A Once and Future Raider : Harrison Outgrows Bad-Guy Reputation

Into the long procession of Raiders with rap sheets steps rookie defensive tackle Nolan Harrison, who defies hardened expectations with his soft, confessional manner and eloquent speaking skills.

Yet, it was this Harrison who, as a sophomore at Indiana University, performed a sack-dance on an automated teller machine in Bloomington, Ind. Seems the machine ate his card.

“It didn’t give me my money,” Harrison said. “I just lost it. You know how you lose your last 50 cents in a Coke machine?”

Harrison, at 6 feet 4 and 290 pounds, ripped the ATM from its casing. The bank filed a civil suit, and Harrison paid $4,500 in damages.

It was this Harrison, too, who was suspended for his senior season by Indiana Coach Bill Mallory after a drunk-driving accident in June of 1990.

“It took me for a ride which I will never forget,” Harrison says now.

Harrison remained an NFL prospect, although the suspension probably cost him first- or second-round dollars.

“I’ve heard that so much,” he said. “Especially from my dad.”

Several teams were still interested but--surprise--it was the Raiders who took a chance on Harrison, picking him in the sixth round.

It may prove an excellent gamble. Harrison has turned heads since the opening of training camp, recording nine tackles and three sacks in four exhibition games.

“When we drafted him, we thought we might have something special,” Raider Coach Art Shell said.

Harrison bears no resemblance to a young man with a questionble past, and he hears it all the time. A Cincinnati Bengal scout thought he had the wrong player when he interviewed Harrison.

“He said, ‘You’re the exact opposite of what your dossier says,’ ” Harrison said. “He said, ‘You seem like a really good guy, articulate. I can’t see you as a guy who would tear a bank teller machine out of the wall.’ ”

Harrison explains that he was a mixed-up college kid, away from home for the first time. The freedom from parental restraints and Harrison’s hair-trigger temper proved a combustible combination.

“My freshman and sophomore years, it was party, party, party,” he said. “It was a great new experience for me, and I handled it just like any other 17-, 18-, or 19-year-old--not well. My parents taught me well, but there are mistakes you’ve got to learn for yourself, because they’re not always going to be there to hold your hand.”

Harrison hurt his parents, mother Clem and father Nolan Jr., more than anyone. They reared their children with a stern hand in Chicago, wanting productive lives for their son and daughter, Chelcia. Harrison’s father was a successful insurance salesman in Chicago but didn’t like the environment on the city’s South Side, where the Harrisons lived until 1978.

Before his 10th birthday, Nolan Harrison had been mugged, hit in the head with a hammer and stabbed twice.

“I was very sheltered, you know, ‘Don’t leave the block,’ but when I got old enough to explore, that’s when I got in trouble,” he said. “There came a point in life, when I graduated to a bike without training wheels, when I got around that corner. You’ve seen the scenario in the movies, the kids sitting there looking out like it’s the wilderness, the unknown. I took that step and went out. I paid the price. Because there were older kids out there who just loved to take little kids’ bikes.”

Harrison’s father moved the family to the affluent Chicago suburb of Flossmoor. All went well until Harrison left to play football at Indiana.

There, he met trouble again. Harrison thought he was cursed.

“If it was going to happen, it was going to happen to me,” he said. “If I had to be at a meeting at 8 o’clock, something would happen to make me late. I was a kid who kept trouble in his pocket.”

On the football team, Harrison was king of the Dawn Patrol, an early morning detention group who had violated team rules. Harrison ran sprints until his sides ached, always swearing he would never return to the Dawn Patrol.

He always did.

It was Harrison’s parents who really paid the price, though. They, not their son, paid for the ruined ATM.

Then the drunk-driving incident ended Harrison’s college career. He was lucky it didn’t end his life--and four others.

On June 13, 1990, Harrison and two friends left a Bloomington bar in Harrison’s car. Soon, Harrison was driving the wrong way down a blind alley. He had just learned to drive a manual transmission, he said, and accidentally hit the clutch instead of the brake.

The car lurched out into an intersection and broad-sided another car carrying two passengers. No one was injured, but the story made banner headlines in the next day’s papers.

Harrison passed two field sobriety tests but was arrested because his blood-alcohol level was over the .10 allowed.

Harrison, at 290 pounds, said he did not feel intoxicated. The papers reported that his eyes were bloodshot.

Not from drinking, Harrison said.

“I almost killed all these people. I had been crying.”

Harrison spent 11 hours in the drunk tank, and was eventually convicted of driving under the influence. He was sentenced to four days in jail, got a year’s probation and had his driver’s license suspended for 120 days.

The morning after the incident, Mallory suspended Harrison for his senior season. Harrison had ruined everything.

“In Bloomington, the kids, the people, they look up to you,” he said. “They want to be where you are. Whenever you screw up, you screw things up for the lower levels. I lost that respect from a lot of people, and that hurt.”

Harrison never questioned Mallory’s decision.

“When somebody messes up, and you don’t reprimand him, somebody else thinks, ‘Well, I can do that, too,’ ” Harrison said. “Then you have chaos on your team, and it falls on the head coach. You nip it in the bud in a hurry. Unfortunately, I was the bud. It was my fault.”

Harrison lost his scholarship, but his parents came to the rescue again, paying his senior year’s tuition. Harrison earned his degree in, of all subjects, criminal justice.

While suspended, Harrison tried to attend Indiana home games as a fan, but found it too difficult.

“I watched the Michigan State game on TV and it was a block away,” he said. “It hurt so bad.”

There was never animosity between Harrison and Mallory. The coach, in fact, opened Indiana’s workout facilities to Harrison while he was preparing for NFL combine workouts.

But Harrison acknowledges he would be nowhere without supportive parents. This summer in Oxnard, he invited his mother, father, and grandfather to training camp for Family Day.

“I’d hate to think about what would have happened to me if I didn’t have the parents I have or the coaches I had in college,” Harrison said. “I could have just gone in the tank and said, ‘Screw it, I’m a bad kid.’ Now, those mistakes won’t happen again. I won’t make those things happen again.”