Franco Dokmanovich Harris is asked constantly if he is banking on his father's fame to become Pittsburgh's mayor. Though his campaign mentions football a lot, it is still complicated, because Dok Harris has spent most of his life running away from his father's image.

Take Dok's sports injury. Like his Hall of Fame running back father, Mr. Harris has knee and foot problems (they shop for orthopedic shoes together), with a chronic injury to his right knee. But Harris the younger got his in a medieval role-playing game, after catching his cleats on a rock while running with a padded sword made of plumbing products.

"My rebellion against the parents was being un-athletic. From day one I wanted to be a scientist and go to MIT," Mr. Harris said last week. "I wanted to be the opposite."

He was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but attended Princeton instead. He also did an about-face on that low-octane rebellion: now that he is running for mayor, Mr. Harris says he is trying to be a mirror image of his famous father, but not one legendary for scooping up the Immaculate Reception.

"His love of Pittsburgh off the field is what inspires me," he said.

Mr. Harris, 30, announced in March that he would challenge incumbent Mayor Luke Ravenstahl as an independent in the Nov. 3 election. Another independent, Squirrel Hill attorney Kevin Acklin, is also in the race.

Mr. Harris has tried to position himself as the best candidate for small business. He currently works for his father's food company, Super Bakery, and, while earning joint business and law degrees last year at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, volunteered to give free legal services to startup business owners. Before returning to Pittsburgh in 2004, he worked for three years for Capital One Financial Corp. in Washington D.C., designing credit card plans that let card holders save money for college, or earn better credit through volunteering and other good works.

Echoing this, he says he has another model for his mayoral run -- businessman-turned-mayor Bob O'Connor.

Mr. Harris first got to know Mr. O'Connor, who died in September 2006, when Mr. O'Connor worked with the elder Mr. Harris on the "Be A Sport" program in the early 1990s. It urged city residents to drop off used sports equipment at Three Rivers Stadium, to be distributed to city youngsters.

Running for mayor "has been in my head for a while. It came to the forefront when Mr. O'Connor passed away," he said. "He was a small businessman who cared a lot. Seeing that level of caring and authenticity is something you don't see in politics ever, really."

Mr. Harris was born in 1979 to Franco Harris and Dana Dokmanovich, college sweethearts from Penn State who bought a ramshackle house on West North Avenue in the Mexican War Streets, not far from Three Rivers, in 1973. Then, as now, it was one of the city's most diverse neighborhoods -- gay and straight, black and white, rich and poor.

His father was one of nine children and grew up in public housing in New Jersey. Dok "wasn't going to experience what I experienced growing up," said Franco Harris, when asked about his son's North Side upbringing. "I thought it was important for him to have balance in his life."

Dok would play on a rusty fire engine the city had in lieu of a playground in West Park and was often seen around the neighborhood "dashing about like a Serbo-Italo-Afro-American butterfly," Sports Illustrated's Roy Blount Jr. wrote in 1982. The same story talks about the elder Harris's commitment to charity around the North Side, which Ms. Dokmanovich joked will get him into heaven the same time as the Pope. "He lets anybody in the house," she said.

A precocious kid, Mr. Harris attended preschool science classes at Buhl Planetarium and then kindergarten at the former St. Peter's school on the North Side. (Mr. Harris is Serbian Orthodox like his mother and a member of an Aliquippa church.) It became clear he was good at studies but not some other things that seemed his birthright -- neighborhood kids would regularly pick him last in football, basketball and soccer games.

"My dad always says we learned very early that Dok wasn't going to be an athlete," Mr. Harris laughed.

The Harrises moved to Sewickley in 1994, partially due to fears about raising their son in a sometimes tough neighborhood.

Mr. Harris stresses that his family was not rich by today's superstar athlete standards and his father worked to put money away -- under a recommendation from the late Dwight White, a stock broker after leaving the Steelers -- to get him through private school and college. The family business, for which Dok Harris handles investments and scientific research, specializes in selling doughnuts and other baked goods to institutional buyers such as the military and schools.

His parents sent him to the private Sewickley Academy through graduation in 1997, before going on to Princeton University for a politics degree in 2001. Jim DeRose met him their first day of college, and the pair would serve on Princeton's university council together, a sort of student-administration Senate. Even at an Ivy League school 330 miles away, Mr. DeRose said, people knew about Franco Harris's son.

"He was very gregarious, very outgoing, social person, but had a very private side as well," said Mr. DeRose, a Denver financial consultant. "Everybody knew Dok but not everybody was in this tight circle of his."

While in college he said he registered to vote as a Republican, largely out of disgust at the last months of the Clinton administration and in support of John McCain's 2000 presidential bid. It was also "another rebellion" against his Democratic parents, he said. (He remained registered at his parents' Sewickley home until early this year, despite living in Shadyside the past five years, which he admitted recently was a mistake.) He volunteered for the presidential campaigns of Democrats John Kerry and Barack Obama.

Mr. Harris suffered his knee injury during college, while running through the woods during a live-action battle sponsored by NERO, the New England Roleplaying Organization. He had been into the medieval fantasy games since he was 16 and read about them in a magazine for Dungeons & Dragons fans.

Mr. Harris -- who is single -- is rather embarrassed about that now, but knew it would come out in the mayoral campaign. "It was fun, social. For someone a little nerdy and a little dorky it gave me chance to be a leader and just run around and have fun. I still have friends from playing," he said.

On the campaign trail -- where his main issues are business development and fighting crime -- Mr. Harris comes across as educated and assured, and with a greater weapon at his disposal than a padded sword.

Whether he's addressing the students at all-black Westinghouse High School in Homewood or an all-white senior citizens center in Polish Hill, the Steelers connection gives him an easy rapport with audiences, which he plays up by handing out football schedules, or, in the case of a Bloomfield parade, having his dad autograph miniature footballs.

Even if he didn't mention the team, he could not escape it. At the high school, teachers were wearing Steelers jerseys. The senior center had a sports shrine draped with a Terrible Towel in the corner.

Being 6 feet, 2 inches tall with that iconic Harris bushy hair and beard (which he has had on and off since high school) doesn't hurt, either.

Franco Harris has "stayed in the public eye so much because he's done so much off the field," Dok Harris said. "His message to me was always, Dok, you're no better than anybody else, but since you had some opportunity you have to give back."

So is he running for mayor on his dad's fame? That's a lot like the question he used get from strangers constantly as a kid -- if he was going to be running back like his father. Franco Harris said he thought Dok would enter politics one day, but the answer back then was different. "I'm going to be a scientist secret agent," he would say.

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