The New York Times
Published: December 21, 1997
What became of Amelia Earhart?
Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried, if not in Giants Stadium?
Have creatures from outer space really sampled New Mexico's tourism?
And then, yet another of the great unanswered questions of the 20th century: was Franco Harris's Immaculate Reception kosher?
Also: was it legal?
The Immaculate Reception will not be remembered as far into the future as the Catholic doctrine from which its name derived. Yet, thanks to the energies of NFL Films, which constantly feeds the appetites of television networks and syndicators, the catch by Harris, then a Pittsburgh Steelers rookie, revisits our screens to this day, heading toward its 25th anniversary this Tuesday as the most-publicized play in American sports.
Mary would be amazed, if not irked. Television is not giving us Bartoleme Estaban Murillo's timeless 16th-century painting, ''The Immaculate Conception,'' is it? TV is showing the Reception.
Ah, but Mary and Franco share. Some doubt the Virgin Birth (which, by the way, non-Catholics confuse with the Immaculate Conception). John Madden, then the coach of the victimized Oakland Raiders, doubts the Immaculate Reception.
Again, was it legal? It was. I know where the proof lies to this very day.
After the game, I dined with my wife, then drove to Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV studios to deliver a commentary on the game for the 11 o'clock news. Meanwhile, a Steeler fan in his late 20's, Michael Ord, was celebrating Harris's catch at a downtown bar, fittingly named The Interlude. Boisterous fans toasted the victory. Ord climbed upon a chair and, with a spoon, tapped his glass for attention. ''This day,'' he proclaimed, ''will forever be known as the Feast of the Immaculate Reception!''
Then, to a friend, Sharon Levosky, he suggested, ''Call Myron Cope.''
When my phone rang in the newsroom, I listened to Sharon and said: ''That's fantastic. Let me give it some thought.''
The Immaculate Reception? Tasteless? I pondered the matter for 15 seconds and cried out, ''Whoopee!'' Having conferred upon Harris's touchdown its name for 11 o'clock news viewers to embrace, I accept neither credit, nor, should you hold the moniker to be impious, blame. Whichever, I can lead you by the hand to the repository wherein lies the proof that Harris made a legal catch of Terry Bradshaw's pass.
But first, a refresher.
22 Seconds Left And 60 Yards to Go
On a Saturday afternoon, two days before Christmas 1972, the Steelers and the Raiders engage one another at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh in a first-round playoff game, the winner to advance to the American Football Conference championship game. With 22 seconds remaining, the Raiders lead, 7-6. The Steelers' offense faces fourth-and-10 at its 40-yard line.
One of NFL Films's marketed videos is especially arresting. Bradshaw breaks the huddle, jogging to the line behind No. 56, center Ray (the Old Ranger) Mansfield. Whoops, was not Jim Clack centering for that play? True, but NFL Films had no particularly dramatic from-the-rear film of the Steelers breaking that huddle, so an earlier play had to do. The Old Ranger, who died of an apparent heart attack last year hiking down a mountainside in the Grand Canyon, is preserved for posterity. That's O.K. The revisionist Oliver Stone might have plugged in J.F.K. snapping the ball from a Hyannisport touch football game.
Anyhow, Bradshaw drops into the pocket but is soon chased backward and to his right by Horace Jones, the Raiders' right defensive end. Bradshaw slips Jones, who grazes a hand across Bradshaw's midsection, and desperately rockets a pass that travels 37 yards from his fingertips to the Raiders' 34. He has spied John (Frenchy) Fuqua, an undersized but talented halfback, hooking into the middle of the field, racing free. Raiders safety Jack Tatum, however, also has spotted Frenchy. Tatum abandons the tight end he was covering and advances upon Fuqua. At the instant the ball arrives, a fierce collision occurs.
Tatum said afterward: ''I thought I might have a chance for the ball, until he got in front of me. But when he did that, I just went for the man'' -- meaning Fuqua. Tatum, whose autobiography published years later was titled ''They Call Me Assassin,'' delivers a Tatum special -- a wicked right forearm that appears to strike Fuqua flush in the head.
At that moment, the ball emerges from the collision, flying back toward midfield. And here comes Harris.
Said Dick Hoak, the Steelers' backfield coach then and still today:
''Franco's assignment was to stay in the backfield and block the outside linebacker. If the guy didn't come, Franco was to try to chip someone, then get out for a pass.''
The Catch, And the Confusion
Harris finds nobody to block or even chip. He glances over his right shoulder and, seeing Bradshaw in trouble, gallops upfield. Little does he suspect that he is about to collect a priceless reward for good habits.
''From the day he came into the league that year,'' Hoak remembers, ''he ran 'em out. In practice, no tackling, he'd run clear to the end zone from 40 yards out. In games, he was always around the ball, whether he'd run a pass pattern or was blocking. If he ran a pass route to one side of the field and Bradshaw threw to the other side, Harris would run there.
''Maybe the pass would be batted into the air, or maybe there'd be a fumble. I tell our young guys in practice: 'Run to the end zone. Get to know it. Franco Harris did it every time and got to the Hall of Fame.' ''
Harris's simple explanation following the Steelers' victory? ''I started running to block if Frenchy caught the ball,'' he said.
But here comes the ball, and Harris cups it in his upraised palms, possibly as neat a shoestring catch as Roberto Clemente has made in this same stadium. Scarcely breaking stride, Harris points himself at the left corner of the end zone. The Raider defensive back Jimmy Warren angles in pursuit from the middle of the field. Inside the 15, Harris reaches back with a stiff-arm, fighting him off. At the 11, Warren lays hands on Franco's back. But he slides off, landing on his belly. As Harris crosses the goal line, a reported hundreds -- but actually, maybe not even a hundred, the estimate being significant, as we shall see -- pour onto the field.
But was this a touchdown? The referee does not signal touchdown.
The rule book at that time specified, as it no longer does, that for a pass to be legally caught, two players of the same team could not touch the ball consecutively. The National Football League frowned upon receivers playing volleyball. Thus, if Bradshaw's pass had touched Fuqua en route to Harris, it was not kosher. But if it had caromed off Tatum to Harris, fine.
Referee Fred Swearingen confers with his crew, particularly with Umpire Pat Harder and Back Judge Brian Burk, the two officials presumed to have had the best view of the Tatum-Fuqua collision. Remarkably, Swearingen then disappears into a Pirates baseball dugout, escorted to a telephone by a Steeler official, Jim Boston. Swearingen phones the press box and asks to speak to Art McNally, the N.F.L. supervisor of officials. Then, he emerges to throw up his arms. Touchdown!
Did Babe Ruth predict his 1932 World Series home run by pointing to Wrigley Field's center-field wall? Or was he merely gesturing, or not even doing that? History is a mess. Did Harris make a legal catch? How shall we ever know the answer? We will. Here.
And now, a word about the principals.
THE CORPULENT COACH
John Madden, head coach of the Raiders, described as more stunned than angry in the Raiders' locker room, declared, ''If the officials really knew what happened, they'd have called it right away.'' He had a point.
The next day, Madden spent a miserable Christmas Eve back in California, reviewing game film. He subsequently asserted that Bradshaw's pass could not have ricocheted off Tatum because Tatum had positioned himself behind Fuqua. Perforce, the ball had struck Fuqua.
But Madden was rationalizing. The Raiders' game film had cleared up nothing. (Nor had the Steelers'.)
Nonetheless, the Corpulent Coach plunged forward, charging that Swearingen had phoned the press box and asked McNally to review instant replay. NBC was televising the game, but not to Pittsburgh. Though the game was a sellout, Congress had not yet got around to pressuring the N.F.L. into televising home-game sellouts. Television carried the game into Three Rivers on at least one monitor, but the telecast played to the public only beyond a 75-mile radius of the city. Steeler fans, if sober, held their foul breath in Youngstown, Ohio, motel rooms.
Sneaking a Peek At the Instant Replay?
Instant replay remained 14 years away from being approved (for a time) as an officiating tool, so it could not be invoked by Swearingen or McNally. Yet Madden, furious, charged that McNally had stolen a peek at a replay.
Several days later, a United Press International article with an Oakland, Calif., dateline reported: ''Oakland writers said Steeler Public Relations Director Joe Gordon told reporters in the press box that the N.F.L. officials had made the decision from the replay.''
''That's a total fabrication,'' said Gordon, long regarded by pro football writers across the country as the nonpareil of N.F.L. publicists. He had answered the phone call from Swearingen and called McNally to the phone and stood by, hearing McNally's end of the conversation. Gordon said McNally never viewed a replay. He said Swearingen simply was checking with McNally to determine that his interpretation of the applicable rule was correct. If so, Swearingen had no business making the phone call. A high school official would have understood the rule.
Madden pressed on, taking an additional tack: ''There was no way they were going to call it any other way with all those people on the field. Somebody would have been killed.''
Hey, the stands had by no means emptied.
THE ASSASSIN
''I didn't hit the ball,'' Tatum said.
He is, of course, remembered as the man who delivered the blow to Darryl Stingley that put the New England receiver in a wheelchair for life. Stingley reviles him for afterward showing only a minimum interest in his, Stingley's, fate. If you depended on this man's testimony, would you put him on the witness stand?
THE FRENCHMAN
One of my Steeler favorites. John Fuqua, from Detroit, called himself Count Frenchy, claiming to have descended from a French count. To teammates and beat writers, he was simply ''the Frenchman.'' He confided that at weigh-ins at the start of training camp, he carried a 5-pound weight in his athletic supporter so as to make 180 pounds and avoid being cut.
Down through the years, he has insisted he knows whether it was he or Tatum who touched the football, but that he will reveal the truth in his own good time. About 10 years ago, in a Detroit hotel bar, the Frenchman urged me to write his autobiography. Short of time, I declined with thanks. Was it a book that would reveal the truth?
Forget it. The Frenchman has no idea whom Bradshaw's pass struck.
''Everything was dizzy,'' he at first told reporters crowding around his locker. Tatum's ferocious forearm had sent him sprawling.
The Frenchman seemed unaware of the rule that governed the Immaculate Reception. When reporters explained it to him, his mischievous mind cranked into action. ''No comment; I'll tell you after the Super Bowl,'' he said. The Super Bowl was a game the Steelers did not reach, going on to lose to Miami in the A.F.C. championship game.
Fuqua added: ''I'm not chopping down any cherry trees'' -- perish the thought that Count Frenchy would fib -- ''but no comment.'' Twenty years later, the Steeler free safety Mike Wagner opined about Fuqua: ''He doesn't know. How could he? He was getting drilled from behind.''
DIVINE INTERVENTION (POSSIBLY?)
The Rev. John Duggan, sojourning from Ireland to study in Boston for a doctorate in psychology, had made the acquaintance of several sons of the Steelers owner Art Rooney Sr. A good luck charm, they decided.
''Get him to the games,'' Rooney ordered.
Relatively young for a priest, his face cherubic, Father Duggan in this fateful season had attended 12 games, preseason included. The Steelers had won 11 of them. Saturday nights he conducted Mass for Steeler Catholics and candidly admitted he prayed for victories.
Friday, the day before the playoff game, he looked on as the Raiders took the field at Three Rivers to practice. Notwithstanding Father Duggan's collar, the Raiders suspected a spy and ordered him off the field.
Said the priest, in his rich Irish brogue, ''I consulted their manager, a Mr. Madden of all names, and told him I would speak to my superiors about this.''
You asked for it, Madden, and you got the Immaculate Reception. Harris, for his part, allowed in the dusk of that Dec. 23, ''I'd believed all along, but after today I believe in Santa Claus, too.''
Not far east of Pittsburgh, in a woodland favored by deer hunters, stands WTAE's 1,000-foot-high television tower and, about 150 feet distant, a squat, concrete-block, one-story, fenced-in structure. In the basement are stored film and videotape of times past. There lies my proof that the Immaculate Reception was legal.
In the early 1970's, I made my living writing for magazines, chiefly Sports Illustrated, but had been dabbling increasingly in broadcasting for WTAE radio and TV. I served as color analyst (and still do) for radio broadcasts of Steeler games and weekdays delivered sports commentaries on both radio and television. On Christmas Day 1972, two days after the Immaculate Reception, I obtained from our television newsroom the film of Harris's catch that one of our cameramen had shot. Neither it nor the excerpt from NBC's telecast had made it the least bit clear to audiences whether Tatum or Fuqua touched that football. I ran the film through a device called a viewer, slowly cranking the handle that allowed me to watch the film frame by frame, again and again, at a snail's pace. No question about it: Bradshaw's pass struck Tatum squarely on his right shoulder. I mean, I saw it.
Bradshaw's powerful arm (he drilled that pass), combined with the inflexible polycarbonate plastic epaulet that topped the right side of Tatum's shoulder pads, would account for the football rebounding a full 8 yards into Harris's hands. With great relish, I broadcast my findings. The film could not be televised frame by frame, so I simply related my findings in a commentary I scripted. That was that.
In today's age of advanced technology, to say nothing of valued collectibles, that film, I suppose, would have been made airable in slow motion and then placed in a safe. For my part, I had magazine and broadcast deadlines to meet and an A.F.C. championship game for which to prepare, so I simply returned the film to a newsroom shelf, from which it would in time be sent to WTAE's transmitter building for storage.
It lies there, proof of the legitimacy of the Immaculate Reception, but virtually unfindable.
''It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,'' I am told by Bill Hillgrove, the Steelers' play-by-play radio broadcaster, who for many years has been the sports director of WTAE-TV.
All right, why?
''About 1977, our station went from film to videotape,'' Hillgrove said. ''In the film days, when Franco made his catch, TV people didn't think much about systematically filing stuff for the future. It was, 'Just get it on the air.' About two years after we went to tape, we became more conscious of future need, if for no other reason than legal purposes.''
But would not the Immaculate Reception film have been stored chronologically, by date? ''It isn't,'' Hillgrove said. ''See, we played that film from time to time for a while -- we'd get it from the transmitter, then send it back -- but each time we sent it back, it was added to all the stuff that preceded it. Who can remember when we last used it, let alone know a date? To go in there and find it, well, you'd have as good a chance of hitting the lottery.''
Absent the film, Madden might say I have concocted my story of viewing that film frame by frame. Would he be calling me a liar? If so, I would confront him and, to borrow a Madden trademark, pow! Then again, maybe not. I stand 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds.
A statue of Franco Harris greets visitors at the Pittsburgh International Airport.
The Hero And His Legacies
In early November, I had lunch with Harris, still a Pittsburgh resident and businessman. A huge, stately man, black on his father's side, Italian on his mother's, he wore a neatly cropped beard. Not long ago, he led a group that purchased Parks Sausage, a venerable but failed company in Baltimore.
''It's hard work,'' he told me, ''but we're getting near to turning the corner.''
The coming weekend he would be in Philadelphia to watch the Princeton-Penn football game. His alma mater, Penn State, would be playing Michigan at Happy Valley, where he wanted to be, but his son Dok -- not a football player -- had enrolled at Princeton. ''I've never attended an Ivy League game,'' Harris said, wincing.
Then, hesitantly -- but what father could resist mentioning it? -- he said, ''Dok made 1,600 on his S.A.T.'s.''
I told Harris about the film I had put through the viewer. ''Wow!'' he exclaimed. ''Can I see it?''
Sorry, Franco. Laying your hands on it is as unlikely as a second Immaculate Reception.
Myron Cope is a longtime sports commentator in the Pittsburgh area.
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