Any sports fan living in Glenwood in the mid-1960s knew about Cliff Harris before he became Captain Crash with the Dallas Cowboys.
Cliff's maternal grandparents, longtime Glenwood residents, made sure of that. It was said that Ansel Weaver never attended an Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference football game until his grandson began playing for Ouachita Baptist University. He was one of the biggest University of Arkansas fans in my hometown but along with his wife, a legendary former Glenwood High teacher, was spotted leaving Razorback Stadium early one afternoon for Conway and a Ouachita game that night.
Although Cliff is more closely associated with Des Arc, he played his first schoolboy football at Hot Springs High. Back then, Hot Springs was a constant loser in football, and as future Trojan coach Joe Reese remembered years later, "they used to give standing ovations for first downs." Arkadelphia, where Cliff attended college, wasn't much better in those days, the late John Outlaw putting the Badgers on the map in 1979 with his first of two state titles before J.R. Eldridge won two more in the decade just ended.
It's hard to believe that Cliff Harris is 73, or that 40 years after retiring from the sport, he is just now receiving induction to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
That long-overdue honor came Wednesday when Harris, who played on two Super Bowl-championship teams in 10 years as a pro, became the 19th Dallas Cowboy selected for enshrinement in Canton, Ohio. He's part of a special centennial class to celebrate the NFL's 100th birthday.
Undrafted out of Ouachita, which for the longest time broadcasters mispronounced ("Wa-sheet-uh," anyone?), Cliff played safety when the Cowboys truly became America's Team. He and Charlie Waters patrolled the secondary when receivers crossing the middle risked beheading. If Cliff has any regrets about his Hall of Fame selection, it's that teammate Drew Pearson, Roger Staubach's go-to guy in the Super Seventies, didn't get the same call from Canton on Wednesday.
"I'm so happy right now, but I'm equally unhappy that Drew didn't make it," Harris said on a Dallas talk-radio program. "As I've said, and he knows this, he and I are like brothers. My son is named Andrew. I call Drew, he's like my little brother. ... But he's my buddy, he's my friend. I care about him [and] love him. It's hurt me that that he didn't make it. I wish that we coulda gone in together."
Jerry Jones has made plenty of mistakes since purchasing the Dallas Cowboys but one thing he did right was name Harris, along with offensive lineman Rayfield Wright, to the club's Ring of Honor in 2004. In a year that Jimmy Johnson is entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Jones can "start fresh" with his former Razorback teammate, as Jerry said when buying the Cowboys, and name the two-time Super Bowl-winning coach to the Ring of Honor.
Harris played for Cowboy teams that won the Super Bowl in the 1971 and 1977 seasons and came up short in that spectacle of sport three times -- once to the Baltimore Colts, on a late field goal, and twice to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the team of the decade. A decade that could have been transcendent for the Cowboys somehow is lost in a maze of Terry Bradshaw touchdown passes to Lynn Swann or John Stallworth making Cowboy defensive backs look dazed afterward.
Tom Landry, the Cowboys' first and only head coach for 29 seasons, wore a hat on the sideline, projecting a Moses-like figure descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. Defensive coordinator of the New York Giants (Vince Lombardi, later his rival with the Green Bay Packers, called offensive plays for head coach and Arkansas native Jim Lee Howell's team) before helming the Cowboys, Landry knew that the winning view on defense is gained from the safety position. No NFL team in the 1970s may have had a better pair of safeties than Harris and Waters, Cliff with 29 interceptions and 16 fumble recoveries in the decade, both making receivers think twice about repeated forays over the middle.
Pro Football Hall of Famer Larry Wilson said of Harris, "I feel [he] is the finest free safety in the business today. He changed the way the position is being played. You see other teams modeling their free safeties around the way Harris plays the pass, and striking fear in everyone on the field because he hits so hard."
Though Landry's eccentric offenses dazzled the fans, the Ernie Stautner-coordinated Dallas defense ranked in the top 10 every year with Harris in the lineup.
Along with Staubach, Harris left the sport after the 1979 season, Roger engineering a 35-34 win over the Washington Redskins for the club's seventh NFC East title of the decade. If anything, the Cowboys are more popular than ever (they also may be the most despised team in pro sports) but the tough-guy image such players as Harris and fullback Walt Garrison projected is long gone from the club. Beating the Cowboys is still huge in some towns (Philadelphia comes to mind) but no longer surprising.
Out of football, Harris and Landry worked side by side again for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Cliff making many visits to Hot Springs Village for an annual benefit golf tournament. Harris and several former Cowboys are among the selectors for the Cliff Harris Award going to the top defensive player in the country representing NCAA Division II, III and NAIA colleges and universities.
Ouachita Baptist just completed its greatest decade of football, coming to dominate the Great American Conference, a source of pride for Harris and so many ex-Tigers. It was especially gratifying when OBU remembered one of its most famous alums renaming A.U. Williams Field as Cliff Harris Stadium a few years ago.
Cliff's parents came back to Hot Springs in their golden years, and I remember stopping by their home on Main Street one afternoon to discuss old times and perhaps some recent honor for their son. They were on my mind Wednesday when I heard about Cliff and the Hall of Fame.
So were grandparents Ansel and Amy Weaver, who in 1960s Glenwood didn't need ESPN to tell about their grandson. How proud would they be today.
Sports on 01/16/2020