idea. Tom Crean, Joani’s hus-
band, had moved from Marquette
to coach Indiana basketball
by then. Moving to Ann Arbor
would put him closer to all three
of his kids. “I remember making
that argument,” Jim Harbaugh
said. “And maybe resonating.”
Players Jack had coached in the
‘70s, and his colleagues on Bo
Schembechler’s staff, still lived in
the area. He could live next door
to his grandkids and see them
every day.
Making
the
decision,
Jack
thought about the sacrifices he
made while his own kids grew up.
Famously, Jim Harbaugh grew
up going to Michigan football
practices when his dad coached
defensive backs. Less famously,
Jack brought his kids to practic-
es at other stops along the road.
Almost never talked about is that
during those practices, Jack was
doing his job, not being a dad.
At Iowa, he made time with his
kids by occasionally bringing
them on Friday night recruiting
trips to Cedar Rapids. In the car,
he’d ask the questions parents
ask their elementary school-aged
kids — who’s your best friend,
how’s school. He’d turn the radio
off and listen as they told him
about the lives he sometimes
felt he was missing. Those are
the moments he values now, but
that time with his kids, he freely
admits, was often scant.
This, he decided, was a chance
to make up for it. In July 2016, he
moved to Ann Arbor, quietly tak-
ing a job as senior advisor to the
head coach.
“I look back on my years of coach-
ing, it goes 46 years and there
were days I would leave at 6 in
the morning, come home at 11
at night,” Jack Harbaugh said.
“The head coach of our family
was Jackie. And now I got a little
time on my hands to make up for
those times that I wasn’t around,
maybe around my kids. I’m get-
ting a second chance, and I’m not
gonna, hopefully, screw it up.”
Jim doesn’t see his father as an
absentee parent. He remembers
Jack stopping whatever he was
doing to help him with math
homework or throw a ball around
with his sister. “I just want to be
exactly like him,” Jim said. “...
The kind of dad that takes you
to ballgames, plays catch with
you, believes in you.” Jackie
always made sure they lived close
enough to wherever Jack was
coaching that he could make it
home for dinner, even if just for
an hour. During the offseason —
recruiting being less than the all-
encompassing job it is now — he
could spend more time with the
family.
When Jim and John played Ann
Arbor rec baseball, Jack coached.
He took the job seriously, going
on a recruiting spree and pick-
ing off talent from around town.
Years later, John rattles off half
the roster from memory — a left-
handed pitcher from Ypsilanti, a
catcher who couldn’t start on a
different team, a third baseman
who no one else wanted. “We
were like a magnet for all the mis-
fits,” John said. “We won.”
A local baseball team made up of
castoffs winning its league brings
with it an element of clichéd
romanticism, but there’s some-
thing to it. Jim pitched, usually
the three-inning maximum “and
usually it was nine pitches,” John
said. Unlike the kids’ Pop Warner
football games, which usually
fell on work days for Jack, this
was time the family could spend
together.
One year, Jim and John wanted
to try out for a hockey team and
were told they couldn’t because
football season was still going on.
Jackie says she told the person in
charge that her kids were 12 and
they would never be told to give
up something they wanted to try.
Football, she wants to make clear,
was never a preordained fate.
At the end of that Pop Warner
season, she says, a host of play-
ers including her sons tried out
for the hockey team and made
it anyway. She woke up at 5 a.m.
to drive them to practice and sat
behind the net, away from the
other parents who complained
about their kids’ playing time.
Jack managed to get to the games
on occasion and the team won
its league with Jim as a first-line
forward.
Still, football practices were for-
mative. Anyone who has spent
time around the family agrees
to that. There’s a reason they
were written about ad nauseam
when Jim took the Michigan
job in 2015. Jim and the rest of
the coaching staff’s kids played
around on a side field while the
team practiced and their fathers
coached. Jack drove his kids
home for dinner and they’d recap
the day, Jim and John enamored
by their interactions with star
players.
Even before that, Jim’s first mem-
ories are going to one of his dad’s
practices. “About five years old,”
Jim said, “And car rides home
from practice.”
When fall weekends came in
Ann Arbor, Jack would stay at
the team hotel and Jackie would
bring Jim and John to the stadi-
um. They both had jobs on game
days — Jim moved plugs from one
electrical outlet to the other. But
while Jim was on the sideline,
Jack sat in the press box. They
didn’t interact during games. “In
fact, I don’t even remember driv-
ing home with him,” Jack said.
Jim eventually made a career for
himself as an NFL quarterback
and later a coach. His schedule
aligned with Jack’s, though it
was just as busy. The family lived
in separate places surrounded
by separate teams, but they had
the offseasons, and when Jim
played for the Colts, it was only
a 3-hour drive to Western Ken-
tucky, where Jack coached, short
enough that he could come on
staff as an unpaid recruiting
assistant for the cash-strapped
program.
Jim had no office at Western
Kentucky’s football building, the
same as Jack at Michigan now.
He’d spend three or four weeks
during the winter on the road
recruiting Florida. For one or two
of those weeks, Jack estimates,
they’d go out together, waking up
at 7 a.m. and driving across the
Route 4 corridor — Orlando to
Tampa Bay, and all the talent-rich
high schools in between. They’d
go until 11 or so, then get up the
next day and do it again, build-
ing the nucleus of Jack’s program
together.
Jack put in 14-hour days running
Western Kentucky until leav-
ing for an administrative job at
Marquette after the 2002 season.
It’s impossible to know the effect
coaching for over 40 years had on
his health, but it’s easy enough to
infer that it wasn’t good. When
he told Jim after the 2004 season
that he wouldn’t return to his San
Diego staff, he put it in terms of
letting the bird fly away from the
nest. He says now that the game
had passed him by.
Still, though, he watches prac-
tice tape of both Michigan and
the Ravens and offers both sons
advice. When asked to posit why,
Jackie calls to her husband, sit-
ting nearby playing euchre on an
iPad, to get a direct answer. He
falls back on that cliché: that he’s
just trying to catch up to a game
that outran him. She laughs.
“Well that’s not a true answer.”
“... I think that he really does
it because he loves the game,”
Jackie said. “And he is learning
by doing it. And if he has sugges-
tions — he always says he never
gives suggestions unless he’s
asked — but I’ve known him to
give suggestions when he sees
something.”
The specifics of those conversa-
tions, though, remain private
between father and son. Jack
says he tries to be a fly on the wall
when sitting in Michigan’s foot-
ball meetings, and every player
interviewed for this story backed
up that description.
His presence in Schembechler
Hall is fairly quiet. Jack is around
for support, sitting in his chair
and willing to talk with anyone.
Players catch him sometimes in
Jim’s office, deep in conversa-
tion, and know he holds some
influence, but as far as they’re
concerned, he’s something like a
friend.
“Guys just come in and out and
are able to talk to somebody about
what’s going on in their lives,”
Noah Furbush, a linebacker from
2015-18, said. “You see that a lot
with Jack.”
Once Jim took the job at Michi-
gan, Jack spent a lot of time
around the program, even before
he moved. He’s always been a
presence in his sons’ football lives
— at Stanford, Jack was known
to find an empty office to go
over practice tape when he came
through town. Michigan’s play-
ers noticed little change when his
job became formal and he started
living in Ann Arbor, spending
days in a chair by Jim’s office.
The Jim Harbaugh of 2015
looked more like an overgrown
child than someone considering
mortality. He’s commonly carica-
tured as someone focused solely
on football, oblivious to the rest
of the world and tuned in only to
competition, and at no time in his
life was that image more promi-
nent.
5B
Read more at
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