Take a Picture With Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception” Statue

WHERE: Pittsburgh International Airport in Moon Township

WHEN: Anytime

HOW TO DO IT: Make a quick stop and take a picture

COST FACTOR: This one is free

DIFFICULTY FACTOR: There really is none unless you are rushing to catch a flight.

BUCKET RANK:

Two life-sized statues stand sentry at the airside elevators inside of Pittsburgh International Airport, and scores of passengers stop to shoot pictures or at least take an extended look at them on a daily basis.

One statue is of George Washington, who fought in the French and Indian War in Western Pennsylvania before leading disparate troops that pulled off one of the greatest upsets of all time. Washington beat the mighty British in the Revolutionary War, and later, as the first president of the United States, he set America on a course to becoming the greatest country in the world.

Despite such exalted status, the likeness of Washington does not attract nearly the attention of the one that is only a couple of feet away, which is telling of how inseparable Pittsburgh is from the Steelers.

The statue of Franco Harris shows the former Steelers running back making the shoestring grab that embodies the greatest play in NFL history. Dubbed the “Immaculate Reception” by Steelers broadcaster Myron Cope, Harris’ catch-and-run for a touchdown delivered the first playoff win in franchise history.

Harris, one of the iconic Steelers of the 1970s and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, is pretty agreeable to posing for pictures with fans when he is in public. But serious Steelers fans also need a picture of themselves posing with Harris’ statue in their photo albums.

The moment that is frozen in time in Pittsburgh International Airport still conjures up all sorts of images and questions and consider this: the Steelers have had a player return an interception 100 yards for a touchdown in a Super Bowl. Without that James Harrison tour de force the Steelers probably wouldn’t have a sixth Super Bowl, and yet that play is still a distant second to the “Immaculate Reception” in team annals.

The most famous of Harris’ 117 NFL touchdowns, which came after he caught a Terry Bradshaw pass that had ricocheted backward, secured a 13–7 win over the Oakland Raiders. It set the Steelers on a course to the greatest run of the Super Bowl era and fueled a bitter rivalry that defined the 1970s.

Desperation for the Steelers in the AFC divisional playoff game turned into hope when Harris ran toward the ball, as his college coach had drilled in him to do, after a nasty collision between running back Frenchy Fuqua and Oakland safety Jack Tatum. Hope turned into hysteria after Harris snatched the ball before it hit the turf at Three Rivers Stadium and started galloping down the left sidelines.

Steelers owner Art Rooney did not see any of this. Rooney had already left the press box so he could get down to the home locker room and console the players, who had watched Oakland score a late touchdown to take a one-point lead. By the time Rooney reached ground level, Harris had stiffed-armed and sidestepped a couple of Raiders tacklers on the way to the end zone. As Three Rivers Stadium throbbed, fans rushed the field.

Amid all of the confusion caused by whether Fuqua had touched the ball before getting crushed by Tatum—NFL rules at the time prohibited an offensive player from catching a pass that had been touched first by a teammate—and then the pandemonium Harris’ play unleashed, officials ruled a touchdown.

Harris is still best known for that play, but the statue that immortalizes the “Immaculate Reception” only tells a small part of his story. Indeed there are many dimensions to Harris, something the Steelers learned early in his career.

Harris attended Penn State but never blossomed into a star there. He shared the backfield with All-American Lydell Mitchell and also clashed with coach Joe Paterno on occasion. Harris has a very analytical mind and he questions anything that doesn’t make sense to him. That could be mistaken for Harris flouting authority, especially given the don’t-question-orders culture of football, and it gave the Steelers some pause before they selected him in the first round of the 1972 NFL draft.

Harris arrived the same year that Dick Hoak became the Steelers’ running backs coach and struggled early in training camp. Any concerns about him vanished in the Steelers’ first preseason game when Harris broke free for a 75-yard touchdown run. Harris’ vision and cut-back ability got him past the first level. The speed that belied his size allowed him to outrun defensive backs on the way to the end zone.

The normally reserved Hoak exclaimed “Holy cow!” to two other assistant coaches with him in the press box after watching that run. He later figured out why Harris had been routinely stopped in training camp for minimal gains.

“What happened in practice, why he didn’t look good, was if you told Franco this play goes to the four hole, put your head down and run in the four hole, he wasn’t doing that,” Hoak said. “He was going to run where they weren’t. In training camp the defense is going half speed and he’d try that stuff and somebody is waiting for him. That’s why he didn’t look so good. If you put him in a live situation it was different.”

That all went to the core of Harris’ makeup.

“He wants to know, why are we doing it this way?” Hoak said. “He would question you but if you gave him a good reason why he should do it he’d do it. There were times he questioned things we shouldn’t have done and we changed.”

Harris’ inclination to question dovetails with a keen sense of right and wrong and that contributed to an unseemly divorce with the Steelers. Harris, approaching Jim Brown’s NFL all-time rushing record in 1984, felt he deserved more money after rushing for just over 1,000 yards a season earlier.

The Steelers balked at his demands and released Harris. He signed with the Seattle Seahawks and played just eight games and rushed for 170 yards before calling it a career. Harris and the Steelers reconciled after he retired, and he stayed in Pittsburgh and became a successful businessman.

Harris remains one of the most prominent faces of the organization and he regularly attends alumni events. But he is more than just a connection to the glory days of the ’70s, more than just a statue, and it surprised no one in the Steelers organization when Harris exposed himself to withering criticism and even scorn as the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal unfolded at his alma mater in 2011.

Penn State’s Board of Trustees clumsily fired Paterno less than a week after a grand jury indicted Sandusky, a once-revered Nittany Lions assistant coach, on almost fifty counts of abuse, and Harris became one of Paterno’s fiercest defenders.

He did so at a time when Penn State had become so toxic, and the rage directed at the school so blinding, that some equated Harris’ defense of Paterno as his condoning the sexual abuse of children.

Never mind that Harris from the start questioned why someone who had done so much for Penn State on and off the field did not receive due process. Or that he simply demanded answers, accountability and transparency from a board that has provided little of those in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.

A rush to judgment led the Meadows Racetrack and Casino in Washington, which is south of Pittsburgh, to drop Harris as a spokesman. And then-Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl called for Harris to step down as the chair of the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship program.

Harris never wavered and he has turned shining a light on what really happened with Penn State and Sandusky and the Second Mile, a charitable organization sanctioned and supported by the state, into a crusade. The irony is that the strong will that once put Harris at odds with his college coach has placed him at the vanguard of Paterno defenders.

But to those who know Harris he is simply staying as true to himself as he is Paterno by fighting for the latter’s legacy.

“Franco’s like that. He’s that type of person,” said Fuqua, who remains good friends with Harris. “He might get to heaven before me. Why? Because he has a conscience. He’s good people and I don’t say that about many people. I don’t have anything bad to say about him at all except stop being an angel.”

Harris may get the glory for the “Immaculate Reception” but Fuqua claims he is the only living person who knows whether the touchdown that the Raiders have long disputed should have counted. And he has adroitly turned speaking engagements into one-act shows replete with the drama that accompanied the “Immaculate Reception.”

Fuqua will start by talking about the play and how he knew a collision was coming when he heard Tatum’s footsteps.

He will pause for effect and then tell those in the crowd that he is going to share with them the secret he has guarded like Fort Knox. With the anticipation heightened, Fuqua will start recounting the play, right up until he and Tatum collide.

He will then take off his sports jacket to reveal a T-shirt. The shirt has the date of the Immaculate Reception, December 23, 1972, below a picture of Harris running to the football.

The back of the shirt says, “I’ll never tell” and Fuqua gives the crowd a good look at it before turning and walking off the stage.

Yes, more than 40 years after the “Immaculate Reception” Fuqua swears he will never tell whether or not he touched the ball before Tatum.

“Unless they give me a million dollars I might,” he said with a laugh. “I won’t tell and no one’s going to give me a million dollars so I’ll take it to the grave with me.”

Like Harris, the play for which Fuqua is best known hardly defines him. That is because Fuqua is still as much of a character today, living in retirement outside of Detroit, as he was when he wore outrageous costumes and embraced the sartorial extremes of the 1970s.

It doesn’t take more than a general question to launch Fuqua into a story and it can be hard to tell who is having more fun when that happens: the running back who played seven seasons and won two Super Bowls with the Steelers or his audience, whether it is one person or a roomful of people at a speaking engagement.

Take the platform shoes with the miniature fishbowls that became both his signature and his bane.

Fuqua, who wore everything from flowing capes to lavender skintight jumpsuits, embraced the platform shoes when a company in New York sent a pair to him. He wore them to banquets and other speaking engagements, only he kept encountering the same problem: the fish, usually tropical ones he had bought to match the color of his outfit, always seemed to die on the way to an appearance. Even more unsettling for Fuqua is that he started receiving letters in bunches from fans who accused him of cruelty to animals.

“I never figured out how to keep them alive,” Fuqua said, “and people started saying I was killing fish. I had been getting 30 pieces of mail a day. All of that mail turned to hate mail and what I was doing to the poor goldfish. My final conclusion was to take the shoes [to a speaking engagement], take the fish in a bag, put them on the podium, pour the fish in there and say, ‘I’m still working on a way to keep them alive.’ That’s what I wound up doing. I got away from it eventually and all I’d wind up with is different colored sand in the shoe.”

Fuqua played in an era where Astroturf was prevalent—and the equivalent of playing on green concrete. But his feet hurt him today, above all else, because of the platform shoes.

“My feet are terrible,” Fuqua said. “I go every six weeks to the foot doctor. I don’t know how women walk with high heels.”

That observation is followed by a gregarious laugh and that laugh is usually just around the corner when Fuqua is telling stories about the “Immaculate Reception,” how he made peace with some of the Oakland Raiders players in that game, including Tatum, and the time coach Chuck Noll caught him with his fiancé in a hotel room after curfew.

But Fuqua can also tackle more serious issues such as managing concussions, how that has evolved and how dangerous the game has become even with league initiatives to make it safer.

“The NFL has a long way to go and the reason it has a long way to go is you are re-teaching the whole philosophy of the game,” Fuqua said. “Hell, everyone from the ’60s through the ’80s, they were taught that you use your head as a weapon. You’ve seen the cartoons when a guy gets hit with a hammer and stars pop up in his head? I have seen the stars and went back in and played.”

The sobering reality, Fuqua said, is that serious injuries—and health issues later in life—are inevitable with players only getting bigger and faster.

“I could not have played in the NFL over the last 20 years,” said Fuqua, who rushed for 3,031 yards and 21 touchdowns in 100 career NFL regular-season games. “The guys are humongous. We had some tough S.O.B.s but these guys today are like animals and they work out 365 days a year. I am frightened for the NFL player today.”

More—much more—on concussions later.

EXTRA POINTS

“Immaculate Reception” Anniversary Still Celebrated By Harris and Fuqua

Franco Harris and Frenchy Fuqua, two of the protagonists in the greatest play in NFL history, remain good friends and still make appearances together. They also race to call one another on December 23—the date of the Immaculate Reception. “We haven’t missed a year and the call gets earlier and earlier,” Fuqua said. “[2014] was the first time in about five years that Franco beat me.”