Ich bin ein Rodney Harrison

Rodney Harrison was a heel. In a sport where the majority of oxygen is taken up by the crooks, the bloviators and the simpletons, Harrison was a bad guy who didn’t make you feel bad about yourself. To like him was to miss the point — you’d no more side with Rodney Harrison than you would a silent movie villain. I hated the guy. And for that, I’m eternally grateful.

The better side of my nature — the side concerned with moderation, forgiveness, and independent films — realizes that this is no way to find pleasure.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish undoubtedly had a similar situation in mind when he said, “A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates is a sick man,” a moving and canny sentiment that, with all due respect to the late Mr. MacLeish, fails to account for Trent Green’s knee injury or the 2007 New England Patriots. Harrison never made any bones about being an outlaw. Like all the best villains, his origins were absolute — a fifth-round pick out of tiny Western Illinois, nobody could fall back on the memory of what he looked like as a 19-year-old freshman with a high-top fade. Like Harry Lime, Darth Vader and Michael Myers, Harrison appeared to us for the first time fully formed. Appropriately enough, he spent the first half of his career in the football backwater of San Diego. He was the closest thing the late-90s NFL had to an urban legend — as the league cracked down on physical play, Harrison endured, just out of the mainstream.

I’ve never quite understood players who bemoan the heavy hand of the league office regarding physical play. If you’re making $5 million a year to scare the bejesus out of opposing quarterbacks, $10,000 seems like a fair price to pay for something that gives you a definitive tactical advantage. Harrison understood this equation, and it made him terrifying. He didn’t care about money, not in the sense that football players are supposed to care about money (“Just want to do what’s best for the team”); fining Rodney Harrison was like asking him to pay a cover charge. Suspending him, as Commissioner Roger Goodell did in 2007, seemed pointless — a drug suspension has an inherently shaming quality, but how do you shame the bogeyman? Write him off as a career-doper if you want to, but what did Harrison have to lose? It’s like the Burmese bandit Michael Caine talked about in “The Dark Knight”: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical…they can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Back in the day, the retirement of a good-to-great athlete used to be sad because you knew you would never see them play again. Now it’s sad because it means enduring a steady stream of “Is ___ a Hall of Famer?” discourse. Indeed, there’s nothing quite like a spirited Hall of Fame debate to strip sports of its subjective splendor. On those rare instances that I am unable to convincingly feign the symptoms of a major heart attack and am actually forced to weigh in on the player’s “credentials” (an odd phrase that always makes me feel like the Head of Mission in a lesser Graham Greene novel), I invariably adopt the conservative approach.

If you have to ask, the answer is no. For Harrison, the answer is clear: Of course he belongs in the Hall of Fame. The fact that this is even an issue is galling. Forget the numbers about Super Bowls (2), Pro Bowls (2), sacks (30), and INTs (34) — Rodney Harrison belongs in Canton because he played like he had machetes for arms. On Wednesday our own Matt Bowen wrote a compelling and thoughtful retrospective on Harrison’s career that will probably make a lot more sense in two years or so, when people take a step back and admit that the New England Patriots franchise is not directly responsible for global warming, the fall of the Tsarist autocracy, and the disappearance of Roanoke Colony. Folks griped about what Bowen didn’t mention (the HGH suspension) and completely missed what he did say: Here was a dependable former NFL safety admitting that he was so taken with the play of one of his contemporaries that it changed the way he approached his position. There’s no better way to gauge a player’s impact.

It’s not that the people who hate Harrison are wrong; you just wish they’d find a little bit of joy in that hate. There’s something to be said for knowing how to wear the black hat.

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