Author explores hero worship
By Gene Collier
March 05, 2003

For better than 30 years now, there has existed some percentage of the population - many of them football fanatics, and many living in the Pittsburgh area - who go to emotional pieces at the sight of Franco Harris.

And for three decades, pop psychologists have purported to explain the near mystic quality of the great Steelers running back. The bulk of it focused on the so-called Immaculate Reception, which has endured as football's most remembered play since the moment Harris' garish athleticism somehow allowed him to pluck a wet, falling pig bladder safely from the December gloom, lifting with it the curtain on a dynasty.

But no one is ever going to explain it as thoroughly, and certainly not as profoundly, as Stephen Dubner. His book is not so much an unprecedented illumination of the very complicated Harris, as it is a serious self-examination of the author. At times, it seems almost too personal for publication.

Harris entered Dubner's life near the time of the Immaculate Reception, a year before the author's father died, and it is no exaggeration to conclude that Harris replaced the father as hero, paternal monument and, if not God, then certainly as religious icon.

"The Steelers got slaughtered 33-14; it was a terrible day," Dubner writes, describing a playoff game in Oakland in 1973. "I didn't cry when my mother gave us the news about my father but I was crying now. ... (Jesus) did not live in my heart. It was Franco who lived in my heart. I wore Franco as my father wore his Blessed Mother scapular. He was my rock and my redeemer, my protector and my inspiration, my stealth messiah."

It gets worse. Or better, if we accept, as Dubner seems desperately to want us to, that hero worship is not a bad thing but rather an indispensable engine part driving all sophisticated cultures.

In the broad view, Pittsburgh should love this book. It is tremendously flattering to the town and the people, but it's greater value lies in sharp social commentary and its compelling

illustration of the sometimes convoluted and even downright weird process that is coming of age.

"We tend to lump together the various species of modern celebrity - athletes, entertainers, politicians, Donald Trump - into one big glossy creature," Dubner writes. "But the athlete may indeed warrant special consideration. The rest of them, after all, actively set out to court frame.

"An actress wants to be adored, a politician esteemed, a Donald Trump envied. They do what they do not in spite of the attention but because of it. Their careers couldn't survive without it. Only when the lights grow too hot - or when they make a misstep - do they demand privacy. Even serial killers save their press clippings."

For Dubner, by contrast, the phenomenon that is Harris' long rejection of celebrity ultimately provided him a profound personal canvas.

"The point was neither to become Franco nor to befriend him," he wrote. "The point was to attain from him - to attain an equilibrium I lacked, a humility I faked and a strength I had neverknown."