For Eagles' Macho Harris, his Linc debut another trial

Macho Harris puts it like this on his Twitter bio: "I'm good but not great enough, I'm full but I ain't ate enough."

Tweeted like a fifth-round Eagles draft choice turned opening-game starter, at Brian Dawkins' old position, no less. That's free safety, a position Harris had never played, in high school or college. He wasn't too noticeable last week - positively or negatively - at Carolina. But the Panthers didn't present nearly the same challenge as tomorrow's home opener against the New Orleans Saints and their prolific quarterback, Drew Brees.

However his Linc debut goes replacing an Eagles legend, don't expect Harris to be fazed, since metaphorical trials by fire don't compare to the real thing. He has a reminder of that on his scarred right forearm, from the day he put out a kitchen fire after first getting his younger brother and sister away from the blaze.

Standing at Dawkins' old locker, the rookie safety converted from Virginia Tech cornerback has an easy manner, an infectious swagger ("This team right here is full of swagger"), and a willingness to engage, even in talking about his toughest days. He points to the tattoo scripted on the right side of his neck. Mama's Boy.

"I grew up as a mama's boy,'' Harris said, pointing out the inked memorial to his late mother, a portrait of Maritza Harris, on his left arm.

In a sense, his easy manner is another memorial.

"He's very effervescent - he's a charmer now," said Jim Cavanaugh, a Virginia Tech assistant coach and the team's recruiting coordinator. "He's got this way about him. He gets it from her. His mother was very charming."

Despite the trials of Macho Harris' life, this hasn't changed: "He has great confidence in himself," Cavanaugh said. "If he makes a mistake - 'Well, they got lucky.' He's not going to get himself down."

It is the most unforgettable recruiting visit in Virginia Tech football history.

"I drove up, I saw the smoke curling up under the door," said Cavanaugh, who had Hokies head coach Frank Beamer with him in the car.

Two little children, a boy and a girl, were in front of Harris' house in Richmond, Va. Inside, Macho held a quilt, putting out a kitchen fire. The quilt was ablaze, too.

The grease fire started on the stove, after Harris' mother had run to the store to get more French fries for dinner. She had been making wings and fries, Macho's favorite, and ran out of fries.

"She thought she had turned the stove off," Cavanaugh said. "The knob showed 'off' and it wasn't off."

Harris had grabbed a fire extinguisher but it didn't work, so he picked up the burning pan with some towels. When he opened his back door, a rush of oxygen caused the grease to flame up.

"He was a little bit stunned," Cavanaugh said. "He was always controlled. He got those kids out. His eyebrows got singed. He was lucky he got his head back [when the pan flamed up]. That would have been horrible if he got his face burned."

Macho saved the house. The coach helped get the fire fully out, including some hot spots on the linoleum floor. Beamer, who had taken Harris' little brother and little sister further away from the house, got inside and saw Macho's right arm bubbling up.

"I thought it was nothing - I just thought I got burned a little bit," said Harris, who needed a skin graft from his hip. "Especially third-degree burns, they just hurt for a split second, then it goes numb. Coach said, 'We're taking you to the hospital.' . . . He already knew what it was.''

At the hospital, Beamer told Harris how he knew. As a boy, Beamer had helped his father burn some trash. Afterward, he'd carried a broom into the garage, too close to a gasoline can. After the resulting explosion, Beamer suffered burns to his face, neck shoulder and chest and eventually endured over 20 skin grafts.

"Not even my mother could experience what I was going through,'' Harris said. Beamer "was the only person. He was there for a reason.''

Macho's name is Victor Harris, except nobody calls him Victor. The Eagles switched his official name on the roster to Macho. His father, a truck-driver who is called Victor, named his hard-charging son Macho when he was 2 years old. The boy never stopped moving.

By high school, that confidence was there. The day Beamer showed up on the sidelines of a game, Harris kept scoring touchdowns. The way Cavanaugh remembers it, Harris ran for a couple and caught a pass for one and ran back a kick for another. At one point, he went by Beamer and said something like, "What do you think? Pretty good, huh?''

The top-rated high school player in the state of Virginia, Harris, then a running back, already had visited Southern Cal, Michigan and Miami.

"He had a knack for looking past the first tackler and figuring out how to get past the second tackler, figuring he could juke the first one,'' said Rudy Ward, the athletic director at Harris' high school, Highland Springs. "Everyone talks in football [about] how, as you get older, the game slows down. That was always the case for him. He didn't have the great, great 40 time, but his cutting ability was second to none."

Macho Harris was a true local celebrity, said Scott Burton, his high school coach, who is now an assistant at the University of Richmond.

"Walking off at halftime, spectators from the other schools were stopping him for autographs,'' Burton said. "People always were yelling, 'Go to Virginia Tech!' Or, 'Go to Michigan!' Girls were screaming.''

Even before the fire, Ward saw how Harris handled adversity. In the state playoffs, Highland Springs was just outside the goal line, needing a score in the final seconds. Harris got the ball.

"I was standing on the goal line,'' Ward said. "He scored, from my vantage point. They didn't give it to him.''

Harris remembers it like yesterday, he said, and his blood still boils. The Highland Springs stands went crazy. Teammates threw helmets. In the midst of the chaos, Ward saw composure from a high school senior.

"He was the guy who pulled them all together to shake hands,'' Ward said.

He wouldn't know what to do without her.

"I'd always say that - always,'' Harris said of imagining life without his mother.

On Christmas Day of his senior year in high school, just 10 days after that kitchen fire, Maritza Harris collapsed from a brain aneurysm. She died five hours later in the hospital, at age 43.

"I'm not going to lie - when my mother passed away, I wanted to be with her,'' Harris said. "It was tough. At the same time, to rely on God, and know that God put things - He made things happen for a reason. That kind of made me easy. And knowing the fact that she was in a better place, that definitely made it easier.''

Harris has learned not to get worked up about things he can't control. That's what he told himself right before the NFL draft, he said. A lot of projections had him going in the second round. Harris admitted that, when he didn't hear his name the first day, "it got kind of shaky." He couldn't have predicted how he'd end up playing an entirely new position, starting in his NFL debut.

"My mother, she wouldn't want me to fold," Harris said at his locker. "She always told me she couldn't wait for me to go to the NFL. We talked about big things. I do whatever I can to keep on fighting every day. And time will heal. I learned that. Time will heal."