Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  In 2012, Jim guided the 49ers back to the NFC Championship Game, where they beat the Atlanta Falcons to advance to Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans. Their opponent? The Baltimore Ravens, naturally. It was a truly historic occasion—two brothers facing off in the biggest sporting event on the planet. Jim and John did their best to downplay the obvious storyline, but it didn’t work. As the relatives started pouring into Louisiana, John found himself trying to figure out which cousins or uncles were rooting for whom. “It was kind of interesting to see where everyone was lining up,” he says.

  During pregame warm-ups in the Superdome, John tried to approach Jim on the field as he would do with any other opposing coach, but Jim kept avoiding him. Eventually, John started chatting with 49ers kicker David Akers, whom he had coached in Philadelphia. That got Jim’s attention. He walked over to John and said, “Why are you distracting my kicker?”

  “I’m going to talk to you or your kicker,” John replied. “Let me know which one.”

  So Jim stayed and exchanged a few words, and the two shook hands. When Jim tried to turn away, John pulled him back and said, “Gimme a hug, man.” Jim obliged him, briefly.

  Super Bowl XLVII was memorable for many reasons. The Ravens took a 28–6 lead early in the third quarter, and it appeared the game was going to become a laugher. But the action was interrupted by a power outage in the Louisiana Superdome. That led to an uncomfortable 34-minute delay. The hiatus seemed to stall the Ravens’ momentum, and when play resumed, the 49ers went on a tear and cut the lead to five points. They had a chance to take the lead with under two minutes to play, but on fourth and goal from the five-yard line, Ravens cornerback Jimmy Smith appeared to hold Niners receiver Michael Crabtree, preventing him from making an attempt at a catch. That ended San Francisco’s drive and enabled the Ravens to escape with a 34–31 win.

  Inside a swarm of clicking cameras, the Harbaugh brothers shook hands and barely embraced. Jim took off. Their parents had been invited to come down to the field with a few minutes to go, but they didn’t want to miss the final moments, so it took them a while to reach John and his family. When they climbed onto the podium for the trophy presentation, they took a place next to Grandpa Joe, a ninety-six-year-old immigrant from Italy who had never graduated from high school, and who was now standing amid falling confetti as one of his grandsons received the Vince Lombardi Trophy from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

  Once the celebration ended, Jack and Jackie went back to the 49ers’ locker room. Jim was sitting in an office by himself not wanting to see anyone, but when he heard his father was around, he asked him to be brought in. Jack walked into the room to find his younger son sitting behind a desk, his lip quivering. Jim’s wound was still very fresh, the callus yet to be formed.

  “You saw it, didn’t you?” Jim said.

  “Saw what?” Jack asked.

  “The last play. He held him. You saw it.”

  There was no good answer. “If I say he held him, I’ve demeaned my oldest son who just won the Super Bowl, and I can’t do that,” Jack told me. “If I tell Jim that he didn’t hold him, that they aren’t going to call that on a fourth down at the end of the Super Bowl, that’s not good with what we’re discussing right here. So I thought to myself, You can’t say anything.”

  Eventually the players and coaches packed up their stuff and headed for the buses. Jack and Jackie climbed aboard and took a seat toward the front. So did Joani and her husband, Tom Crean, who was then the basketball coach at Indiana. Finally, Jim came on board with Sarah and their kids. His son Jimmy took the seat next to him. As the bus pulled away, Jim put his arm around his son’s shoulder, and Jimmy rested his head on his dad’s chest.

  Jackie had said as little as possible to her son in the aftermath of the game. She had been around football coaches long enough to know that the less said after a painful loss, the better. But she was moved by the empathy her grandson showed his dad. When they climbed off the bus, she finally spoke up. “The best moment of the game for me was seeing your son show you that he understands how you feel,” Jackie said to Jim. “Win or lose, it still comes back to family.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Losing hurts Jim Harbaugh, but it doesn’t crush him. He’s way too persistent for that. He put it to me this way: “There’s a quote from one of my favorite books, The Old Man and the Sea. ‘A man can be destroyed but he can’t be defeated.’ That resonates with me.”

  He proved that to be true in the 2013 season, when Harbaugh took the 49ers back to the NFC Championship Game, where they lost to a Seattle Seahawks team that was coached by his old nemesis, Pete Carroll. Despite the loss, Harbaugh’s record in San Francisco was truly amazing. He had come to a franchise that had missed the playoffs for eight straight seasons, and during his first three years on the job he took the 49ers to three NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl. Under normal circumstances, that would earn a coach a lifetime contract. But one year later, the team forced Harbaugh out.

  How could something that was going so well turn sour so quickly? First and foremost there was Harbaugh’s tetchy relationships with Jed York, the team owner, and general manager Trent Baalke. Harbaugh was never the type to work well with heavy-handed bosses. Sure, in a university setting he had to answer to an athletic director, chancellor, and president, but they rarely meddled in the program. In San Francisco, Harbaugh had no compunction about walking into Baalke’s office early in the morning and demanding that something be changed immediately. Diplomacy has never been his forte. Things eventually got so bad between them that he and Baalke would reportedly ride the elevator together without being able to make eye contact. York later said there was a “rawness” between Harbaugh and Baalke that infected the entire franchise.

  In such a poisonous environment, small slights become big problems. When the team held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to commemorate the opening of Levi’s Stadium, Harbaugh arrived in his practice attire (read: khakis and sneakers) and then left after a short stay. That became a “thing” in the press. So did Harbaugh’s repeated refusals to sign a contract extension, which led the 49ers to try to engineer a trade that would have ended with him coaching the Cleveland Browns. When the team suffered a few losses to start the 2014 season—including one in the preseason to John’s Ravens—Harbaugh noticed that the media coverage, which had been so glowing in the past, turned sharply negative, with quotes attributed to anonymous sources casting him in a bad light.

  It’s also apparent that some of Harbaugh’s players grew tired of his act. It was one thing when he was in college and dealing with young players who were less inclined to challenge the head coach’s authority. In San Francisco, the players were grown professionals who didn’t always take kindly to things like Harbaugh’s decision to ban music and card games on flights because he wanted them to focus on the game. Alex Boone, a 49ers offensive lineman (and Ohio State graduate) who had praised Harbaugh’s enthusiasm while he was the coach there, had a far less flattering take during an interview for HBO’s Real Sports after Harbaugh got the boot. “I think he just pushed guys too far,” Boone said. “He wanted too much, demanded too much, expected too much. You know, ‘We gotta go out and do this. We gotta go out and do this. We gotta go out and do this.’ And you’d be like, ‘This guy might be clinically insane. He’s crazy.’ . . . He kind of wore out his welcome.”

  If being too demanding is a crime, then Harbaugh will happily plead guilty. “I take full responsibility and I apologize for none of it,” he told me. “When you’re a coach or a leader of an organization, you really want to build a ball team, as simple as that sounds. We had a great ball team. Tiny things came up that [management] disagreed with that were irrelevant. If I told you the little things they got upset about—like who got the credit. Who cares? It doesn’t matter. That’s not relevant. It’s about being a ball team.”

  The speculation surrounding Harbaugh’s status eng
ulfed the team during the 2014 season. After the 49ers slogged their way to an 8–8 finish, the team issued a press release claiming they had reached a “mutual” decision to part ways. Harbaugh refused to toe the inauthentic party line. “I was told I wouldn’t be the coach anymore,” he said. “I didn’t leave the 49ers. I felt like the 49er hierarchy left me.”

  He had no shortage of suitors, but one in particular stood out. Three weeks before, his alma mater, Michigan, had fired its head coach, Brady Hoke, following a 5–7 season. Some folks at the school were still annoyed with Harbaugh for making a typically candid comment eight years before suggesting that Michigan cut corners academically for its football players. Still, there was never a doubt whether the school wanted its favorite son to return. The only question was whether Harbaugh wanted to go back to coaching in college. As it turned out, the tug of the Big House, the legacy of Bo Schembechler (who had died in 2006), and the fond memories he had from spending six years of his childhood—not to mention a seven-year contract that paid him $5 million annually and included a $2 million signing bonus—tipped the balance. On December 30, 2015, Harbaugh was introduced as the head football coach at the University of Michigan. He was home again.

  * * *

  • • •

  As usual, Harbaugh alighted with the subtlety of a tornado. It started with the very first spring practice. Normally a coach will put his players through meetings and video work before sending them on the field, but Harbaugh used the field for the entire four hours. It was a callback to the knowledge he got from Grandpa Joe: You can either teach ’em to do something, or you can show ’em what to do and then let ’em do it.

  Michigan opened the 2015 season with a loss at Utah, but from there the Wolverines won nine out of ten games, returned to the national rankings for the first time in two years, and walloped No. 19 Florida in the Citrus Bowl, 41–7. The winning continued in 2016, when Michigan entered the top five of the Associated Press’s national rankings for the first time in nine years and opened with nine straight wins, including a 78–0 thumping of Rutgers. After stubbing their toe at Iowa, they entered their annual showdown with Ohio State ranked No. 3 with a chance to play their way into the four-team College Football Playoff. The game was decided in the second overtime, when the Buckeyes benefited from a controversial spot by the referees that gave them a late first down. That set up the winning score. Speaking to reporters afterward, Harbaugh didn’t mince words. “I’m bitterly disappointed with the officiating,” he said. The Big Ten fined him $10,000 for those comments. He paid but never apologized.

  In many respects, Harbaugh has been a breath of fresh air for college football. While a handful of coaches have taken to Twitter to promote their programs, Harbaugh has been borderline Trumpian in his use of the social media platform. From his @CoachJim4UM account, he has thrown rocks at beehives like Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith, Alabama coach Nick Saban, Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, Tennessee coach Butch Jones, and Georgia coach Kirby Smart, among others. “For every tweet that makes it out there, there are a hundred that don’t because of me,” Sarah says. “I’m the type that tries to avoid conflict. I want people to like me, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to ever sit back and let people speak an untruth.”

  Unlike most football coaches, Harbaugh has shown a willingness—an eagerness, even—to apply his talents to subjects beyond the football field. For example, he has recently become a staunch advocate for the Legal Services Corporation, a publicly funded nonprofit that provides civic legal aid to poor people. Harbaugh is not one to speak on things he doesn’t know about. He has attended several LSC meetings and acquired a deep well of knowledge about what it does and why its work is so important. His celebrity platform was especially useful in early 2017 when it was revealed that President Trump planned to eliminate funding for the LSC from his budget. I was warned by a media colleague that if I brought this topic up to Harbaugh, it would be hard to get him to stop talking about it. I did, and it was, but it was fascinating to hear him delve into detail about the challenges that the working poor face in the American legal system. “People try to stop you from talking about this stuff,” he told me. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, it’s complicated.’ It’s not complicated. It’s simple and there’s a better way to do it. All of this would work better if you ran it like a football team, instead of half the team trying to undermine the other half all the time.”

  This is what it is like to spend a couple of hours inside Jim Harbaugh’s mind. His thoughts race every which way, but when they land, they land. It’s like the time he was driving to work as the coach at Stanford and pulled over for thirty minutes because he was so fascinated with the way a traffic cop was doing her job. That process of letting his mind go where it wants, focusing only on the things that truly matter, and casting off everything else as drag—that’s the way he brings his teams together. Harbaugh disdains the notion that there is some big secret to coaching, a neat little list of tricks that can be inputted into a spreadsheet. “People try to ask you, ‘Tell me the key thing.’ There is no one thing,” he told me. “It’s a thousand little things that are going to add up and make all the difference. Should this outroute be running nine yards? Should we roll it to twelve? It’s so many things. And you’ve got to be right about 95 percent of the time. No one is going to be 100 percent on their decision making, but you should strive to get an A. If you’re not in the mid-high 90s, then people aren’t going to follow you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Jack Harbaugh has his own little office inside Bo Schembechler Hall. It’s located just a few feet from the head coach’s work space. Jack is free to attend just about any practice or meeting, which he has done often since he and his wife moved to Ann Arbor permanently in the summer of 2016. Jim frequently asks his father for suggestions, but just as often Jack will be enlightened by something Jim has said and jot it down on a notepad. He doesn’t have a team to coach anymore, but old habits die hard. “I had a very average career,” Jack said. “I would have been a better coach if I had been able to know Jim and John and study them back then.”

  Besides giving Jack proximity to practices, living in Ann Arbor allows them to spend time with Jim’s seven children, four of whom he has had with Sarah, whom he married in 2008. The latest addition came in January 2017, his son John. Life as Jim Harbaugh’s wife is every bit the whirlwind as one might imagine. He may have a brilliant football mind, but he has no idea how to hang a picture on a wall. He often leaves his car with the motor running and the door open. He misplaces his cell phone and wallet with regularity. Cooking for himself is out of the question. He also suffers from sleep apnea, which he tries to make up for by downing Diet Cokes and chewing tobacco all day long. And let’s just say he is not exactly meticulous when it comes to washing his underwear. It’s a little gross, but then again, it makes it easier to pack for trips. Jim can be gone from home for days at a time and bring only a toothbrush that he stashes in the pocket of his sweatshirt.

  “He’s distracted all the time,” Sarah told me. “He goes into what I call ‘Football World,’ and there’s really no breaking through it. He has a brilliant football mind, but he just doesn’t have room in his head for the easy stuff. I treat him now like he’s my child.”

  Still, there is no question he is a doting dad, just like Jack was. When Jim was still playing in the NFL and started having children, he made the mistake of listening to people who cautioned against pushing his kids into sports. “People said, ‘You don’t want them to be in your shadow all the time,’” he said. “I backed off for a little bit, but then I noticed it’s easier for kids to quit or not be good. You’ve got to demand that they don’t quit and that they are practicing.”

  He went on to tell me of a recent experience he had with his daughter Addy, who is seven years old. One day she came home from basketball practice, and Jim asked her who was the best player on her team. “Our coach says it doe
sn’t matter who’s the best,” Addy replied. “Everybody’s the same.”

  “Well, Addy, I don’t think everybody’s the same,” Jim said. “And it matters to me that you’re the best player on the team.”

  So Jim took his daughter to a court and started teaching her the fundamentals of basketball. He showed her how to dribble, how to shoot, how to box out for rebounds. She may have gotten a few blisters on her feet, but she got better. Whereas she used to turn her back when a missed shot came her way, Addy learned to beat her opponents into position and aggressively pursue the ball. Instead of getting rid of the ball as soon as it came to her, she learned to make plays for herself and her teammates. She may not have become the very best on her team, but she was close. All it took was a little coaching and a lot of determination. Acceleration, balance, confidence.

  I asked Harbaugh if he was concerned that by pushing his daughter to practice like that, he might turn off her desire to play. “Well, we made it fun,” he said. He further explained that when he is recruiting, he prefers players whose parents are hands-on when it comes to their development. “It just seems those players are better than the ones whose parents aren’t involved,” he told me.

  I was reluctant to probe Jim on his relationship with his brother, figuring he has been asked so many questions on the topic that he would be turned off. But that was the one time when Jim was at his most disarming. “If I could wish anything for you or anybody else, it would be to have a friend like John in your life,” he said. “Not just a friend you’ve had the last six months or the last year, but someone you grew up with. We shared the same room for sixteen years. Anytime we ever got into a kerfuffle, within minutes or hours we were laughing again. I couldn’t wish anything better for somebody than to have that.”