No. 33 wants the ball

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This article was published 23/11/2017 (2990 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Of the many moments that have come to define Andrew Harris and his unrelenting pursuit for greatness, there is one that sticks out.

“January 15, 2008,” he says, while sitting on a white leather couch in large conference room in downtown Ottawa, just a short drive from TD Place Stadium where the Grey Cup game will be played on Sunday. “That was the day my daughter was born.”

Harris and the rest of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, of course, won’t be playing in the game. For a second straight year Winnipeg was eliminated in the West Division semifinal; the 39-32 home loss to the Edmonton Eskimos put an end to what was a promising 2017 campaign for the club, which finished the regular season with the second-best record in the CFL at 12-6.

What has Harris talking about his daughter, Hazel, who will turn 10 in a couple of months, is a request for a reflection on a career that appears to have hit its peak. On Thursday, Harris was presented with the CFL’s most outstanding Canadian award — a recognition he had yet to earn over an illustrious eight-year career.

How he was able to rise from a troubled teenager to become one of Canada’s most impressive football talents is a tale worth telling. What’s most intriguing, though, isn’t how he got there, but why; he says it started with a desire to do right by his daughter. And football was just the best way he knew how.

“It was at that moment I realized I’m responsible for another life now, and the need to provide for her and make sure I leave on a legacy – something she can be proud of,” says Harris. “She’s the reason why I get up and go work out when I’m sore and tired. She’s the reason why I want to get that extra inch when there are guys on my back.”

Anyone who has ever played against Harris recognizes his talent. But those who have shared a locker room or gym with him are impressed mostly by his drive and commitment to the game. No one works harder, longer or through pain more than Harris, who takes pride in knowing he was never given anything. Instead, he’s earned everything he has.

But to fully understand where Harris is coming from you have to know where he’s been.

“Everyone said I was too small, too slow, too Canadian,” he says. “It’s definitely a dream come true that I’m here right now.”

•••

Doug Hocking might not have been the first to recognize the extraordinary gifts that Harris possessed on the football field. But he wasn’t about to be the one to let them go unnoticed. Hocking, who played 12 seasons as a linebacker in the CFL, including eight years with the Bombers, from 1995 to 2002, first met Harris as the defensive co-ordinator of the Vancouver Islander Raiders of the Canadian Junior Football League.

Harris had arrived on the West Coast from Winnipeg as a troubled teen needing to escape from distractions back home. Whatever bothered him on the field, however, seemed to have little effect on his play. And it wasn’t long before Hocking realized that he had something special.

“I saw a kid who was playing football at a different speed than anybody else on the field. As far as raw talent was concerned, he was just at a different level than everybody,” said Hocking, now the head coach of the Raiders, in a phone interview. “But I also saw a guy who on and off the field needed some guidance. He needed to be around some guys that could show him that this could be your life, that football could be your career if you wanted it to be.”

Harris would go on to win three national championships with the Raiders, while also setting a number of British Columbia and CJFL records, including all-time touchdowns and scoring. But it was after his second season with the Raiders that Hocking would steer Harris in a direction that would forever change the course of his life.

Having trained at Elite Performance in Winnipeg, Hocking knew it was the perfect environment for Harris to hone his skillset. It is there Harris would learn the level of discipline needed to become a professional athlete and where he would be held accountable for his mistakes.

“Now you look at him and he just flips the switch in the off-season, he’s a beast in the gym,” said Hocking. “A lot of that has to do with what’s beating in his chest and that’s his heart and his desire to want to be the best.”

Jeff Fisher, the owner of Elite Fitness, remembers receiving a call from Hocking about a young kid that had the potential to be great. Fisher, who used to train the Bombers, recalled a quiet, but respectful first meeting with Harris. Most athletes are subjected to a rigorous screening process — including an in-person interview, fitness test and final stamp of approval from a board of directors. But since Hocking was the best man at his wedding, Fisher took him at his word.

What he remembers most, however, was an interaction with former Bombers defensive lineman and CFL hall of famer Doug Brown, who had heard about the kid’s potential and wanted to send him a message early on. Brown grabbed a piece of tape, wrote a time on it and then walked over to a piece of equipment called Jacob’s ladder — considered by many to be among the most difficult and least-desirable challenges in the gym — and stuck it on the wall just above the instrument of torture.

“I can’t remember what the time was, but what (Brown) said to me was pretty much, ‘If you can’t beat this, you ain’t shit,” Harris says. “A lot of kids would complain or pout about that, but for me, I took that as a challenge.”

Harris says he eventually “crushed” the mark set out by Brown but, more importantly, he developed a bond with a place that kept him motivated. Never once was he late for a workout – even five minutes would mean a trip home – and always after he would thank Fisher. Harris will begin his 10th off-season at Elite this winter.

“He was a young up-and-comer, chomping at the bit,” says Brown. “I knew he was in the right place to maximize his career, but I don’t think any of us knew what he was going to be capable of.”

Two years later, after first being acquired as a territorial exemption in 2008, Harris began his CFL career with the B.C. Lions. In 2011, he’d get his chance to start at running back, eventually winning the Grey Cup and being named the game’s top Canadian.

•••

When Harris is asked about his age — he turned 30 in April — his face contorts in disgust even before the question is finished. He doesn’t understand why people obsess over it, especially after a season where he led the CFL in rushing (1,035 yards) and set a new league record for most receptions by a running back in a single season, with 105. Harris was on pace to become the first back in league history to reach 1,000-yard marks in rushing and receiving in the same season; he finished with 1,035 on the ground but came up a bit short catching the ball, recording 857 yards through the air.

“I still feel like the best years are ahead of me still,” he says. “My body feels good as it ever has.”

Over his eight seasons in the CFL, Harris has largely escaped the type of major injuries than can derail the career of a running back. He has missed a total of just nine games, six of which came late in the 2014 season when he dislocated his ankle with the Lions. Despite hitting the 1,000-yard rushing mark for the second time in his career the following season — he also had a personal-best 222 carries — the belief was his best days were behind him.

Tension had also started to build between Harris and Lions general manager and head coach Wally Buono and it soon became clear the longtime relationship was finally at an end. That’s when rumours of his desire to come home and pull on a blue and gold jersey started to gain momentum.

He signed a three-year deal, which expires at the end of the 2018 season. He doesn’t know how long he’ll play, but he’s pretty sure it’s be after his current deal ends. And he knows how he wants to go out.

“I want to play until I’m done,” he says. “I don’t want to be spit out and chewed out by this game and play when my body is falling apart.”

That said, he’s confident that he’s got a fair bit of football left in the tank because of the way he treats his body. He compares his approach to that of a thorough mechanic assesses with a car. If something is about to go, he fixes it before it becomes a bigger problem. By now, he can sense what his body needs and what the best way is to fix it.”

“It’s like when you feel the front tire is a bit low and you just keep on driving on it and the next thing you know you have a flat. For me, if I feel it’s a little low I’m going to fill it up,” says Harris.

Of course, it takes more than just knowing your body to be able to play all 18 games. For Bombers athletic therapist Alain Couture, it also takes a willingness to power through all of the painful wear and tear that’s the cost of doing business in every gruelling season.

“Andrew has played through a lot of stuff this year and he’s used to it; he has the mentality that he knows he’s going to get banged up, he knows his body is not going to be feeling very good,” Couture says. “There are days where I’m treating four different things on him. It’s like, take your pick with what you want to start with.”

As proof, Couture recalls the Week 15 game in Edmonton. Harris took an Eskimo’s knee directly to his lower back — an area of the body Couture calls an “awful spot to take a hit” — early in the second quarter. By halftime, when Couture was able to take a closer look at the injury, what appeared after stripping away a layer of padding was swelling “equivalent to a balloon sitting in his lower back.”

Over his 15 years with the Bombers, Couture has seen the same injury several times before. But while most players wouldn’t want to even look at it, let alone consider returning to the field, Harris, naturally, did both.

“He just kind of chuckled a little bit and asked what it looked like. I told him that it was all puffed up, and he put his hand on it,” says Couture, before describing what happened next. “He was just like, ‘huh, look at that.’ Then he went out for the third quarter.”

Harris went on to finish the game with 135 combined yards, including a rushing touchdown late in the third quarter that put the Bombers up by two scores. Winnipeg ended up winning the game, 28-19.

•••

Bear Woods, who joined the CFL in 2013, establishing himself as one of the best linebackers in the CFL during his four seasons with the Montreal Alouettes before moving to Toronto this past season, admits he knows little about Harris.

But from watching from afar, and has seeing him up close in games, Woods feels comfortable enough to share an observation. He acknowledges that Harris had already become a recognizable face in the league by the time he arrived to the CFL and called his numbers through his first seven seasons “insane.”

Still, Woods says there was something much different about Harris this year. Something he was reminded of every time Toronto prepared to play the Bombers.

“He just kept popping on film. Honestly, it was like there was something to prove,” he says. “I can’t really put my finger on it but there was a sense of purpose when it came to finishing runs.”

If the sheer force Harris used to would run over oncoming defenders impresses Woods, he is blown away with how he is able to manage the mental toll of the game.

“The offence runs through him,” he adds. “To go into a game knowing you’re the motor of the whole offence has to be a daunting task. Hopefully he’ll continue to be a big part of the league because I know people enjoy watching him as much as I enjoy competing against him.”

When Corey Chamblin, the Argonauts’ defensive co-ordinator, plans strategy against Harris he has to scheme against two different players, he says. There’s Harris the running back, who can punish you with his brute force and then there’s the Harris the receiver, who can stretch a two-yard pass into a first down.

“He can actually master both and that’s something I’ve seen from him over the years,” Chamblin says. “It’s just maturity and understanding where he is in his career. He’s also more of a leader. When he was at B.C. they had other guys to lean on; this year you can see that he’s put the team on his back.”

For Harris, though, what he was able to achieve with the Bombers was a step in the right direction but hardly the end of the road. Fuelled by what the team has created over the past two seasons, he knows the clock is ticking down on his chance to write the storybook ending. In a year from now, he hopes to be back for Grey Cup week, but with the rest of his team in tow.

“All these things are great, but until I’m hoisting that trophy and in the parade coming down Portage and Main, I feel like there’s always going to be a void,” he says.

jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca

twitter: @jeffkhamilton