COLLEGE FOOTBALL: BOWL WEEK : Kevin Harmon Also Has Led Iowa to a Bowl, but He is Different

Stepping off the jumbo jet and into the glare of another sunny day in Southern California, Kevin Harmon looked as conservatively dressed as the rest of the Iowa football team.

He appeared to be just another of the proper Hawkeyes who arrived last week for the Holiday Bowl against Wyoming.

But beneath Harmon’s basic black Hawkeye blazer beat the heart of a transplanted New Yorker with an appreciation of urban style.

Later, a beige leather jump suit and white loafers worn on sockless feet was the uniform of the day.

“This is my New York look,” Harmon said, sounding off with both civic and personal pride. “This is the way we like to dress back home.”

Back home is Laurelton, a predominantly black middle-class section in Queens. Kevin is the youngest of five brothers in a football-playing family, although his older brothers, Greg, 26, and Gary, 25, never graduated much beyond the neighborhood games.

Derrick, 24, played three seasons as a running back with the San Francisco 49ers. His closest brother, Ronnie, 23, has just completed his second season as a running back with Buffalo Bills. But he may be best remembered in these parts for his four-fumble performance in a 45-28 Iowa loss to UCLA in the 1986 Rose Bowl.

“I still kid him about that,” said Kevin, who is known for his 48-yard kickoff return that set up the winning 41-yard field goal in last year’s Holiday Bowl against San Diego State. “It’s hard to let him forget.”

But in many other ways, this has not been a season to remember for the Harmons.

Derrick retired from the 49ers before the season and is working as an engineer in the Bay Area.

Ronnie, first-round draft choice of Buffalo in 1986, has been embroiled in legal difficulties stemming from his former involvement with sports agents Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom and his acceptance of money, airline tickets and a car from them while he was at Iowa.

And although Kevin leads the 9-3 Hawkeyes with 139 carries for 668 yards and 6 touchdowns, and is tied for third in receiving with 29 catches for 248 yards and a touchdown, he has done so despite an ankle injury that has caused him to miss much of the last seven games.

His ankle remains sore, but he said he expects to start Wednesday against Wyoming (10-2) in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. He will end his college career with an appearance in the Japan Bowl next month.

That finish may not be all he had hoped, but it is brighter than the possibility he faced early in November. Harmon was in danger of losing his remaining eligibility after it was reported that he had received $350 and airline tickets from Walters and Bloom two seasons ago during their dealings with his brother.

Harmon retained his eligibility, however, after an investigation by Iowa officials, whose findings were reported to the Big Ten and National Collegiate Athletic Assn. The consensus was that Harmon was not aware of the source of the funds.

“Nothing happened,” Harmon said. “I really wasn’t concerned. Ronnie was involved. I wasn’t involved.

“I learned a lesson (about dealing with agents). But everybody has got to do what they want to do. I guess that’s what Ronnie wanted to do. That’s not what I would do, but that was what he did.”

It was Ronnie, however, who led him to Iowa. Ronnie’s decision to go there made plausible to Kevin the idea of spending his college years deep in the heartland. And when Ronnie left for the Bills, Kevin stepped in at tailback, earning the starting job this season.

It has been a reasonably successful finish for a player who went to Iowa as an option quarterback, redshirted his first season and did not convert to running back until midway through the next season.

Even so, when Harmon announced his decision to follow his brother to Iowa, he had some explaining to do to his big-city buddies.

New Yorkers, even those who grow up in Queens, consider themselves a bit more sophisticated than most of mankind. To them, the world ends where New Jersey begins.

“They said, ‘Iowa? Isn’t that where they grow potatoes?’ ” Harmon recalled, smiling.

No, it’s where they grow corn, soybeans, beef and pork.

It’s where they also play a pretty fair brand of football.

Harmon didn’t understand that himself, at first, but despite some early misgivings, he has found a second home in Iowa City, one that offers him a change of pace from the hectic existence in which he grew up.

“The people in Iowa are honest,” Harmon said. “You can appreciate that coming from New York, where no one trusts anybody. But in Iowa everybody trusts everybody and that’s a nice feeling, knowing you are trusted.”

Those simple values have impressed Harmon, but he remains a New Yorker. He bemoans the lack of late-night life in Iowa City--”Everything closes by 1:30”--and the absence of New York-style pizza. “I just laugh when I hear that,” said Kevin’s father, Jesse. “You send a kid from New York anywhere, and he’ll tell you there’s nothing to do.”

Jesse Harmon said at first he had to listen to a lot of long-distance telephone calls about the dullness of life in Iowa City. Those calls have become less frequent, and, having made a few visits to Iowa himself, has learned to downplay his son’s complaints.

Each fall, he makes a two-week trip to Iowa to watch the Hawkeyes play football, visit with the coaches and make a general checkup. Not many people take fall vacations in Iowa City.

“My dad likes it out there,” Kevin said. “He really does.”

Harmon’s adjustment to life in Iowa was eased by his brother’s experience. Ronnie and Kevin were nearly inseparable for the three seasons they attended school together. They helped form a core of New York-area players on Iowa’s football team. These include reserve running back Chet Davis, who attended Bayside High School in Queens with the Harmons, and the Hawkeye’s leading receiver, Quinn Early, who is from Great Neck on Long Island.

The New York players have done more than provide the Hawkeyes with a rich supplemental recruiting area, they have given their Iowa teammates a bit of cultural diversity, and a few laughs.

The supposedly street-wise New Yorkers don’t always know what to make of the friendly Iowa residents. To the Iowa natives on the team, it comes across as an amusing form of paranoia.

“The guys from New York walk down the street and can’t figure out why people are just saying hi,” said Kerry Burt, a senior strong safety from Waterloo, Iowa. “They’re asking me, ‘Why is this guy saying hi? What does he want from me.’ I guess in New York, they don’t say hi unless there’s a reason.’ ”

But if the players from Iowa get a kick out of the sometimes jaded New Yorkers, the New Yorkers wonder if the Midwesterners get all their ideas about life in New York from “Kojak” and “West Side Story.”

“When I first got out there, someone asked me if I had ever seen a tree before,” Harmon said. “Can you believe that? A tree. I got pretty mad. Yeah, I’ve seen a tree. I live in a house, not an apartment. We’ve got our own front yard and and our backyard with grass. Everything in New York isn’t concrete and sidewalks.”

But it is that kind of perception that had plagued New York City football for many years among college recruiters. That is especially true in the public high schools, in which only about 40% play football. That view has changed in recent years, thanks in good part to the Harmons.

Tony Vacavone has coached at Bayside since 1965, but not until Derrick Harmon did he have a player go to an NCAA Division I school. Harmon was an All-Ivy League selection at Cornell before he was drafted in the ninth round by the 49ers in 1984.

“Derrick changed everything,” Vacavone said. “No one wanted to look at players in the Public League. But after Derrick did what he did at Cornell, people started to ask, ‘Where did this guy come from and why didn’t we take a look at him?’ A lot of people realized they were missing out on some good players.”

Ronnie never lacked for that kind of attention. He was the most recruited football player in recent New York City history. He had his choice of almost any school in the country.

Although the Hawkeyes were coming off their first Rose Bowl appearance in 22 years, a 28-0 loss to Washington, and had recruited another New York City public school player, Owen Gill, the season before, the locale of the school seemed out of character for Ronnie.

“Ronnie is always gold chains, flashy clothes, the whole thing,” Vacavone said. “I wasn’t sure how he would fit in at Iowa.”

Ronnie answered that question by rushing for 2,271 yards during his Hawkeye career, second only to Gill’s 2,556. Ronnie had already been at Iowa for a season when it came time for Kevin to choose a school.

Kevin was a quarterback at Bayside and wanted to go to a school that would give him a chance to play that position. But in the second game of his senior season, he stepped in a hole and sprained his knee. He did not play the rest of the season.

“Schools just stopped calling,” Harmon said. “Schools that sent me letters, called all the time, just stopped.”

Among those was Penn State, the school Harmon said he had his heart set on. Among those he was interested in, only Iowa, Maryland and Syracuse stuck with him through his injury. Despite some family concerns about following and being compared to his brother, he chose Iowa.

“Derrick was always the real thinker,” Vacavone said. “You go in the locker room, and he’d be reading a book. Ronnie was always the flashy one. He wanted to do nothing but play football. Kevin, he was somewhere in between. He had a little bit of Derrick and a little bit of Ronnie.”

The Derrick in him is what makes him wear a bracelet engraved with the name of a U.S. Air Force captain missing in action in Laos since 1969. Harmon, 22, is too young to remember much about the Vietnam War but has become interested in the plight of U.S. servicemen missing in Southeast Asia because of his friendship with Dan Reed, an Iowa booster and Vietnam veteran active in veteran causes.

“This is something close to my heart,” Harmon said. “Knowing Dan has really brought this home.”

The Ronnie in Harmon is what brings out the leather attire. It also helped lead him to Iowa.

“It seemed like a good choice because he might get a chance to play quarterback,” Vacavone said. “They were doing a lot of different things with their quarterback then, and he would have been a great option quarterback. But then Chuck Long came along and they went to a more drop-back style passing game.”

Realizing that his chances to play quarterback in such a system were slim, Harmon switched to tailback. He slowly worked his way up the depth chart, earning the No. 1 position last season before a series of injuries limited his playing time and allowed Rick Bayless to take over. Harmon finished with 182 yards in 41 carries. Bayless gained 1,150 yards and was All-Big Ten.

But when this season started, Harmon had regained the No. 1 tailback spot from Bayless, whose status for the Holiday Bowl is uncertain because of a separated shoulder he suffered in the regular-season finale against Minnesota.

“That shows you what kind of player Kevin is,” Coach Hayden Fry said. “To come in and beat out an All-Big Ten running back when he was healthy.”

Harmon only wishes he could have found out what his career would have been like if he had stayed uninjured.

“I think about it all the time,” he said. “I wonder what it would be like to not be hurt off and on--to just go through a season like that.”

Harmon is hoping that opportunity will come in professional football. He would like nothing better than to become the third Harmon brother in a row to play in the National Football League.

But wherever he goes and raises a family, he plans to take a little of New York City and little of Iowa City with him.

“As a parent, your kids are said to be a reflection of you, but environment plays an important role,” he said. “You don’t realize, you can do all you can, but environment plays an important role.

“I won’t live in New York, and I won’t live in Iowa. I’ll combine both of them. I’ll try to get the best of both.”

Maybe that’s the Ronnie and the Derrick in Kevin. It’s kind of like wearing an MIA bracelet with a leather jump suit.