Little Fanfare For an Uncommon Man

Only now and then does Harrison suffer a lapse in his habitual discretion. One moment came as the Colts trailed late in a game against Tennessee in 2003. Harrison ran a deep post, into double-coverage. Manning threw, and Harrison made a diving, stretching, one-handed, laid-out grab for 42 yards, just short of the goal line. The Titans jumped around, screaming at the officials that it wasn't a catch. Harrison calmly got to his feet -- and waved his teammates down the field. A few moments later, the Colts scored the decisive touchdown for a 29-27 victory.

"That's about as showy as he ever gets," Colts center Jeff Saturday says.

Facing Inward

He drinks juice. His sole idea of excess is a Tastykakes binge. For a while, Harrison kept a Tastykakes display next to his locker. It was the kind of thing you'd see in a grocery store.

"That's as wild as it gets for Big Marv," Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney says.

His fondness for Tastykakes, from his home town of Philadelphia, is what passes for personal information on Harrison, who guards his privacy closely. He is purposely inconspicuous in the Colts' locker room, tending to keep to himself, and most of his teammates don't know him well. His chair in front of his locker is usually empty -- and when he's in it, he sits facing inward, toward his locker, his back to the room. His fellow wide receiver Reggie Wayne jokes that if Harrison ever comes out of his shell he wants to be there with a camera. Even his offensive coordinator, Tom Moore, admits, "We don't have a lot of conversation."

Ask Dungy what makes Harrison tick, and he says: "That I don't know. I really don't know. It's an interesting question. And you'll never find out."

If he has a good friend on the team, it's Manning, or Freeney, who also played at Syracuse. They shoot pool, or go to prizefights. But even Freeney seems to find Harrison fairly unknowable.

"Marvin is Marvin, [there's] no guy like him," Freeney says. "You may not even know he's there. Outside of the football field, he'll sneak by you. He'll park his car in the middle of a shopping center, and no one would ever know. That's Marvin. I wouldn't be surprised if Marvin was into one of those -- what do you call 'em -- things where you go into the wilderness, fishing and hunting, and being by yourself. He likes to do things different, and not necessarily what everybody else does."

Harrison has intimates, but they tend to be childhood ones with whom he grew up in North Philadelphia. He shelters his family from the media and declines to provide much information about them, or a phone number for his mother. "I try to leave her out of it," he says. Only grudgingly does he name friends. "I don't want anybody to talk for me," he says. "Even if they think they know me, they don't know me. So. That's how I like it."

Under prodding, he names his old high school geometry teacher, Joe Fararow, as a friend. He has also stayed close to an old high school classmate, Mike Watson, now a middle school teacher in Philadelphia. "He's very shy and it's kind of like you have to build that trust up in order for him to consider you a person of interest or a buddy," Watson says.

Harrison is just three credits shy from acquiring his master's degree in consumer affairs from Syracuse -- but he won't say what he plans to do with it. Nor will he talk about his off-the-field interests. "I have tons, but I never discuss them," he says. "Nothing people should know."

His personal habits are apparently as modest as his on-field ones. He is a meticulous and low-key dresser who has to wear the right Nike sneakers with the assigned Nike shirt. "He's a neat freak, to be honest with you," Watson says. "Everything's got to be perfect." His locker is almost military in its foursquare organization, shoes lined up on one shelf, and shoulder pads upright and centered on another.