Joey Harrington...

[woundedknees]

Born to be a Duck

http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/si ... /story.csp

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from “What It Means to Be a Duck: Mike Bellotti and Oregon’s Greatest Players,” by The Register-Guard’s Rob Moseley. The excerpt, printed with the permission of Triumph Books (triumphbooks.com), is a look at the UO career of former quarterback Joey Harrington, in his own words, from the chapter “Joey Harrington, Quarterback, 1998-2001.”

I guess you could say I was literally a Duck from birth. My dad was in one of Len Casanova’s final recruiting classes, and then played for Oregon under Jerry Frei. When I was born, Cas sent my father a letter of congratulations, as they had become pretty good friends by that time. The theme of the letter was along the lines of, “We hear you have a talented player we should be looking for in the next 17 years.” Basically, I had a scholarship offer to play for Oregon right then and there. It was signed, “Sincerely yours, Len Casanova.”

I asked one time in high school if I could play some free safety, and the coach just kind of looked at me and laughed and kept walking. I was just always a quarterback."

My first scholarship offer was from Oregon State my junior year. Jerry Pettibone was the coach then, and he said they were going to be changing the offense, that they were going to throw the ball and not run the option. I listened to him, just because he and Dad were friends. Denny Schuler was at Oregon State when they recruited me, and he had played with my dad at Oregon, so that’s how it got started between me and the Beavers. I went down there on a visit just to listen to them, even though I knew I wasn’t going to go there.

... "Washington State called and said, “Hey, we heard about your game, and we want you to talk to Mike Price. We’re not sure if you’re good enough for a scholarship, but you’re back on our radar.”

The only real offers were from Oregon and Stanford.

As far as what it means to be a Duck, I learned mostly about the ability to build a team with a bunch of people from very different backgrounds all shooting for a common goal. If you look at the collection of guys who made up that 2001 team, it’s really crazy. We had a guy who was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship in Ryan Schmid. We had a guy who was born in Korea and moved around with a military family and came as a walk-on receiver and ended up as an All-Pac-10 linebacker in Wes Mallard. We had a guy from the tough part of Phoenix in Rashad Bauman. And we had me, a quarterback who played the stinkin’ piano. It was just a very eclectic group of people who worked extremely well together and developed a great friendship.