By on December 02, 2012 at 12:05 AM
Franco Harris addresses the crowd at his old high school, Rancocas Valley Regional, on Friday, where he was honored for his Football Hall of Fame career.This is not the start of a cheeky joke; it’s a fact. The bar was located at Pittsburgh International Airport, which nowadays happens to have an eerily lifelike statue commemorating the Immaculate Reception, next to one depicting Gen. George Washington.
Yes, Franco and George, side by side. Any problem with that? The fact is, in Pittsburgh, they rank them in that order if they rank them at all. But that has nothing to do with the story.
Anyway, this 22-year-old rookie went into the airport saloon on that frosty evening of Dec. 23, 1972, and there they were — a few dozen large and surly men, lined up and staring down at the bar like it was some Easter Island reenactment, only this one included hard liquor and harder feelings.
“There were nothing but Oakland Raiders players in that bar, on their way home, just like me,” Harris recalled. “And I said, ‘Oops.’ ”
He found another place to wait for his flight to Philadelphia, and 20 miles later he was safely back home in Mount Holly for the holidays.
Another close call, another clean getaway — only this time it was to a place that has always been his sanctuary. He was reminded of this on Friday, when much of the town and the entire student body of Rancocas Valley Regional High piled into the auditorium to honor their iconic alum, and needless to say, the impending 40th anniversary of the Immaculate Reception came up more than a few times.
Did they have any choice? They opened the proceedings with a video (of course), and the video opened with The Play (of course), which most of the teenagers cheered with steely familiarity. Indeed, the kids here were hip: They unfurled a “Franco’s Italian Army” banner.
And even the fellow representing Allstate Insurance — which co-sponsored this reunion with the Pro Football Hall of Fame — couldn’t resist suggesting, “How cool is it that we’re honoring a guy known for having good hands?”
Harris is reminded of his good-hands moment ... pretty much hourly. That’s how things go sometimes: He retired with 12,120 yards, six All-Pro selections and four Super Bowl rings, but he is also fated to be remembered as the kid from Jersey who turned an AFC playoff game into arguably the most serendipitous event in sports history.
The truth is, the 62-year-old Harris is still fine with that. Bobby Thomson and Kirk Gibson and Allan Houston and Garfield Heard probably feel the same way. The difference is, they aren’t among the greatest players ever, like this guy is.
“I always say if you’re known for one thing, and it’s a positive, that’s not a bad place to be,” Harris said. “But I looked at the Immaculate Reception as just a beginning, and I tell people that it kept getting better after that, because we accomplished so many great things after that, and it was only the start of a whole new era for the Steelers.”
That’s why he is lionized in Pittsburgh. For 40 years, they had been lamentably bad, a team that had never won a playoff game, but that ’72 game changed everything.
If you are old enough, you can still rewind the details in your mind’s eye: the desperate fourth-and-10 fling by Terry Bradshaw from his own 40 with 22 seconds left and the Steelers down, 7-6, the collision between Jack Tatum and Frenchy Fuqua downfield that sent the pass back the other way, and some broad-shouldered rookie wearing No. 32 going after the ball because “that’s what Joe Paterno yelled at me to do every day at Penn State.”
Only here’s where Harris admits to a blind spot. He doesn’t remember grabbing the ball inches from the turf at the Oakland 43, or lifting it into the crook of his arm. He only remembers rumbling down the left sideline to beat Jimmy Warren to the end zone to give the Steelers a 12-7 lead with five seconds to play.
“It’s just so odd,” Harris said, as we stood on the stage of the school’s auditorium. “To this day, I just remember leaving the backfield, and running down the sideline, but nothing between those two.
“And part of the mystique of that game was that NBC misplaced the tape for something like 30 years, so all we saw was the slow-motion stuff from NFL Films, from just one angle. Now, when you see the play in real time, it blows your mind because it happened so fast — you see the ball coming out and me running the other way. I still don’t know how you react that quickly, and not break stride. It’s just really weird.
“But I’m pretty confident it really happened, because we have it on film.”
The play took 17 seconds, but it spawned a dynasty for a Steelers team that would include nine Hall of Famers, and it forever changed the lives of most of the people who lived through it.
That even includes Harris’ family here in Burlington County, the part of Jersey that looks more like Indiana, where silos still outnumber Starbucks by roughly 20 to 1. It is a place where most of Harris’s nine brothers and sisters still live, and his 85-year-old mom — “bedridden, but perky as ever,” he says — is in the nursing home next door to the high school.
She wasn’t a football fan, but legend has it that Gina Parenti — a native of Florence, Italy, who barely spoke English — provided the most fitting soundtrack for the Immaculate Reception.
“She sensed from my brothers that something was wrong,” Franco explained, “so she went over and put on a record of the Ave Maria — right before the play.”
Hail Mary, indeed.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has run stories on the Immaculate Reception every weekend during this anniversary season. Its central figure, the congenial third son of Army Sgt. Cad Harris and his Italian war bride, likes the fact that the story still has tentacles.
Even the folks at Rancocas still felt like a part of it, “and that’s because for as long as I can remember, we all gravitated toward Franco around here,” said Bob Smith, his friend since 1964, and the baseball coach at Middlebury (Vt.) College. “He just had a knack for uniting people, so you can imagine what it’s like for him in Pittsburgh.”
“I know that it changed the city, and the culture of Pittsburgh,” Harris said. “Because before 1972, people said, ‘Same ol’ Steelers — they always find a way to lose.’ It didn’t matter that we lost the next week to that (17-0) Miami team, because we showed we were ready to find ways to win.
“So for me, there’s so much to it — it’s not about a single play. It’s really a reflection of the players and the team of the ’70s. Because 1972 was the beginning of that dynasty — and it was an unbelievable decade, finishing up in 1979 with the Super Bowl.”
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