Editor's Note: Mark Harmon will officially accept the NFF Gold Medal, the organization's highest honor, during the 62nd NFF Annual Awards Dinner Presented by ETT on Dec. 10 in New York City. The event will be live streamed on ESPN3 starting at 8:30 p.m. ET and can be watched via this link.

UCLA quarterback Mark Harmon arrived in New York 46 years ago for the National Football Foundation Annual Awards Dinner without a tuxedo. All he carried off his transcontinental flight from Los Angeles was a business suit, prompting a bit of panic when he learned about the preferred attire.
 
Selected as a 1973 NFF National Scholar-Athlete, Harmon was designated to respond on behalf of the class, and he needed to rent a tuxedo. He walked across the street from the Waldorf Astoria and rented a dove grey tux with a frilly shirt hanging in the front window. Then he went to the dinner where everybody else was wearing black tuxedos. He stood out rather prominently.
 
"John Wayne (who was presented the Gold Medal that night) started calling me 'Rebel,'" Harmon recalled. "All night he called me, Rebel. The autograph on the event program—I still have it— he wrote: 'To The Rebel:  May the wind always be at your back. -John Wayne.''
 
Tonight, Harmon returns for the 62nd NFF Annual Awards Dinner now at the New York Hilton Midtown to become the 65th recipient of the NFF Gold Medal. He will stand out for different reasons. He is famous outside of football now as star and executive producer of the consistently top-rated television show, NCIS. Back on the NFF dais for the first time since he was a collegian, Harmon displays a humbleness about the award.
 
"The very first person I thought of (when told he would be the recipient of this award), was Terry Donahue," Harmon said. "Terry recruited me. I thought of him, my dad, and UCLA teammate/roommate John Sciarra and just how much this organization means to them. Everything that this recognition defines. It's not that it doesn't mean the same to me, just that my own reaction to this honor coming in my direction really made me think of my time with all of them."
 
At the 1973 dinner, Harmon was accompanied by his father, Michigan halfback Tom Harmon, the 1940 Heisman Trophy recipient and a 1954 College Football Hall of Fame inductee. Harmon's UCLA coach Pepper Rodgers was scheduled to be at the dinner, but in Los Angeles Rodgers jumped on a flight to Atlanta to accept the Georgia Tech head football coaching position. UCLA Offensive Coordinator Homer Smith, back in Los Angeles, probably meant more to his success as a triple option quarterback.
 
"Out on the practice field, that first day with him, there was a patch of Astroturf," Harmon said. "On it were painted footsteps. Those footsteps were the correct foot placements for the read option. Those were Coach Smith's footsteps. Every step we took was like a dance step and that is how we learned the angles of that offense. It has always seemed appropriate to me that the footsteps I was trying to emulate, were his. I still use that work ethic all the time. It remains a coaching point in the back of my head, and it is something I still use every day.         
 
"My job as an option quarterback was to get the ball to the guy who could do the most with it. And I am still doing that. I do that every day here on set.  I look at it as my job as an actor to pass the ball. To get the ball off my hands and into other people's hands. Sometimes you carry it yourself. You drop your helmet and you take the tough yards up inside. That is what I always loved about the game and I learned that on the field."
 
Mark Harmon grew up in Southern California where he probably had more success as a baseball player than a football player. He also excelled in rugby. Harmon says his dad never pressured him to play football. His dad's Heisman Trophy was always sitting on a desk in his office. But football had balance in the Harmon household and his dad never pushed any sport. His mother Elyse Knox was always "just, Mom" but she was also an accomplished actress and appeared in more than 40 films. Said Harmon: "I do get it, the assumption that Dad was a Heisman recipient, so he put a football in my hands. Or that Mom was a successful actress, so somehow that path is expected. It wasn't like that at all".
 
His mother and father met by chance when his dad was on his way to San Francisco to play in the East-West Shrine Game. He stopped in Hollywood to do Bing Crosby's Radio Show. Part of that included lunch and a studio tour. His mother was an actress at Columbia where Crosby's show was broadcast. She was assigned to be the tour guide that day for Tommy Harmon.
 
"Mom certainly did not follow sports at the time, and she did not know a football from a hockey puck," Harmon said. "Dad loved that about her, that with all the press he had received, she knew very little about him. The story goes that early on they went to dinner at Jay Berwanger's home, a Heisman recipient. A few days later they went to dinner with another Heisman recipient, Les Horvath. On the way back from that second dinner Mom said 'I don't know what the big deal is about this Heisman Trophy. Everybody's got one.' Dad loved that story, and he loved her.
 
"My dad was an exceptional man who led an exceptional life. He was the youngest in a large family. He worked hard. He was a multi-talented, four-sport athlete. He came from Rensselaer, Indiana, and the steel mills. I think I have some of that and there is a blue-collar approach to most things I do. I know I didn't forget that on the football field, or on any athletic field. Or in the classroom or with what I am doing now."         
 
Mark Harmon took the junior college route to UCLA. He had played only two years of high school football and had one of those cut short with an injury. Lightly recruited for any sport, he attended Pierce Junior College in Woodland Hills, California.
 
"I really didn't play a lot of football going into college," Harmon said. "I didn't have a lot of experience and I certainly had very little experience at the quarterback position. So, I didn't know if I could compete. I just knew what I wanted to try and do. That's one of the reasons I went to Pierce. I was really chasing a dream."
 
His tenacity earned him junior college All-America status, and he joined a couple of Pierce teammates at UCLA, which was coming off a losing season (2-7-1) in 1971. In junior college, he had become a promising triple option quarterback, drawing interest from a number of schools, including Stanford and Oklahoma. He visited Norman and vividly remembers sitting alone with then-offensive coordinator Barry Switzer, a 2001 Hall of Famer. A graphic of the Sooners' wishbone offense was behind Switzer.
 
"'So, I am supposed to explain our offense to you,'" Harmon recalled Switzer saying. "He leaned back and drew a directional arrow to the right and then another directional arrow to the left and said: 'We go Bone right and Bone left and we pitch the ball to (Greg) Pruitt and we score a touchdown. Let me tell you something: If you come to Oklahoma, we will win the National Championship. If you don't come to Oklahoma, we will win the National Championship.' That made me laugh and we are friends to this day. I love the guy."
 
Harmon chose UCLA because of his academic major. At the time he was looking to go into medicine; however, that changed to communications.
 
In his first UCLA game in 1972, he quarterbacked the Bruins to a 20-17 upset victory over defending National Champion Nebraska, ending the Cornhuskers' 32-game unbeaten streak.
 
"There wasn't anybody on that UCLA team that didn't think we could play with them," Harmon said. "Part of that was all of us just being young but I was one of a dozen or so transfers who came into UCLA. I always thought that we had some players. It was about trying to keep a lid on Johnny Rodgers because every time he touched the ball you held your breath. We needed to have ball control and to take advantage of turnovers…the outcome was special certainly because we weren't supposed to be in that game."
 
During Harmon's two seasons at UCLA, the Bruins compiled a 17-5 record as he distributed the ball to running backs Kermit Johnson, Wendell Tyler and James McAlister when not passing or running it himself. In 1973, Harmon's senior season, the Bruins led the nation in rushing and set school rushing records that still stand.
 
"(Harmon) was an incredible ball-handling quarterback," said quarterback John Sciarra, a teammate of Harmon's at UCLA and a 2014 College Football Hall of Fame inductee. "Outside of being smart and running the team and leadership, mechanically Mark Harmon was the best quarterback I have ever been around. He could run The Wishbone as well as anybody."
 
Upon graduation, Harmon had no intention of pursuing professional football. Carrying a 3.45 GPA and graduating cum laude, he had several options. He started taking acting classes and held a number of jobs to make ends meet. He worked in advertising, as a national shoe company rep, as a broadcaster and as a carpenter before appearing in Coors beer commercials.
 
 
Harmon's big break came with Flamingo Road which then led to St. Elsewhere when he was cast in the leading role of Dr. Robert Caldwell. His success continued with the police drama Reasonable Doubt starring as detective Dickey Cobb and on Chicago Hope as Dr. Jack McNeill.
He chillingly portrayed Ted Bundy in the TV movie The Deliberate Stranger and charmed with his performance of Freddy Shoop in the feature film, Summer School.
 
Other feature credits include The Presidio, Stealing Home and Wyatt Earp. Harmon also had memorable guest roles on the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon, and hit shows Moonlighting and The West Wing before landing the lead role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a former Marine sniper and Special Agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on the global favorite NCIS.
 
Today, NCIS is the most-watched-scripted show in the world, a TV juggernaut attracting more than 15 million viewers each week. In 2014, an idea Harmon co-developed with EP Gary Glasberg became the spinoff, NCIS: New Orleans which premiered on CBS. The original NCIS is currently in its 17th season and will pass its 400th episode this year.
 
Through it all, family remains an important aspect for Harmon.  Married to actress, producer Pam Dawber for 32 years, the couple have two sons; Sean, an actor/stuntman, and Ty, a graphic artist.
 
"No one is in control of an acting career," Harmon said. "You work and you wait to be asked to show your stuff. And then you hope to be ready when you get your chance. No one knows when that chance will come, or if it will."