Even on that play, the greatest in the 103-year history of the NFL, Franco Harris was so much more than the beneficiary of a blessed bounce, and so much more than the Steelers rookie who stumbled into the right place at the right time.
He was smart enough to follow the ball, an athlete’s most elementary assignment. As surely as you follow the money in business, politics, and crime, you follow the ball in sports.
Joe Paterno taught him that at Penn State. So, on December 23, 1972, when Terry Bradshaw threw a desperation fourth-down pass near the end of a Pittsburgh-Oakland playoff game that the Raiders led by a point, the running back told himself to go to the ball.
You are supposed to compete through the referee’s whistle, and so the trailing Harris kept running downfield when there was little apparent reason to. Never was luck so clearly the residue of design. Harris put himself there to make his controversial shoestring catch off the controversial deflection and to score the controversial 60-yard touchdown that made Steelers 13, Raiders 7 something no witness could ever forget.
The Pittsburgh franchise had never before won a playoff game, or even scored a touchdown in a playoff game. So throughout western Pennsylvania, the name “Immaculate Reception” was privately and even publicly endorsed by any Roman Catholic priest who hoped to stay in the good graces of his parishioners.
I was an 8-year-old viewer at the time, and it is my first vivid football memory. Before, during, or after every single Steelers game I’ve watched over the decades, I’ve thought of that childhood time and place when there was no such thing as cable TV, the NFL RedZone channel, or many roughing-the-passer calls.
Sunday afternoons were a lot simpler back then. You watched the Giants and the Jets and maybe one available national TV game, usually involving the Steelers or Cowboys, and the officials weren’t too worried about protecting vulnerable quarterbacks, receivers, or anyone else from violent hits.
As it turned out, Harris became known, in part, for getting out of bounds before absorbing an unnecessary shot to his rib cage. But on the biggest play of his life, he stayed inbounds, barely, while stiff-arming Oakland’s Jimmy Warren and running into the end zone with five seconds to go, turning Three Rivers Stadium upside down.
The 1972 Rookie of the Year was named a Pro Bowler in nine straight seasons, won four Super Bowl titles, and earned induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And yet people forever wanted to talk to him about the Immaculate Reception. Hundreds of people. Thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people.
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Harris never let them down, either, always handling the requests with humility and grace. The same goes for referee Fred Swearingen who, without the benefit of instant replay to determine whether Pittsburgh’s Frenchy Fuqua or Oakland’s Jack Tatum or both had deflected the ball, decided that the touchdown should stand.
Swearingen once introduced Arnold Palmer to a young up-and-comer named Jack Nicklaus at an Athens, Ohio, golf exhibition. The ref had no clue he was starting another heated rivalry when he enraged Raiders coach John Madden and his players by deciding that Tatum had made contact with the ball (the rules then prohibited an offensive player from catching a ball first touched by a teammate unless a defender also touched it), and that Harris had caught the ball before it hit the ground.
Before issuing his judgment, Swearingen had grabbed the Pirates’ phone in the stadium’s baseball dugout to speak with the league’s supervisor of officials, who told him the call was good. “We’ve got five seconds to play,” Art McNally told him. “Let’s get it over with.”
“Nobody really knew,” Swearingen told me years later. “Nobody could tell who hit the ball. My only rationale was the ball would not shoot that far back and that far out to the side unless the defense hit it. The offense was trying to catch it; they’re not going to knock it back there.”
Harris somehow gathered the long rebound on the run, kept his feet, and kept his cool. “One million to one odds on this one,” the legendary Curt Gowdy said on the broadcast. “You talk about Christmas miracles, here’s the miracle of all miracles.”
For my generation, that call in the Steelers’ huddle, 66 Circle Option, stands as a lifetime marker. That’s what great sports moments do. They change the game and inspire memories of the loved ones who were there with you when they happened.
So we were all hit hard by the news that this bearded nobleman was suddenly gone at age 72, right on the doorstep of the 50th anniversary of the Immaculate Reception on Friday and his jersey retirement ceremony in Pittsburgh on Saturday. No football player was ever a better representative of his team. No dynasty was ever a better representative of its region.
On Tuesday, hours before his death, Harris was on SiriusXM Radio with Chris Russo to talk about his catch. After he was introduced, Harris told the host that he was “doing great, fantastic. And as you said, 50 years ago. And it still feels brand new.”
It still feels brand new to us too, Mr. Harris, and always will. Thanks for the memories.
