Put A Sock In It

Aaron Harris hopes to shut down-and shut up-USC

The Father said "go" and the two brothers collided. The tall, slender one cringed as he crumpled. The little one, the tackler, smiled. Thick across the chest and shoulders, he loved to get physical. Of course, the contact took place on a big mattress to soften the falls. The young one, after all, was only 4.

"I wanted them to have the technique," says the dad, Anthony Harris, but he meant the drill to be just a background lesson. Harris, a middle school coach in Garland, Texas, didn't raise his three sons to play football. He raised them to play offense. Like him. His boys would play baseball to develop agility, basketball to learn leverage and soccer to improve their footwork. All of it in service to the glory of the touchdown.

But one day after practice at North Mesquite High, his youngest son, Aaron, the one who always liked to hit, announced he had to be true to himself. He was going to … play linebacker. This wasn't a choice, it was how God made him. "I probably took it harder than anyone," says Dad, a wide receiver back in the day. "I hate linebackers."

Nowadays, Aaron Harris is the 230-pound, burnt-orange fist who will be the Texas Longhorns' lead punch in their effort to bring USC's deified running backs down to earth at the Rose Bowl. Just like Daddy taught him to be.

LENDALE WHITE is the kind of back Harris might have been: a real wrecking ball. So Harris knows how to fight back. "A guy like that takes every run personal," he says. "You have to take it personal too."

Reggie Bush is spectacular, but the Longhorns know they need to stop White, too. His bruising play between the tackles serves as a meat tenderizer against the belly of a defense. "Nobody gives him enough credit," Harris says. "Yards after contact is all about determination. If you hit him and stop him, you're coming up and laying the wood."

Henry Melton is familiar with UT's reigning two-by-four. The team's own sledgehammer running back let his guard down in practice … once. "Aaron gave him a lick to let him know he was there," says running back Ramonce Taylor. According to Taylor, Melton, all 270 pounds of him, now "kinda dives" when Harris comes around. He's not copping to the charge, but Melton does say, "Once you get hit, it's going to make you think twice. You don't know you're doing it, but when you go through that hole, you kind of tense up. When Aaron gets that lick on LenDale, it's going to be tough from there."

Harris, a senior, has taken some punishment of his own. As an eager freshman in his first round of two-a-days, he volunteered to go one-on-one with 250-pound fullback Will Matthews, nicknamed Headache. "Nobody else wanted to go," says Harris, who was rushed to the hospital after the collision. "I gave him a good hit. I had to watch the film to remember it, though."

That was a reckless time for a young man who was trying to prove himself. He'd sacrifice his body and sometimes the playbook to get noticed. "I had to learn how to play with 10 other guys," he admits. There were tougher lessons off the field, where Harris kept putting himself in the wrong place at the wrong time: in a fight at a campus party, in someone else's car with someone else's pot, outside a club against some guys with brass knuckles and something to prove. That incident, in May 2004, left Harris with his mouth wired shut and plenty to think about.

"He learned all of it could be taken away," Anthony says. "He started to understand all he had." Aaron grew even more reserved, almost constrained. What you don't say can't be misconstrued. Company you don't keep can't bring you down. Harris came to camp that August 15 pounds leaner and immeasurably wiser. Living comfortably in the shadow of everybody's All-America, Derrick Johnson, Harris made 118 tackles. He could have had more. "What everybody didn't know was Aaron was taking on one or two blocks to open it up for DJ to make a play," says safety Michael Griffin.

When Johnson left, co-defensive coordinator Gene Chizik sat Harris down and told him it was his turn. This season he's not only made the big hits, he's also made the defensive calls. "He's pretty much Coach Chizik on the field," says QB Vince Young.

YOU CAN'T touch Reggie Bush. He's not really a running back or a receiver. He may not even be human. He's a ghost. A god. Gale Sayers. And that's just the way Harris likes it. "It stirs my fire," he says. "I'm being tested more if the other team has somebody who's supposed to be unstoppable."

On paper, Texas has the country's fourth-best scoring defense, sixth-best in total yardage. Harris is one of five Longhorns defenders on the All-Big 12 team. On the turf, they're hellacious. They get into your head by trying to knock it off. Bush has never played against a defense quite like this. Meanwhile, the Texas D faces the closest thing to USC every day in practice, with Taylor in the role of Bush. "Once you get past that defensive line, you run into a swarm of bees," Taylor says.

Harris thinks there is one thing left for the elusive Bush to prove. "I haven't seen him get hit and have to get back up and go again," he says. "We need to have two or three guys corral him so we can get a good hit on him." And Melton adds, "We'll get to see how Heisman Trophy-worthy he is, if he's going to take those hits and keep going."

Bush should be warned. Harris is still looking for this season's signature hit, one to rival the back-cracking smack that left Oklahoma State QB Donovan Woods lying on the field a year ago, grabbing his face mask to make sure it was still there. "I'm still waiting on one," Harris says ominously. Watch the highlights, though, and you can't help but wonder what qualifies. "I think he pictures one of those where there's a guy coming across and he knocks his helmet off," Chizik says.

"That'd feel good," Harris says. To the linebacker, anyway.

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