Franco as my father wore his Blessed Mother scapular. He was my rock and my redeemer, my protector and my inspiration, my stealth messiah."
The news about Dubner's father was that he died when the author was 13. As Dubner was coming of age, Harris unknowingly replaced the father as Dubner's guiding star.
"The point was neither to become Franco nor to befriend him," Dubner would write subsequently. "The point was to attain from him _ to attain an equilibrium I lacked, a humility I faked and a strength I had never known."
No less gigantic a literary figure as John Grisham has found a hero in Harris, who is the reason the fullback in Grisham's short novel "Playing for Pizza" is named Franco.
You have to wonder how anybody walks around in such an atmosphere of unabashed idolatry.
"I've been here now close to 50 years and back in the day I'm sure things were different and we could be out and about a lot more than guys are today," Harris said. "I guess I learned that in situations where if we were in a crowd and someone approached, if the ballplayer had an attitude, like, hey don't bother me or hey don't bug me, that would make the situation tense. I just felt that if you just took 15 or 20 seconds just to say hello, glad to meet you, then everything is great. If there's a chance to make somebody's day a little better, why not? It doesn't take very much and it just makes everybody feel better including yourself."
Harris says he plans to enter his 70s the way he went into his 50s, by carefully reassessing his lifestyle and his diet. He's a big believer in blueberries and fish oil. He tried vegetarianism for a couple of years but found the need to add some protein.
"Twenty years ago I made a statement to myself (about older former NFL players) and it was, 'Look, we all have brain damage and we'll all have chronic problems. We'll all have inflammation, to what are the things I need to do?
"Now it's same question. I still do a lot of vegetarian. There's still a lot of life to live and so I want to approach each day like it's a special day and that you can still really live life to the fullest."
You needn't be a neurologist to determine that Harris' brain is operating at full capacity. He's as vital in the community as ever and his football legend gets revalidated every couple of years whether or not it needs it.
Only last fall, 35 years after his last carry, the NFL formally reestablished the Immaculate Reception as the greatest play in its 100-year history, holding multiple votes through which Harris' catch emerged victorious over Dwight Clark's catch and David Tyree's helmet catch in Super Bowl XLII.
Harris was there that day in Arizona, and I wondered whether he thought Tyree had made a play that might supplant something immaculate.
"I thought that it could be one of the top plays ever; there's no doubt that's a great play," he said. "It happened in front of a much bigger audience so it had a lot of visibility. I think it's incredible the Immaculate Reception was voted the greatest again. To me it means so much because of all the things that were connected to it."
That play would get credited with raising the curtain on a dynasty, of course, but Franco says that nobody could have foreseen what the Steelers did in the "70s, winning four Super Bowls in six years.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Fellow Hall of Famer Joe Greene once observed that the Steelers didn't win much before Franco came and didn't lose much once he got here. It happens I have a stat for that you might have seen in this space before; it's that irresistible.
Steelers in the 100 games B.F. (before Franco): 26-71-3. Steelers in the 100 games A.D. (after the draft that brought Franco): 74-25-1.
Might have something to do with the way people feel about him around here, around there, around everywhere.
