It was only 9 a.m. and already starting to get hot at Rio Rancho Stadium last Sunday, when about 16 area lawmen began stretching and then putting on shoulder pads and helmets for football practice.

They were getting ready for today’s inaugural Battle of the Badges, also called the 911 Bowl, at Santa Ana Star Center. Kickoff is at 3 p.m. and tickets are available at the box office.

Their opposition: a group of area firefighters.

Joe Harris Jr. gets instructions from cops head coach Gino Satriana, now the defensive coordinator at Rio Rancho High School. When Harris played for the Rams, Satriana was coaching at rival Cibola High.

Area residents have seen the two professions square off before on the basketball court, on the ice and in the ring, namely in the annual Rumble in Rio.

It’s not winner take all. The 10-82 Fund, which helps policemen in need, and Carrie Tingley Hospital will split the proceeds.

Rio Rancho High School defensive coordinator Gino Satriana barked out instructions to the cops, following up their stretching with a series of other drills not unlike what Satriana helps put Rams football players through on a daily basis.

He has a sense of humor, telling one player that he runs more like Col. Sanders than Barry Sanders, and, after a short water break, “This isn’t a picnic.”

Practice stopped a little after 10 a.m., as a man in street clothes approached the group. Everyone began clapping and walking toward the man, each wanting a hug and a moment to extend a few words of compassion.

This was the guy they’d been waiting for: Joe Harris Jr.

His father, Sandoval County Sheriff’s Dep. Sgt. Joe Harris Sr., had been slain just three days earlier during a shootout in the Jemez Springs area. Before that, Harris Sr. had been practicing, even at age 46, with the lawmen for today’s game.

The younger Harris, trying to maintain his composure in light of the tragedy that had befallen his family and the community, talked briefly to his new teammates, some of whom he knew from his dad’s 20 years with the Rio Rancho Department of Public Safety or the nearly seven years he’d put in with the SCSO.

He was on bereavement leave from the U.S. Navy, for whom he was serving on the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier currently ported in Bremerton, Wash.

No stranger to Rio Rancho Stadium, where he’d played with the varsity Rams in 2002 and 2003, he told of the last time he’d played football. It had been as a teammate with his father on the Razorbacks, of the New Mexico Football League.

That game, he said, “did not end well.” Harris Jr. was injured and taken away in an ambulance.

Being on the same field where he’d once caught passes wearing No. 87 for the Rams, Harris said, “brings back a lot of memories, a lot of high school memories, but it also brings back a lot of memories of my father. Every game I played, my father would sit down in this end zone … and (the Kasey Says canine) Harley. (It was) a father-son bond that nobody could understand. Not only did I play and he’d come to watch me, but we played together quite a few years.”

Being on the field again, playing in today’s game, will be special, considering the circumstances.

“To play for my dad, in his place? There aren’t words I can really say to tell you how I feel,” he told a trio of TV cameras. “It’s just more emotional than anything.

“I’m going to wear my dad’s number and ask my dad to be with me, give me the will and the strength to play as hard and as good and as strong as he would have played. My dad’s been training for a while for this game. I just want to make my dad and do everything that my dad would have done that day.”

Harris said on the day his father had been killed, he had been reminiscing with some family friends and looking through some of his father’s football equipment.

“Somebody had asked me if I was going to play,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about it yet and when I thought about it, I said I would love to. … This time, I want to go out there, I want to play and be healthy, I want to walk off this field and my dad will be with me in a whole different way. I just want to play in my dad’s honor and make him proud, just as he would have done for me.”

Asked to describe his late father, Harris replied, “Anybody that knew my dad knew my dad was a family man. He was a cop. My dad lived to be a cop. He loved the community, he loved the kids, he loved the teenagers, he loved everybody. … My mom (Tonia) and my sister (Allyson) were the two most important women in his life … My dad was known for always saying ‘Do the right thing.’ Loyalty. Family. God. He would give you the shirt off his back, the last dollar in his wallet and the keys to his car, if he had to, just so you wouldn’t suffer.

“He touched so many people in this community, this state, that … everyone says he was a hero and he died being a hero, and I couldn’t be more in agreement with that than ever, but I also call my dad a legend,” he said. “To me, my father is a legend and I only hope to be half the man my father was.”