Jim Harbaugh didn’t know if he was coming or going.
Exhausted to the purpose of collapse and parked within the driveway of his Oakland Hills dwelling, he briefly allowed himself to shut his eyes — was it for a minute? An hour? — earlier than jolting awake at 4 a.m. in a foggy panic. Had he simply returned from his round the clock job with the Oakland Raiders, or was he presupposed to be on his manner again?
Right here he was, a first-round decide from Michigan, a 15-year NFL veteran, and now a training grunt for the Silver & Black, able to do no matter was requested.
“I always remember him with the hair all over his head going everywhere,” recalled receiver Tim Brown. “The veteran guys on the team were saying, ‘Jimmy, you don’t have to do this, bro. There’s other ways you can make money. You don’t have to be in here.’ Because he was literally the guy printing the papers, working the copiers. We were like, ‘All right, if that’s what you want to do with your life then OK.’”
This was greater than 20 years earlier than Harbaugh turned coach of the Chargers, lengthy earlier than he established himself as a soccer fireman — a turnaround artist who revived applications on the College of San Diego, Stanford, the 49ers and Michigan. Now, recent off a season-opening victory over the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs, he’s making an attempt to do the identical in Los Angeles.
Harbaugh’s early teaching roots are related this week as a result of his 1-0 Chargers go to the Raiders on Monday evening.
All people’s bought to begin someplace, and in 2002, Harbaugh was on the backside of the meals chain in Oakland — the scrubbiest of scrubs, regardless of the title of quarterbacks coach.
“I’d come in at 6 a.m. and he’d already be there, and you knew he’d just gotten home three hours earlier,” quarterback Wealthy Gannon stated. “He came in and acted like an intern, like a quality-control coach. He did what anyone asked of him and did it with a sense of purpose and a selfless, humble attitude. I don’t know a lot of NFL quarterbacks that have had the success that he had who would humble themselves to say, ‘I’ll be the quarterbacks coach.’”
Harbaugh, with teaching in his DNA, had been hand-picked by legendary Raiders proprietor Al Davis and was decided to climb the ladder one rung at a time.
“Here’s your contract,” Davis informed him. “We’re going to pay you $50,000 a year, but the truth of the matter is you should be paying us.”
“He was right,” Harbaugh stated later. “It was like getting a doctorate degree.”
So there he sat, parked and bleary-eyed, a younger father getting his PhD in teaching, not sure whether or not to go inside and sleep or flip the truck round.
“I called my brother,” Harbaugh stated, referring to John Harbaugh, then the Eagles’ special-teams coordinator. “He had just gotten into the office. It was 7 a.m. on the East Coast. I just kind of took a pause there and figured it out.”
He pointed his Chevy Silverado down Broadway Terrace and drove again to work.
Raiders proprietor Al Davis watches from the aspect throughout a sport between the Los Angeles Raiders and Atlanta Falcons in September 1991.
(Jim Gund / Getty Photos)
Al Davis had lengthy believed Harbaugh would wind up with the Raiders.
In 1992, on the daybreak of free company, the quarterback was summoned to the Raiders’ headquarters in El Segundo. Davis outfitted him with a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers, assembled a gaggle of receivers and had the exercise videotaped.
“I loved it,” Harbaugh stated. “They taught me something about throwing go-routes that I kept for the rest of my career.”
Afterward, Davis invited him to dinner at The Palm in West Hollywood.
“You’re gonna be a Raidah some day,” Davis informed him.
He was proper.
Harbaugh returned to Chicago for an additional season, then moved on to Indianapolis, the place he earned the nickname “Captain Comeback.” However a decade later, recent off retirement, he interviewed for the quarterbacks-coaching job at Michigan and didn’t get it. Quickly after, he met once more with Davis, who nonetheless remembered the playoff upset Harbaugh engineered towards Kansas Metropolis — citing precise stats — and supplied him the Raiders job on the spot.
“You’re finally where you belong,” Davis informed him.
And Harbaugh believed it.
Fred Biletnikoff, who coached Raiders receivers, remembers Harbaugh as thorough, ready and no-nonsense.
“I don’t think I saw Jim smile at all,” he stated.
Harbaugh was studying on the fly.
“I felt 15 years behind,” he stated. “I literally didn’t know how to turn on my computer. I’d never had one before that.”
Jim Harbaugh throughout his stint as College of San Diego coach in November 2005.
(Lenny Ignelzi / Related Press)
The Raiders assigned him the laptop computer that had belonged to their earlier head coach, Jon Gruden, and it was overflowing with performs.
“He used a program called SuperPaint, a drawing tool, and I got about 20,000 drawings of every kind of run and pass play you can ever imagine. And it still works. I would copy and paste those things, but then I would just start drawing them myself to get the practice.”
Harbaugh nonetheless retains the outdated laptop computer in his Chargers workplace.
“I’ve always said it should go in the Jon Gruden Hall of Fame or something,” he stated.
Younger Harbaugh labored absurd hours, arriving on the Raiders facility earlier than daybreak on the Monday after a sport and routinely ready till Wednesday to going dwelling, stealing just a few winks on the ground beneath his desk whereas utilizing a balled-up sweatshirt as a pillow.
“It was like, 120, 125, 130 hours a week, right?” Harbaugh recalled. “One time I fell asleep at the team meeting, standing up. First time I ever fell asleep standing up.”
Harbaugh largely labored with the backup quarterbacks. He and starter Gannon had been friends, each drafted in 1987, and Gannon went on to change into the NFL’s Most Precious Participant in 2002. That left Harbaugh to deal with the reserves, typically operating Saturday quizzes on the sport plan. He’d write questions on strips of paper, toss them in a hat, and have the backups draw and reply them.
“We were running conditioning drills one time after practice, just our normal gassers routine,” stated Marques Tuiasosopo, former Raiders backup quarterback and now Detroit Lions offensive assistant. “He got on Rick Mirer and me because he didn’t think we were running fast enough. Jim was like, ‘I’m gonna beat you guys.’ We told him he was going to pull a hamstring.”
The three had been neck-and-neck for a lot of the dash earlier than, positive sufficient, Harbaugh suffered a pulled hamstring and needed to hop throughout the end line.
“We were like, ‘We told you, Jim,’” Tuiasosopo stated. “That pissed him off, and he finished like his life depended on it.”
Harbaugh strived for perfection, even within the phrases he selected.
At one level through the season, Davis handed him within the corridor and stated, “How you doing, Jim?”
“Pretty good, Mr. Davis, how are you?”
“How the … do you think I’m doing?” Davis snapped. “We just lost two in a row.”
For days, Harbaugh kicked himself for that. How might I be so dumb? Why’d I ask him how he was doing? So he thought of it and readied a correct response for subsequent time.
Two weeks later, they handed once more.
Lastly, redemption for Harbaugh.
“How you doing, Jim?”
“We’re fighting for our lives, Mr. Davis.”
“That’s all we can do, Jim. That’s all we can do.”
The College of San Diego got here calling for Harbaugh in 2004, and Davis wasn’t joyful when he realized about it.
“When I told him I was considering USD, he said, ‘I thought I brought you here to be a pro coach. You want to go to college,’” Harbaugh recalled. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. Davis, I studied your career and I know you started out as a college coach, and I wanted to emulate your career.’”
Davis winced.
“Yeah,” he stated, “but that was U-S-C, not U-S-D.”
Nonetheless, Harbaugh took the job and coached the Toreros to seasons of 7-4, 11-1 and 11-1.
At one level throughout that span, Davis referred to as and requested if he’d be enthusiastic about being head coach of the Raiders. The identical name got here when Harbaugh was teaching at Stanford.
Each occasions, Harbaugh stated he merely wasn’t prepared.
“He believed in me more than I believed in myself,” the coach stated.
Davis died in 2011, solely a month into Harbaugh’s first season as head coach in San Francisco. He wasn’t round to see his onetime tireless assistant coach restore the 49ers to glory — together with falling 5 yards shy of a Tremendous Bowl victory.
Now, Harbaugh is head coach of the Chargers, the place Davis was as soon as an assistant coach.
“I hated to see him go to the Chargers,” Biletnikoff stated. “Because from the beginning I said that now they’re going to be dangerous. He’s going to get that team rolling. That’s his history.”
