Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Nor does he have a lot of hobbies. He is a basketball coach, plain and simple, full stop. He does a little gardening at home, but that’s about it. He doesn’t play golf. The one outside passion Krzyzewski has adopted is wine. It started with a fund-raiser he hosted for the V Foundation at a winery in Napa Valley, California. Though he does not consider himself a true expert, he keeps an extensive collection in a temperature-controlled wine cellar at home, and he has developed considerable knowledge about how wine is made and where it comes from. “Wine is the best drink of all because usually it’s shared. It’s a lovely drink,” he said during our phone conversation. I prodded him to tell me more about his tastes. He reported that he’s “basically a Cab guy.” When he drinks white, it’s usually a Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio. He’s not into Chardonnay. He also informed me that “rosé is coming back a lot,” which I did not know. “And you know what?” he added. “I like the people who do it. They have the highest standards and they want you to love their product. If there’s something wrong, they don’t want you to have it at all.”

  I didn’t want to offend him, but I couldn’t help but laugh. It was hard to imagine him sipping Sauvignon Blanc with his parents in that second-floor flat on Cortez Street, or discussing whether rosé was coming back when he was running the streets with his buddies at night. “I grew up where we had highballs, y’know?” he said. “Whiskey and ginger ale. I was never a beer guy. My brother drank mostly Crown Royal.” When I pointed out the contrast, I got the feeling that it had never occurred to him before. Then he laughed, too. “No, you’re right. Polish family. Inner city. Wine was not our thing,” he said. “It’s kind of an upset, really.”

  Jim Harbaugh

  “PEOPLE CAN WORK WITH THE TRUTH.”

  He couldn’t take not competing. It killed him to stand still. So what if he was a rookie quarterback with a bright future? He needed to get into the game—now. So Jim Harbaugh went to his head coach with a strange request: Put me in on special teams so I can cover punts and kickoffs. “My first reaction was, ‘Are you crazy?’” Mike Ditka told me. “But he was serious. He just wanted to contribute.”

  It was early in the 1987 NFL season. Harbaugh was a first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears. He started out as the third-string quarterback, which meant he might warm up a little before kickoff, but then he’d spend the rest of the game holding a clipboard. “I’d leave the stadium and it was like I wasn’t even in a game. Just shower and go home,” he said. Harbaugh wasn’t trying to be a hero when he made the request. Lord knows, his presence covering kicks was not going to determine the outcome. But for as long as he could remember, Harbaugh had a deep and abiding need for competition. It was literally in his blood. “I wanted to sweat,” he told me. “I wanted to be sore. It feels good to get out there and be sore and feel like a man. Football’s a great game for that.”

  Ditka was open to the idea. So during practice the following week, Harbaugh got some reps with the special teams unit. When Sunday came, Ditka put him in the game. “He had no fear,” Ditka recalled. “He went down and hit the wedge as hard as he could.” This continued for several weeks. Harbaugh recalls one particular play when he was running down the sideline and fending off a blocker. A second blocker came out of nowhere, knocked him clear off his feet, and sent him flying out of bounds. It hurt like hell, but not nearly as much as standing on the sideline did.

  Eventually, Ditka thought better of the idea and pulled Harbaugh off the field. The Bears’ starting quarterback, Jim McMahon, had gotten hurt, and besides, Ditka said, “I’m not sure my owner was too crazy about it.” But the episode gave Ditka a window into the brash young quarterback’s competitive soul. That need for contact, that disdain for standing idle, drove Harbaugh to play for fourteen years as an NFL quarterback far more than his physical talents did. And it now lies at the heart of his ability to get to Us as a coach who has won big and fast wherever he has been—one NFL job plus three in college, including his current one at the University of Michigan, his alma mater.

  No one knows Jim’s manic competitiveness better than his father, Jack, who coached football for four decades at ten different colleges. But even he was taken aback by a phone conversation he had with Jim during his redshirt sophomore season at Michigan. After sitting out as a freshman, thereby preserving four years of eligibility, Jim was trying to work his way up the team’s depth chart. Wolverines coach Bo Schembechler was putting the players through grueling two-a-day practices in the summer heat. Jim told his dad during that call that he went on a two-mile run during the breaks between workouts. Jack had always exhorted his children to attack the day with “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind,” but this seemed extreme even to him. What he realized was that his son didn’t go running just to help his endurance. Jim needed to know he was working hard while his competition was resting.

  The athlete’s code has always taught the mantra of “no pain, no progress,” but Harbaugh bristled at my suggestion that he is not comfortable unless he’s uncomfortable. “Comfortable is not a word I have ever associated with sports and football. It’s a confusing word for me,” he said. “It’s just about building a callus. The human body is an amazing organism. It craves contact. Like on your foot, if you’ve got the wrong shoes and you get a blister. It’s soft and pussing and then eventually it pops and calluses over. So the body repairs itself, and then it’s tougher and stronger.”

  Harbaugh has a studious mind, with a train of thought that vacillates between fixation and distraction. Mike Ditka was not the first person to ask him if he was crazy, and he certainly wasn’t the last. Harbaugh has often described himself as forever being the kid in school who liked to throw rocks at beehives. He doesn’t want to get stung, necessarily, but he needs to know that he might.

  Discomfort, pain, soreness—it doesn’t matter what Harbaugh calls it. What matters is that he feels it. That’s the great thing about this sport. It hurts like hell, but it never lies. “Nothing tells the truth like football,” Harbaugh told me. “You cannot email or bullshit your way into being good. Throw the balls out there and compete. Maybe the other guy’s stronger, but there’s still a way to beat him. You can outlast him, you can outthink him, you can outrun him. Maybe get yourself stronger. I don’t always know what it is, but I always know there’s a way.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The office is unimpressive for a coach of his stature. It’s not very big, and the walls are white and spare. He has a few pictures and memorabilia in a bookcase, but mostly the walls are uncovered save for a greaseboard affixed to a closet. As a rule, Harbaugh prefers to have very few things on display. Soon after he took the job here in December 2014, he stripped a bunch of sayings and quotes off the team’s meeting and weight rooms. “I would ask guys who were in the weight room every single day, ‘What’s the best saying you’ve seen in here?’ And they couldn’t come up with one,” he said. “It just struck me that that’s a lot of white noise, so you can’t remember any of it. If you can’t remember, then it’s going to be hard to execute.”

  His desk, on the other hand, is a bit of a mess. Harbaugh is constantly jotting ideas on random sheets of paper as well as in his ever-present spiral notebooks, which he keeps in cabinets in his office and other areas of the facility. Harbaugh is excellent in spontaneous moments, but he would rather his actions be meticulously planned. He often writes down ideas he wants to impart at the start of a day’s practice. The way he figures it, he only spends ten minutes talking to his team each day. He wants to make every second count.

  Amid the spartan walls and the cluttered desk sits the centerpiece of the whole operation: a desktop computer with dual monitors. This is where Harbaugh organizes his entire life into an endless row of Excel spreadsheets. He is an avowed Excelholic. He uses it for all kinds of tasks. “I can paint pictures with Excel. I’m very proud,” he told me. He wrote a 9,000-word introduction for a photography book about Michigan
football entirely on Excel. He reached for his mouse and started clicking through the different tabs, dating back to his days as the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. He could use premade templates, but he prefers to create them himself. He’ll spend hours working on a calendar just so he can save ten minutes when things get rolling. As his father, Jack, put it, “Nobody likes busywork more than Jim.”

  As Harbaugh clicked through his spreadsheets, he landed on the schedule he put together for his team’s recent weeklong trip to Rome. Most coaches would be happy to delegate such tasks to an underling so they can spend time recruiting or studying video. Not Jim Harbaugh. “I like to do the itineraries,” he said. “Then I’m not out there going, ‘Why aren’t we doing it this way? We could save five minutes.’ Can’t have that. Have to cut down drag.”

  If we follow this workflow, from the unadorned walls to the disorderly desk to the precision of his spreadsheets, we can glean an understanding of how Harbaugh gets to Us. If his players can remember what he tells them, then they can execute it. “A good coach or teacher can make the hard subject matter seem easy,” he said. “Like, I’m really good at teaching kids how to ride bikes. I’ve got a simple plan. It’s A, B, C. A, accelerate. Get going. B, balance. Find your balance. C, confidence. Now you’re riding a bike. It’s a metaphor for life in some ways.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Harbaugh was eleven years old and living in Iowa, he entered a Punt, Pass and Kick competition. Having won the local competition first, he advanced to a regional competition that was a couple hours’ drive away. His parents couldn’t take him, so he hitched a ride with two other boys. He worked hard to prepare, but he came up short. Even worse, he lost to one of the other kids in the car. So he had to travel all the way home alongside the trophy and the boy who won it. It hurt like hell.

  “I remember I didn’t say a word. I just sat there,” he told me. “Nobody talked to me. My vivid memory was just staring out the window and I was crying. But I didn’t want them to see that I was crying. It was just that gut-wrenching, nasty feeling of losing. I was seven, but I was like, ‘Okay, for the rest of the year, I’m gonna work on my punt and my kick and my pass.’”

  The tears stung, but they watered his seeds of persistence. Fortunately, he would have many more chances to compete. He had a built-in teammate, opponent, and tormenter in his brother, John, who is fifteen months older. They were exposed to sports since literally before they could walk. Their mother, Jackie, used to put them into strollers and take them to her husband’s football practices. When the Harbaugh boys were young, the family moved three times in five years. That forced the boys and, eventually, their younger sister, Joani, who is five years younger than Jim, to learn how to adapt to unfamiliar environments. “I always liked the new adventure,” Jim said. “It taught me a lot of things. When you go in a new environment, you can’t just sit around the house and expect good people to knock at your door and want to be your friend. You’ve got to get out there and engage.”

  Jim and John did their fair share of battling, but they also loved being on the same team. When they were young, they set up pretend basketball games in the basement, creating a makeshift hoop out of a wire hanger. As they grew, they competed at everything, from sports to school to mowing the lawn to seeing who was quicker at racing upstairs to fetch their dad a beer.

  Besides their parents, John and Jim had another important role model in their grandfather, Joe Cipiti. Grandpa Joe, as he was called, came over from Sicily when he was four years old. He was loving and stern, but he was empathetic to his core. Jackie recalls the early days of their marriage when the hours were long and the money was tight. Every few weeks, her parents would show up at their doorstep with a bag of groceries. “My dad always said, in the end, the only people you really have is your family,” Jackie says.

  Joe was an auto mechanic in those days. Jim fondly remembers working at Grandpa Joe’s filling station, where he and John pumped gas, squeegeed windshields, and kept the change. In many ways, Grandpa Joe was Jim’s first coach. “If you were going to cut the grass, he’d teach you, he’d show you, and then he’d let you do it,” Jim said. “That’s how it works in coaching. You give them a tool, give them a teaching point, but at some point the player has to learn to do it himself.”

  Both Harbaugh sons played hard, but Jim had a hot streak that could be problematic. As a close high school buddy, Rob Pollock, once put it, “Neither one liked to lose, but Jim had a screw loose about it.” As a baseball pitcher, he once beaned a girl because she was crowding the plate. When he was in the fifth grade, his mother was called into school to discuss some problems he was having on the playground. She was initially told that several boys were involved, but when she got to school, she discovered she was the only parent who had been called in. When they told Jackie that the real problem was that her son was too competitive, she set them straight, Harbaugh style. “Being competitive is not a bad thing,” she lectured. “People compete every day of their lives.”

  The episode hinted at a dynamic that follows Jim to this day: He plays hard, plays to win, but it puts people off. Jack guesses Jim was about nine years old and living in Iowa when he asked if Jack was going to take another job and make the family move again. Jack said he didn’t think so. “Well, I hope you get one,” Jim replied, “because I just lost my last friend.”

  As it turned out, Jack did take a job the following year as a defensive backs coach at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, this would give the family the stability of living in one place for six years. Jim and John were regulars at practices and games. They would hang with the players in the locker room, play catch on the sidelines of the practice field, and work during the games as ball boys.

  The move to Ann Arbor brought the Harbaughs under the sway of Bo Schembechler, who in his fourth season was already building a powerhouse. During Jack’s time on Schembechler’s staff, the Wolverines won four Big Ten titles, finished ranked in the top 10 every year, and at one point went to three straight Rose Bowls. Schembechler was austere and imposing, but he also felt like part of the family. One time Schembechler walked into the Harbaughs’ house and found Jim lying on the couch watching television. “Why don’t you do something productive!” he barked. Jim grabbed a book and pretended to read it. Then there was the day Schembechler walked into his office and found Jim sitting in his chair with his feet on the desk. Bo teased him about it, but not so badly that Jim felt the need to put his feet on the floor.

  Jim and John shared a third-floor bedroom of their house in Ann Arbor that had been converted from an attic. When they wrestled, their parents could swear they were going to fall through the living room ceiling. One particularly fierce argument prompted them to lay down a piece of duct tape to divide the room properly, which led to an even fiercer argument about where exactly the tape should go. John has told a story about the time they were wrestling in a pool and Jim tried to drown him. Their feelings might get hurt, but the wounds never cut deep. “We had our set-tos here and there, but we could just laugh them right off,” Jim said.

  When Jim became a sophomore at Pioneer High School, he moved up to the varsity football team and won the job as starting quarterback. John, who was two years ahead of him, was a decent player, but there was no question as to who was the better athlete. John and Jim both insist there was no jealousy. “We were always competing, but we had each other’s back and we always rooted for each other,” John told me.

  The six years the family spent in Ann Arbor were some of the happiest of their lives. Schembechler made everyone feel a part of the program. Jack worked long days, but he would try to come home for an hour for dinner every night before heading back to the office. He would take his kids on one or two recruiting trips per season. Even Joani learned how to splice game film. Alas, it didn’t last long, as Jack took a job in 1980 as the running backs coach at Stanford. John was heading to Miami Universi
ty in Oxford, Ohio, where he would play defensive back, but it was a pivotal year for Jim, who was entering his junior year of high school. While Jackie stayed behind with Joani to sell the house, Jack took Jim to California during the summer to get a head start.

  After working out in camps, Jim became the starting quarterback at Palo Alto High School. Jack didn’t think of Jim as a big-time prospect until one day when he was at practice throwing the ball with Stanford’s star quarterback, a cocky young flamethrower named John Elway. After the workout, Elway walked by Jack and said, “Your boy’s very impressive.” By the time his senior season ended, Jim had received just two scholarship offers from Division I-A schools, Arizona and Wisconsin. But he wasn’t getting the offer he really wanted.

  Little did he know that that school’s coach knew full well he wanted to recruit Jim, and knew full well Jim wanted to come. So Bo Schembechler waited until the end of the spring to invite Jim to campus for an official visit and offer him a scholarship. A few days later, Jim called to accept. He did have one question, though. “Uh, Coach, this is a full scholarship, right?” he asked. Schembechler laughed and assured him it was. After all that moving around, Jim Harbaugh was headed back to the only place he really thought of as home.

  * * *

  • • •

  In Harbaugh’s mind, Bo Schembechler could do no wrong. “It was like playing for a living legend,” he said. “I hung on every word he said, because I knew he was right.” That could make things difficult when Schembechler got salty—such as the first time Harbaugh showed up late to a meeting and Schembechler bellowed, “You’ll never play a down for Michigan in your life!” It wasn’t the last time Bo made that threat.