Little Fanfare For an Uncommon Man
Colts' Humble Harrison Stresses Substance Over Style

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

INDIANAPOLIS There are no ploys from Marvin Harrison, no antic bids for attention, look at me, look at me, look at me. So, it may come as a surprise to learn that Harrison is the best wide receiver in the NFL, and perhaps on his way to being the best of all time, certainly better than any other wide receivers you have heard of, those garrulous self-promoters with their megaphone egos, and Klaxon mouths, and stage props hidden in their socks. Compared with him, those guys are insufferable bleaters. They are merely good. Harrison is great.

Harrison has pulled off a very neat trick: He has become great without becoming famous. He does not hold bawling news conferences, or strike ludicrous poses. He has been named to the Pro Bowl eight times and holds several NFL records yet he has passed through his 11-year career for the Indianapolis Colts without a single memorable end zone display or act of self-celebration. The result is that he is uncelebrated. He is not a star. "Well, he is," says Colts President Bill Polian, "but people don't know it."

A search for public mention of Harrison turns up almost nothing except his age, 34, his vitals, 6 feet, 185 pounds, and some statistics. Which is the way he likes it. "That's good," Harrison says. "Nothing to write about." Now, think about it. This is the age of communication, not to mention brazenness and blatant vulgarity. Do you know how hard it is to leave no real impression of yourself, nothing but a bunch of numbers and secondhand opinions?

Harrison shrinks against a wall in the Colts' complex, hands thrust deep in his gray fleece sweats, exuding an almost panicky shyness. With his slight build, he seems more fawn-like than human. He is all slim reticence. Startle him, say, by asking something personal, and he'll bolt from the building. He constantly glances away, his eyes sliding and skittering all over the hallways. The truth is, Harrison doesn't like being looked at.

"I'd prefer to play in an empty stadium," he says softly. "It would be, um, not less embarrassing, but I don't like the focus directly on me, not anything, no one, no cameras. If I had to I would just play in front of no fans."

Ask any pedestrian on the street to name the top wide receiver in the league, and he might pick Terrell Owens or Chad Johnson, notorious preeners. But ask defensive backs the same question, and you get a different answer. Indianapolis Coach Tony Dungy believes that the only people who properly appreciate Harrison are the people "who have to cover him." Last winter, ESPN queried nine defensive backs: Who is the toughest player to cover in the league? Eight answered: Marvin Harrison.

It's the diminutive, semi-invisible Harrison who is on pace to break virtually every important receiving record in the NFL. He passed the 900-catch mark in the shortest period of time in league history, 149 games. His average of 94 catches per season is the all-time record -- by nine. He holds the record for most receptions in a single season (143) -- by 20. Heading into Sunday's game against the Washington Redskins, he is ninth in the league in receptions with 32.

So why haven't people heard more of him? "Because he's all substance," says Dungy. "He's not flash and dash, it's just all performance for him. Even I really had no idea how good he was until I got here."

In a 45-28 Monday night victory over the St Louis Rams last October, Harrison and quarterback Peyton Manning set the NFL record for touchdowns by a duo. They connected for their 86th score when Harrison, running a fade route, caught a lofted ball over his shoulder, planted his left foot, and dragged his right toe in the end zone. And then he jogged casually away.

Manning ran excitedly down field to greet him. Harrison tossed the ball to him. Manning handed the ball back. "You keep it, you keep it, you keep it," Manning insisted. Harrison handed it back again. He wouldn't accept it.

"I've just never been a flashy person, my work is the key to success," Harrison said during an interview last season. "It's not to go out and rant and rave about one touchdown in a game, when you still have 30 more minutes to play. My job is never done until all the zeros are on the clock."

Humility? Personal modesty? They are all but obsolete qualities among NFL wide receivers -- which is why quarterbacks on other teams openly pine to play with him. One of them is the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb, who was a collegiate teammate of Harrison's for two years at Syracuse. "So many receivers go through their career talking about how great they are, and how much they're going to do," McNabb says. "Marvin just does it."

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.

He was born quiet, apparently. "I've always been this way," he says. But it's also possible his unassuming demeanor is partly the result of early responsibility. His father Marvin Sr. died of natural causes when Marvin was 2. His mother, Linda, raised him strictly while working two jobs. Homework was done the first thing after school, before anything else. Sunday was laundry and cleaning day.

"She only had to tell me something once, and I took care of whatever it was," Harrison says. "Same thing as coach. He only has to tell me once. If I screw it up the first time, we'll correct it and we won't have to do it again."

Linda Harrison moved her family around Philadelphia, in search of better schools and after-school clubs, until they came to rest in Roxborough, a gentrified neighborhood with a famed recreational football program where Marvin began making his name as a prospect. She enrolled him in Roman Catholic High School, a grand old institution with a strict dress code and a record of sending its athletes to college.

Harrison wore his necktie and sweater to school and acquired a reputation for conscientiousness. He was never late, and missed one day of school in four years. He took a job cutting the grass at the Roman Catholic athletic fields to make extra money. "I think his mother raised him to be a well-mannered person, a respectable individual, and he kind of prides himself on that," says Watson.

At Roman Catholic, Harrison came under the thumb of Fararow, the geometry teacher, and part-time director of a sports recreation center, who tutored promising athletes with collegiate potential. Harrison was being nationally recruited but Fararow made it clear to Harrison that it wasn't enough to be recruited; he needed grades, too. He moved Harrison to the front row in his class, to make sure he had his attention. "You're sitting on top of the world," he said. "Don't blow it."

Harrison made decent grades, but he struggled with the SATs. The first time he took the standardized test, he failed to meet the NCAA's requirements. If he couldn't make a qualifying score, he would be academically ineligible as a freshman at Syracuse. One summer morning before his senior year, he showed up at the rec center where Fararow volunteered. "Will you help me?" Harrison asked.

For the next few months, Harrison and his good friend Watson spent their lunch hours, four times a week, in private tutoring with Fararow. He would give Harrison articles from the local sports pages and make him read them. Harrison took the test a second time, and failed again. "We've got to be persistent," Fararow said. Harrison took the test a third time -- this time on the morning of a big state tournament basketball game -- and made his score. There is now a wall devoted to Harrison in Fararow's geometry classroom at Roman Catholic.

There is a story Fararow enjoys telling about Harrison more than any other. It concerns one of the more legendary athletic feats Harrison ever performed, but it also defines his modesty, too. Roman Catholic had a sprinter named Mark Cobbs, who was widely acknowledged to be the fastest kid in the city. But anyone who watched Harrison streak around a football field knew he had close to 4.3-speed in the 40, and suspected he might be faster than Cobb. A debate sprang up between the football players and the runners. Cobb issued a challenge. "At first Marvin just did what he does now, he didn't pay any attention to it," Fararow says.

The track guys kept after him. "They just kept challenging him and challenging him," Watson says. Pretty soon, all anyone could talk about was who the faster runner was. Finally, Harrison agreed to race, out of sheer weariness.

"All right, we can handle it," he said.

The entire student body, along with teachers, filed out on to the sidewalk in front of the school, throngs of them crowding the corner of Broad Street and Vine. They stopped traffic, and marked out a sprint distance, 40 yards down the middle of the street. Students were betting their allowances, and lunch chits.

Harrison and Cobb lined up. And then they took off.

The track man never had a chance. In a 40-yard race, Harrison beat him by 15 yards. Then he walked away. They're still talking about it at Roman Catholic.

Harrison, of course, didn't mention it again.

"That was really the beginning of Marvin," Watson says.

Always Open

Whenever Dungy runs into his old friend James Harris, the Jacksonville Jaguars' vice president of player personnel, they have the same conversation.

"I don't understand how the best receiver on your team gets wide open all the time," Harris says. "Everybody knows he's going to get the ball. How does he get wide open, with no one around him?"

On each play, the defenders know Harrison is going to line up on the right side, because it's where he's always lined up. And on each play, they know he's likely to be Manning's featured target. "And he still has four or five plays in the game where nobody's around him," Dungy says. "It seems impossible. But that's what he does, and he does it in such a way that he doesn't draw attention to himself."

Pure talent is one explanation. Harrison has explosion, guile, vision, hands and courage. Also, he has uncanny body control. He can disguise each route so they all look the same; defenders never know whether he's running a stem, out, curl, streak or comeback. By the time you figure out what he's running, he'll freeze you with a single shake of his shoulder, and then vanish.

"He'll just run right past you and make you look stupid," McNabb says.

A catalogue of Harrison's catches includes pirouettes, twists, dips, twirls, lunges, tips, stabs and sleights of hand.

"What he does is so exceptional and so subtle that you can't see it unless you see it on film," Polian says. "There are very few times when, with the naked eye, you will say, wow, how did he do that? You only do that when you look at the tape. And then you say, 'My God, how did he do that?' "

As with all great magicians, the answer lies partly in practice. Behind every catch is hours of tedious rehearsal. Harrison practices the same way he comports himself in every other area.

Back in 1996, on NFL draft day, Harrison sat with friends and family as he waited to see what team would pick him. In four years at Syracuse, Harrison had set the all-time receiving record, and he had legitimate hopes of going among the first 10 players chosen. Instead, team after team passed on him.

"I have to get a job," Harrison kept saying to Fararow anxiously. "I have to get a job. I have to get a job."

The class of '96 turned out to be a remarkable one for wide receivers, with 10 first-rate wideouts selected in the first or second rounds. But Harrison was only the 19th player chosen. Keyshawn Johnson went No. 1, to the New York Jets. Terry Glenn went No. 7 overall, to the New England Patriots. Eddie Kennison was selected 18th, by the St. Louis Rams.

At last, the Colts called Harrison's name. He was the fourth receiver picked. "He kind of has a chip on his shoulder about that," McNabb says. "But he will never say it."

Whether out of insecurity, or because he's never been properly appreciated, Harrison still labors at his position like a third-rate free agent desperate to make the team. His teammates shake their heads at his capacity for work and his obsessive attention to detail.

He insists on being the first player in every drill line. He wears gloves during games, but never during practice. The gloves are sticky and help him catch the ball -- but he wants every disadvantage in practice.

He insists on reporting to the Colts' Monday workouts. The practices are aimed primarily at those players who didn't get in the game, to give them some work. Nevertheless, Harrison is there, catching balls from the second- and third-team quarterbacks. If he doesn't run a route right, or drops a certain pass, he'll work on it obsessively, catching it 45 or 50 times in practice, making the ballboys throw to him until he is satisfied.

"They don't pay me to play, they pay me to practice," he says. "Playing, that's what you do for free. That's what you do for fun."

During regular midweek workouts, he insists on running his routes against Indy's first-team defenders. He practices every route at game tempo, and when he makes a catch, he sprints it into the end zone as if the Super Bowl depends on it. His teammates report that he makes as many gasp-evoking catches in practice as he does on Sundays.

"Of all the great catches that ya'll see in games, he does 10 times that many in practice," says Manning. "It's really gotten to the point where the one-handed catch in games, a lot of our guys go, 'Yeah, you know, he did that twice on Wednesday at practice.' "

A defender, therefore, has to cope with two separate problems in covering Harrison. The first is to contain him. And the second is to keep up with his indefatigable energy. There are simply no breathers against him.

"I know that I'm not going to take a play off," Harrison says. "So for them, they got to be ready to play 60 snaps, every single time. And not only be ready to play 60 snaps, but I'm going to run every route just as hard, and I'm going to try to make them look all the same."

There is one group of people, besides defensive backs, who properly appreciate Harrison: his teammates and associates. Dungy flatly calls him "priceless." Polian has rewarded him with a contract worth $67 million over seven years, to ensure he finishes his career in blue and white.

Whether Harrison ever gets his due from others apparently doesn't matter to him. It doesn't seem to occur to him to ask for it, any more than it occurs to him to lead a parade in the end zone, or hold a circus on the sideline. Tom Moore believes that Harrison doesn't just wish he could play in an empty stadium, "in a way the stadium is empty to him."

Harrison's refusal to strut, or to share his inner life, is a statement in its own right. In a world of undignified shouting, Harrison is a whisperer. And in a league of exhibitionists, he resolutely maintains his humility and privacy. It's tempting to wonder what he might be hiding. The answer is, nothing. "It's almost like he's a mysterious person, until you get to know him, and then you realize, what you see is what you get," Watson says. A little prodding reveals that Harrison's mysterious off the field activities really only consist of going home to Philadelphia, where he hangs out with the same old friends he grew up with.

"I mean, I live a normal life," he says. "I just try to live a normal life, whatever that is."

As for those closely held aspirations of his, his old tutor Fararow lets the shoe drop. When Harrison retires, he will finish his masters. And then he'd like to do something truly marvelous, and worthy of headlines.

He'd like to become a schoolteacher.