The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (31 page)

It was a scene
^*
to make anybody stop and watch. Broad daylight in North Philadelphia. April 29, 2008—a Tuesday. The corner of 25th Street and Thompson, about seven blocks north of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the steps Rocky climbed. A block of brick row houses, a church with a rubbed-out sign, a Hispanic grocery, a vacant lot. In one sense, the presence of a future Hall of Famer at this seedy vortex of the city—Harrison, eight-time Pro Bowl wide receiver with the Indianapolis Colts, then at the tail end of a 13-season career and a $67 million contract—was incongruous. Especially given that Harrison, who is usually described as "quiet" and "humble," was noisily stomping the fat man in the face and gut.

To Nixon, the fat man looked semi-conscious.

After several minutes, Harrison and McCray walked away. The fat man slowly picked himself up. Shouting epithets, he staggered to his car. Nixon watched as Marvin Harrison got into his own car, parked to the west of the fat man's. The fat man put his car into reverse. Thompson Street is one-way going east. The fat man backed up the wrong way until he was smack in front of Chuckie's Garage, a car wash Harrison owns. The fat man was now blocking Harrison, who was trying to drive away.

Nixon saw Harrison get out of his car and exchange words with the fat man. He couldn't hear the words, but he could see the gestures of threat and counterthreat. The fat man stayed in his car. He called somebody on his cell. Harrison got back into his car and called somebody on
his
cell. After a minute or two, Harrison got out of his car for the second time.

Marvin Harrison is six feet tall and 185 pounds. He has a neatly trimmed mustache and the body-fat content of an Olympic swimmer. He became the dominant wide receiver of his era not by out-leaping or outwrestling defenders but by exploiting an almost supernatural talent for getting open: for feints, fakes, jukes, dodges, bluffs, stutter steps, sudden bursts of sick speed. But at this moment, Nixon says, Marvin Harrison did not run. He stood on the sidewalk and calmly raised his wiry arms. In each hand, Nixon clearly saw, was a gun.

Nixon froze.

"YOU A BITCH-ASS NIGGA!" Nixon heard the fat man scream at Harrison. "YOU AIN'T GONNA SHOOT. YOU AIN'T GONNA SHOOT. DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO."

Nixon was across the street and thirty yards away when Harrison started shooting.
Pop pop pop pop pop pop
—a great staccato gust of bullets. Steadily, Nixon says, Harrison unloaded both guns into the fat man's car, stippling the red Toyota Tundra with bullet holes as the fat man ducked in his seat. Eventually, the fat man sat up and sped off, heading straight toward Nixon's position as Harrison darted into the street and continued to shoot.

Now Nixon was in the line of fire. He turned and ran. He ran as fast as he could with his belly and his smoker's cough as bullets slivered through doors and lodged in walls.

Behind him, unbeknownst to Nixon, a bullet ripped through the fat man's hand. Another bullet shattered the glass of a car containing multiple adults and a two-year-old boy. The adults instantly bailed, abandoning the little boy in the car, the glass flowering into razor-sharp petals and bloodying the boy's eye.

And yes, Robert Nixon was also hit. Once, in the back. He didn't realize it at first. Too much adrenaline. Then he scraped his left hand against his right shoulder. He felt a hole in his black T-shirt. His fingers came back stained with blood.

By this time, Marvin Harrison and the fat man had both fled. But Nixon needed to retrieve his car, which was parked on Thompson Street. As Nixon sprinted back to the scene of the crime, the police pulled up. An officer spotted Nixon running and thought he might be the shooter.
Hey, c'mere.
The officer patted him down for weapons. Nixon was clean.

The officer didn't notice Nixon's gunshot wound, and Nixon didn't volunteer that he'd been shot.

I ain't seen nothin'.

The smart call.

So the officer moved on.

 

Marvin Darnell Harrison was not supposed to be this guy, the black athlete with a gun. Insecure, obnoxious, prone to acts of catharsis—that was Terrell Owens, Michael Vick. But Marvin?

Marvin drank juice.

He was a worker. Marvin was the guy who never wore his gloves in practice because the gloves were sticky and made catching balls easy, and he wanted to practice the hard way. He was the neat freak who sat with his back to the press at a locker that would make a drill sergeant swoon. Marvin, who juked my repeated requests for an interview, was the perfectionist who evolved an ability to communicate almost telepathically with his quarterback, Peyton Manning, but barely at all with mere English. If he left any trace of his existence in the league, it was only in the record books: second (to Jerry Rice) in all-time receptions, third in all-time 100-yard games, first in receptions in a single season. Through all this, his team-mates claimed they didn't know him in the slightest. "He's like Batman," linebacker Cato June told
Sports Illustrated.

Think about the discipline it would take to make a living as an elite star of a multibillion-dollar entertainment juggernaut without ever once being truly
seen.
In this sense, Harrison's football career is not only historic; it's also a sort of miracle. The dude skipped like a flat stone across a rancid pool and emerged, 12 years later, dry as a bone.

And when he stood up and looked around, he went right back to the place his heart had always been, the place he had never really left: Philadelphia, the city of his birth. His family was large and close, and although some members had been violent criminals, his inner circle struggled to protect him from those influences. His uncle Vincent Cowell was a respected anesthesiologist at Temple University Hospital. His mother, Linda, and his stepfather, Anthony Gilliard, were modest businesspeople who worked hard and fed needy families when they could. (Just like Marvin did: in 2006 at Thanksgiving, he donated 88 turkey dinners to the poor of North Philly.)

They had taught Marvin to value family above all else, certainly above mere dollars. Yes, he had splurged on a couple of large purchases—a house for his mother in a leafy enclave of Montgomery County, and for himself a four-bedroom, five-bath 7,600-square-foot stucco home in Jenkintown, a quiet village to the north—but otherwise he was so conservative about money (he favored low-risk mutual funds, according to a 2006 newspaper profile) that if you started asking Philly people about Marvin Harrison, one of the first things you heard about the man was that he was, well, cheap. Whenever you went looking for Marvin, you tended not to find him sipping Venti lattes in Jenkintown. You found him on the streets of North Philly, tending to the unpretentious businesses he was either too detail-oriented or too stingy or too authentically modest—too
something,
anyway—to let other people run: his car wash, his sports bar, the soul-food kitchen he had bought for his aunt and his mother, and more than a dozen rental and investment properties he had snatched up at bargain prices.

From up high, Marvin appeared to be a millionaire athlete like any other; at street level, he was a businessman cobbling together a mini-empire in the hood. It was an iconoclastic way to reconcile his money with his roots—a tricky thing for any athlete flung from poverty into wealth. Many simply flee to suburban McMansions. Some, like Allen Iverson, go the other way, keeping questionable company and giving shout-outs to "my niggas back home." But Marvin didn't run and he didn't flaunt. He just sort of
hid.
His life was exquisitely controlled—an extraordinary man's attempt to become a ghost in his own story. For a long time, it worked. And then, for reasons that go well beyond Marvin Harrison—reasons having to do with race, class, jealousy, politics, and the problems of American cities—it didn't.

 

"Fuck you," the fat man said. "Fuck the bar, and I'll fuck you up."

It was mid-April of 2008, two weeks before the shooting. The fat man, aka Dwight Dixon, age 32, was standing with a friend at the front door of Playmakers, Harrison's bar, demanding to be let inside.

Playmakers is about a half-mile southwest of 25th and Thompson, on a side street of a gentrifying neighborhood; a block to the east is North Star Bar, where you can see indie bands like the Mountain Goats. From the press coverage of the Harrison case, you'd think Playmakers was some kind of ghetto shithole. But once you get past the bouncers and their pat-downs, you find yourself in a warm, upscale black bar. There are two pool tables and an old-school Galaga arcade console. The walls are covered with framed jerseys (Donovan McNabb, Jerry Rice) and photographs (Charles Barkley, a Negro League baseball team)—but no Harrison jersey, no Harrison photos. Who needs memorabilia when you've got the hero himself? Odds are good that if you go to Playmakers on a weekend, you'll see Harrison adjusting the thermostat, checking the taps, peering out the front door.

Or if you're Dwight Dixon, you get to watch him pat you down, and pat your friend down, and lay a hand on something gun-shaped and concealed on your friend's person, and tell you both to get lost.

Dixon—everyone called him Pop on account of his size—was not welcome at Playmakers, Harrison made clear that night in April. And Pop was not the sort of person to let this insult slide. Three hundred pounds of swagger squeezed into expensive Gucci and Polo shirts, he was a finely tuned instrument for the detection of disrespect. "I call him a straight-up hustler," says Fishay Bryant, one of Pop's cousins. "Like, he didn't take any handouts. He was very proud."

Pop saw himself as Harrison's equal. After all, they'd both grown up in the same North Philly neighborhood. They knew each other as kids. They'd both been born in the city's worst modern hour—when it was grimy and vegetal, when it stank, when gangs ruled the neighborhoods, when the old industries were dying and the white ethnics were hightailing it to the suburbs, when the notorious Black Mafia was flooding the streets with heroin of unprecedented potency and the newly elected mayor was a skull-cracking cop who promised to be so tough on crime he'd "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." And they both had chosen to hawk their products—car washes and liquor for Harrison, drugs for Pop—in a part of the city that remained, even in April 2008, profoundly fucked.

If Harrison had moved to some better place, Pop would have understood. Hell, Pop wanted to leave Philly himself.
Dreamed
of it. Took his girl on vacations every weekend he could—Texas, Florida, California, Arizona. They flew Southwest. Super-saver fares. But Harrison had stayed, digging his roots deeper and deeper. In 1994, Pop had gone to state prison for dealing crack. When he came out six years later, he was a Muslim, but otherwise he was the same prideful Pop—and Harrison was
still there,
a king among paupers, distributing small-scale charity to needy supplicants beneath the media's radar, his wealth creating a gravity that warped the physics of the neighborhood. "Everybody sucks up to him, and I don't," Pop told a close friend. "I'm gonna see you in your place of business, and I'm gonna buy drinks."

A week after Pop was barred from Playmakers, he drove to Chuckie's and demanded a car wash. He was denied. That Friday he went back to Playmakers. He was turned away—again. The next Tuesday was his confrontation with Harrison. Harrison describes it in detail in his statement to police:

I walked down and asked him why he was continually threatening me and coming to my businesses and harassing my employees. He said, "I'm a grown man, I can do and go wherever I want and say what I want ... and like I said, I will fuck you up and fuck your bar up ... NOW WHAT!" He put his hands up and swung at me. He grazed me on my left shoulder and chin. I swung back and I missed. We wrestled and threw punches a little bit ... I then walked up the street back to my garage, I guess like five minutes later he backs up the street to in front of my car wash. Gets on the phone and is saying, "get your guns ... you know what you gonna get STAN [McCray]...I'm gonna fuck you up MARV ... you ain't no Gangster." I told him that I wasn't a gangster but that he couldn't keep coming back to my place of business and threaten me and start trouble. He drove off down the street. I was inside the garage. I heard gunshots like right after that.

Three years before Marvin Harrison was born, there was another man on the streets of Philly who faced a similar sort of fight-or-flight decision. His name was Marvin too.

Marvin Greer was a 16-year-old gang member. He lived in a high-rise housing project in South Philly. On January 15, 1969, Greer and three friends spotted a boy from an enemy gang. The boy ran. Greer and the others chased him. When Greer caught up to the boy, he pulled out a four-inch pearl-handled knife. He stabbed the boy in the back, killing him, and threw the knife into the sewer. He pled guilty to second-degree murder.

About five years later, in 1974, Marvin Greer died suddenly at age 22; there was no mention of his death in the newspapers, and the cause remains a mystery. Before he died, Greer fathered at least three boys with different mothers. (Back then in Pennsylvania, juvenile felons were furloughed for good behavior, affording them a certain freedom of movement.) The eldest boy was Marvin Harrison.

The next was Markwann "Coots" Gordon. From 1995 to 1997, Gordon participated in a string of seven armed robberies in Philadelphia. According to a 1999 account by Kitty Caparella, the dean of Philadelphia's crime reporters, Gordon was one of "the Philadelphia Mob's two top associates in the African-American underworld," an enforcer with the Junior Black Mafia. Gordon is currently serving 140 years in a federal prison in White Deer, Pennsylvania.

After Gordon came Marvin "Back to Back" Woods. On September 3, 1991, when Marvin Woods was 17, he was playing in the championship game of a schoolyard hoops league when his coach took him out of the game, subbing in another boy. Woods got angry. He left the game. When he rode back on his bike, 20 minutes later, he was carrying a Tec-9. He sprayed his substitute with bullets, killing him, and rode off. Marvin Woods is currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania.