Franco, 32

Franco Harris died two days before the 50th anniversary of the Immaculate Reception and three days before the Pittsburgh Steelers organization is set to hold a halftime retirement ceremony retiring his number – only the third official jersey retired in the franchise’s 90-year history.

Life indeed does have sick sense of timing.

To a younger fan like myself, Franco Harris is viewed just as much as a mythological figure or folktale hero as much as he is as a Hall of Fame player. Any Steelers fan born after 1972 isn’t a fully indoctrinated member of the black and gold fanbase until they’ve seen the Immaculate Reception. It serves almost like an initiation requirement for an exclusive social club or secret society – a rite of passage if you will.

It's easy to be hyperbolic about big moments in NFL history that “changed the game” or altered the narrative of pro football. The Immaculate Reception, however, it can be argued is special because it may never be replicated again in terms of significance and the circumstances surrounding the play.

The questions are plenty – did the ball hit Frenchy Fuqua or Jack Tatum? Did the ball hit the ground before Franco got his hands under it? Was Raiders linebacker Phil Villapiano clipped on the play? Is there to this day a camera angle that can show what definitively happened?

All these questions created a vortex of mystique around a play that transformed a franchise into believing they were now viable competitors in pro football after nearly forty years of existence, giving a city a reason to believe in a football team that up to that point had only lived to disappoint.

Franco’s legacy will always be intertwined with the Immaculate Reception. Even despite nine Pro Bowls, a Super Bowl MVP, having the most rushing yards in Super Bowl history and four Super Bowl rings, Harris will always be remembered for that December 23rd playoff game in his rookie season.

But Franco’s career, however, is significant in a different sense – he was the first Pittsburgh Steeler to become a national icon.

Think about the amount of Steelers who are considered fan favorites for an organization that has a powerful nationwide fanbase – Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, Mel Blount, Ben Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, Jerome Bettis, Hines Ward – all of whom garnered a massive percentage of Steelers fans who claim these people are their favorite players, with some even standing out as favorites amongst the larger NFL fanbase.

Franco Harris, before any of these men, was the first Steeler to reach beyond the city limits of Pittsburgh and convert many young boys and young adult men across America to root for the black and gold because of this miraculous play.

The Steelers, even in their dismal and at best average years, had dedicated fan clubs for even the most obscure backups on the team. Obviously, other future Hall of Famers were on the team for the Immaculate Reception. Terry Bradshaw threw the pass that Franco ended up catching, but Bradshaw at that time didn’t have the support of most of Pittsburgh in what seemed to be a love hate relationship from the very beginning.

Mean Joe Greene, quite possibly to this day the greatest player to ever wear a Steelers uniform, was immediately a fan favorite amongst Pittsburghers for his ferocious style of play and intense desire to win that the city hadn’t witnessed before. But even then, the Steelers during Greene’s tenure before Franco’s arrival (1968-1971) were still a hapless franchise that played hard but couldn’t win to save their lives. The Steelers were still a local group of losers that didn’t get the national attention that the Miami Dolphins or the Baltimore Colts had.

Franco’s arrival to the Steelers marked a massive step forward for a franchise that had a stout defense but needed some sort of offensive production to become a complete team. In a run first era of the 1970s NFL, Franco speed, burst and athleticism ushered in a rags to riches success story for the Pittsburgh Steelers who now played their best against the toughest competition the league had offered.

With an immense support from the hometown fanbase and having his own “Francos Italian Army” fan club, Franco’s Immaculate Reception to a nationwide audience on the day before Christmas Eve gave many young viewers access to a team that had come into their own on a miracle. To them, Franco was the embodiment of the mythology that NFL Films had come to cultivate, seeing him appear from the right side of the television screen, racing to the end zone as time dwindled, showing them the wonder of the game that conveyed the message that it’s never truly over until the clock reaches 0:00.

The utter joy and excitement as fans stormed the crowd stuck with those young men watching live, who went on to adopt the Steelers as their team and buy Franco jerseys, becoming the new nationwide team that hadn’t been felt since the Baltimore Colts of the 1950s.

Stephen Dubner, journalist and co-author of Freakonomics, published a book back in 2003 titled “Confessions of a Hero Worshiper” that delved into his obsession with Franco Harris after watching the Immaculate Reception. His writing in a particular chapter about the Immaculate Receptions highlighted the impact Franco had on many young boys who witnessed the play and looked at Franco with a larger-than-life image that so many athletes since have carried to fans of all ages, as he now had now found a hero that was out of reach that gave him a sense of belonging, inspiration and a sense of wonder.

Now, 50 years later with Franco’s passing, slow motion footage from NFL Films has played ad nauseum over the past couple days, and rightly so, for Franco’s career will never be distinct from what he did on that fateful play that pivoted the course of a football franchise that went from a laughable excuse for a professional football organization to becoming one of the most revered sports franchises in American history. This play isn’t arguably Franco’s biggest accomplishment as a player, but it certainly was the play that made him and the Steelers a national sensation that has only grown larger with each passing year and continues to be a cornerstone of the NFL mythology.

And for that, we say Rest in Peace and here’s to you, Franco 32.