WESTFIELD – Marvin Harrison Jr. doesn’t have his Colts gear anymore.
“I outgrew all of it,” he said.
It’s been nearly two decades since the No. 4 pick in this year’s NFL Draft used to walk across a field like this one after a Colts training camp practice to find his father following a long day of catching passes from Peyton Manning. Marvin Harrison Sr. was in the early days of a Hall-of-Fame career when he would bring his son around to meet Edgerrin James, Reggie Wayne and other members of one of the best offenses in NFL history.
Now, the younger Harrison is walking up to those men as his own person. He’s the one at Colts training camp in a joint practice as the No. 1 target of the Arizona Cardinals.
His father always told him to blaze his own trail, despite the shared name and bloodlines. And every rep across two days of joint practice with the Colts is about living out that dream.
“”It is kind of crazy,” Harrison said. “The first joint practice against the Colts, who would’ve thought that?”
The younger Harrison is an Indianapolis kid in an adopted sense. He grew up in Philadelphia, where his father was born and raised, before he went on to become an All-American at Ohio State. But he came here for training camp and games his father played in.
He grew up watching the highlights his father created as one of two elite wide receivers for Manning and those explosive Colts offenses. He wanted to become just like him as a wide receiver, studying every movement to grow into the player who just got open again and again.
“I always thought I’d be here,” Harrison said.
Wednesday at the Grand Park Sports Complex was one of the first steps to doing that. It’s not his first training camp practice. And he’s played in big games, such as the Rose Bowl and the College Football Playoffs.
But this was the setting where his father made a name once, and there was no clearer reminder of that than when the crowd roared as Harrison Sr. roamed the sidelines, throwing footballs into the stands as fans launched for positioning.
All the while, Harrison Jr. was out on the grass, running routes so crisp that he left Kenny Moore II lost inside as he darted to the sideline, or catching a ball along the white stripe with such precision that he still found room for yards after the catch.