SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Less than a year after winning Super Bowl 50 with the Denver Broncos, Ryan Harris was lucky football didn’t rob the offensive tackle of his left leg.
He was battling a festering infection from a wicked shin bruise that landed him in the hospital for 10 days during October 2016 after he hobbled off the field during the 114th game of his 10-year NFL career. He told his wife: “It’s funny, but I never really thought about getting injured.”
To which Jamie Harris replied: “Well, I’ve thought about it every single day.”
The mania of football can consume a player’s life, define it, then spit him out. Winning was a powerful high; losing made Harris feel like hiding inside the house to avoid eye contact with anyone in Broncos Country.
But five years ago, after the pain was too great for him to play one more snap in one final season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he realized it was time to walk away from the game while he still could, especially when a surgeon told Harris how lucky it was the nasty infection had not penetrated bone.
“I could have lost my leg playing football,” Harris said.
What does a man do with that blessing?
Standing tall in a radio booth at Notre Dame Stadium on Saturday afternoon, with the sun shining on both the Golden Dome and his shaved noggin, Ryan Harris pulled off a feat never accomplished in 115 seasons of Fighting Irish football.
He used the words “pickles” and “shillelagh” to describe eighth-ranked Notre Dame’s 55-0 victory against Georgia Tech.
“You’ve got to paint a picture for the radio listener, right?” Harris told me.
I traveled back to the city where I was born and Harris attended college to hang with a 36-year-old radio commentator on the rise. He was named the best Colorado sportscaster of 2020 by the National Sports Media Association. But what makes Harris special is his ability to weave life lessons so deftly into the X’s and O’s that he gently prods listeners to think beyond the game on the field.
It was Senior Day at Notre Dame, and Harris shared a verbal snapshot of his final game with the Irish 15 years earlier. He recalled meeting his parents on the field, looking into their tear-filled eyes and saying: “Don’t cry. It’s not the end. It’s a celebration.”
Harris does what he calls “a dance on a double-edged sword” by pointing out the failure of quarterback Jack Coan to pick up the blitz to an audience that loves the Irish. “Fans want to know why something is not working,” said Harris, explaining his philosophy of criticism. “They don’t want to hear why they shouldn’t be fans of the team.”
As the Irish stretched prior to their 10th victory of the season, Harris walked down the same tunnel he once traveled with Notre Dame teammates Brady Quinn and David Bruton, then toured the stadium floor. He wished Mike Tirico a good call of the game on NBC and exchanged notes on professional prospects with Chicago Bears front office executive Champ Kelly.
Rather than merely pointing out how nobody in college football gains more yards after contact than Notre Dame running back Kyren Williams, Harris informed radio listeners about the serious money-crunching that the third-year sophomore must do while the Irish chase a berth in the college football playoff.
“Kyren Williams has a tough decision to make,” said Harris, well aware from talking to NFL scouts that Williams could be taken in the first or second round of the 2022 draft. “You only have a certain amount of miles in your body as a running back. Do you want to use those miles in college? Or do you want to be paid per mile in pro football?”
Harris enrolled in a broadcasting boot camp in 2017 and landed a gig doing color commentary for Notre Dame shortly thereafter. He credits former Broncos coach Gary Kubiak, known to drop useful life hints (“Order your wife flowers today”) into football meetings, for the valuable advice: Get on with a second chapter of life as soon as possible after retiring from football, rather than sit at home and wonder where the good times went.
“I struggled in the transition. It’s incredibly hard to separate your personal value from what you did in your job. When you retire from football, you don’t have a lot of self-value, because you still have all these skills that are too painful to use,” Harris said.
“When you’re playing in the NFL and caught up in the mania, it’s easy to think football is the only thing in life that really matters. But a fish doesn’t think about living in water, because that’s its natural state. And then you’re out of the water. Retiring from football is like telling a lawyer he can’t go in the courtroom ever again, or telling a writer he can never pick up a pen and paper.”
What has been Harris’ secret to quick success in a tough business? He cites two things.
No. 1: “Not swearing when I get excited talking about a football play,” Harris admitted. “That’s really hard.”
No. 2: “Adjusting to handling conflict without a fight,” Harris joked. “You don’t always have to like everybody you work with. But unlike the football field, you can’t fight in a broadcast booth.”
The sense of humor Harris brings to the booth takes the edge off a game that fervent fans sometimes forget is entertainment, not religion. He used “shillelagh” to describe the punishing physicality of the Irish, which made broadcast partner Paul Burmeister laugh out loud.
And after Notre Dame receiver Braden Lenzy contorted his body to rescue a drive with a fourth-down catch before the football went splat on the turf, Harris exclaimed: “He made a catch with the effort of a guy saving a jar of pickles falling from the refrigerator.’
For a big dude, Harris is quick. An offensive lineman that labored in the trenches now works high above the fray, employing his wits.
Maybe here’s the real-life skill lesson he learned from football.
“You fail a lot in sports,” Harris said. “But you’ve got to pick yourself up and move on to the next play.”
