THE IMMACULATE RECEPTION WAS SO MUCH MORE THAN A SPORTS MIRACLE
Franco Harris’ moment in time showed how a football team can lift a community for decades, and his death three days before the iconic play is celebrated in Pittsburgh is a numbingly unfair conclusion
This being Pittsburgh in late December, and these being the Steelers of the early 1970s, it was time to go. Our seats were in the upper deck of Three Rivers Stadium, so why not hoof it down the stairs and out-hustle the drunks to the ramps? Not that we were losing faith, my father and I, but these were rough times in a smokestack town where the steel industry was beginning to collapse. Weren’t the Steelers about to lose? Shouldn’t we beat the traffic?
I was too young to understand it all. But I could sense the angst in the stands, the trash talk among longtime buddies and the non-stop beer runs. What was happening down on the artificial turf of a concrete, multi-purpose donut was bigger than a postseason football game. There was a fevered desire, more like a wisp of hungover hope, that this NFL franchise of longstanding failure finally would rally behind a blond-mopped quarterback from Louisiana who was trusted by few, not even the head coach who drafted him No. 1 overall. We’d sit there and argue the merits of Terry Bradshaw versus those of Terry Hanratty. Yes, even back then, I was engaged in sports debating, and while I defended the potential of the deep-bombing Bradshaw — whose twangy drawl sounded like a foreign language in the old world of western Pennsylvania — my father embraced the Notre Dame-pedigreed backup from his hometown about 45 minutes up Route 8.
We weren’t the only ones leaving with less than a minute remaining in the fourth quarter. Even the beloved team owner, Art Rooney, was entering an elevator to the field from his suite seat so he could console players as they entered the locker room. He, too, assumed the game and the season were over. In eight days, the outfielder who built his baseball legend in the same stadium, Roberto Clemente, would die in the crash of a cargo plane while delivering supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims. Little did Pittsburgh U.S.A. realize in that flashpoint — 4th-and-10 at the Steelers 40-yard line, 22 seconds left, coach John Madden and the Oakland Raiders leading 7-6, a skittish Bradshaw in wild-hair mode — how desperately and dearly they needed something divine to happen, something gonzo, something seminal, something preposterous, something that would be recalled for decades as the greatest play in the annals of America’s most popular, prosperous league.
You know the rest, regardless of your generation or sports acumen. We saw history unfurl from the stairs. Bradshaw, nimble at 24, avoided a heavy rush and noticed a black Steelers jersey in Oakland territory. He whipped the football somewhere, anywhere. The head-hunting Raiders safety, Jack Tatum, collided viciously with the Pittsburgh running back, John “Frenchy” Fuqua. The ball appeared to deflect off Tatum, as Fuqua went tumbling to the turf, but to this day, no one can accurately assess what occurred. It was 3:29 p.m. on Dec. 23, 1972.
Trailing the play, known forevermore as “66 Circle Option,” was a rookie running back named Franco Harris. He, too, thought it was the season’s last gasp. But recalling a nugget of wisdom from his coach at Penn State, Joe Paterno, he convinced himself to “Play it to the end! Play it to end!” and “Go to the ball! Go to the ball!” In the upper deck, we saw a dance of confusion but still figured the game was over. For almost 50 years, Harris never could recall the entirety of events, but what transpired was as true as the videotape that has been viewed millions of times. With grace and poise belying his 230 pounds, he kept running, saw the ball coming his way, leaned forward almost effortlessly, picked the ball out of the air inches before it touched the turf and rambled into the end zone, tip-toeing down the sideline and staying in bounds his final steps.
The Immaculate Reception was born. The Steelers won and didn’t look back until the ‘80s. A sports romance never has been more beautiful and more urgent.
“It blows my mind that I have no visual recollection of catching the ball,” Harris said earlier this week. “That wasn’t an easy ball to catch. It just doesn’t make any sense. How did I track it? How did I keep in stride? You normally don’t catch a ball in that way. If I had dived for it, I would have been ruled down because the rules were different back then.”
I was in shock. My father, who owned the season tickets, was giddy like 59,000 others in a trembling stadium. We were luckier than Old Man Rooney, who was on the elevator and missed the play. He didn’t know the Steelers had won until the door opened and pandemonium fell upon him.
Life in Pittsburgh never would be the same. The Steelers began the most dominant, short-term NFL dynasty ever, winning four Super Bowls in six years and sending a procession of Hall of Famers to nearby Canton. They continued to symbolize a city that transformed, in the decades ahead, from a steel town to a tech town, an art town, a theater town, a foodie town. Chuck Noll retired as coach and was succeeded by Bill Cowher, who won another Super Bowl. Cowher was replaced by Mike Tomlin, who won another Super Bowl. Across the Allegheny River, the Penguins won five Stanley Cups in their downtown arenas with hockey greats Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby. The Pirates won in ‘79 and came close in the early ‘90s, then succumbed to also-random in baseball’s caste system. But at least they play in an exquisite park beside the Steelers’ home, a startling double-whammy for gobsmacked visitors entering the city through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. This wasn’t just an all-time sports memory.
This was a panacea for a place that needed it more than most. Which is why it was beyond staggering Wednesday to hear of Harris’ death overnight, at 72, just two days before the 50th anniversary of his iconic moment. Only hours before his passing, he had regaled crowds at a Heinz History Center function celebrating The Immaculate Reception. He had done several media interviews and was preparing for Saturday, when the Steelers are hosting the Raiders as part of a day honoring the play and retiring his No. 32 jersey.
But how can this be considered immaculate if Franco won’t be there?
Life is fickle. These developments are incredibly unfair and wrong.
“It is difficult to find the appropriate words to describe Franco Harris’ impact on the Pittsburgh Steelers, his teammates, the City of Pittsburgh and Steelers Nation,” said Art Rooney II, the team’s president. “From his rookie season, which included the Immaculate Reception, through the next 50 years, Franco brought joy to people on and off the field. He never stopped giving back in so many ways. He touched so many, and he was loved by so many.”
On Tuesday, Tomlin had joked that he was in the stadium in 1972. “I was in Section 135. I was eight months old. I think it's funny. Surprisingly, I’ve probably met 75,000 people that were there that day,” he said. “It's just one of those beautiful things in the history of our game. It’s humbling to be in close proximity to it, to work for this organization, to understand its impact on this organization, the career it spawned in Franco, a gold-jacket career, what it did for them that season in terms of changing the trajectory of that season, what it’s done for this franchise.
“There are many things that make it the play it is and the most significant play in the history of our game. To know the man involved, to call Pittsburgh home, and so it's awesome to be a part of and to witness. The best way we can honor him is by performing.”
Now, game day will feel like a wake. “I just admire and love the man,” Tomlin said Wednesday. “There’s so much to be learned from him in terms of how he conducted himself, how he embraced the responsibilities of being Franco for Steeler Nation, for this community. He embraced it all and did it with such grace and class and patience and time for people.”
“He meant so much to Steelers fans as the Hall of Fame running back who helped form the nucleus of the team’s dynasty of the ’70s, but he was much more,” league commissioner Roger Goodell said. “He was a gentle soul who touched so many in the Pittsburgh community and throughout the entire NFL. Franco changed the way people thought of the Steelers, of Pittsburgh, and of the NFL.”
Said Phil Villapiano, the Raiders linebacker who will be eternally attached to Harris as the defender covering him on the play: “We did so many things together. I can’t remember all these things over the last 50 years. It’s crazy. We were always doing the Immaculate Reception story and it got bigger and bigger. He would invite me to places he needed me. I would invite him to places I needed him and our friendship just grew and grew.”
Franco deserved one last chance to absorb a city’s love. Let’s hope they never move his statue at the airport. In Chicago, there is no statue of Michael Jordan or Walter Payton at O’Hare. In Los Angeles, there is no statue of Magic Johnson or Kobe Bryant or Sandy Koufax or Vin Scully at LAX. But at Pittsburgh International, as passengers head down the escalators to the trams, there is a replica of a full-uniformed Harris — arms reaching, body leaning — making the catch. A replica of George Washington is alongside him, but no one ever notices the first U.S. president. It’s all you have to know about what the man and the moment mean to a city.
That Harris was taken away suddenly, before his rightful commemoration, is anything but divine. A city weeps into its Terrible Towels, united as Franco’s Italian Army while the Steelers Polka plays with Primanti’s sandwiches on the table. You think I’m overdoing the Yinzer Love? Hardly. Without The Immaculate Reception and the man who somehow caught the football, I’m not sure what would have happened to Pittsburgh.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.