New York Times best-selling author John U. Bacon has released excerpt material from his new book to TheWolverine.com.
Bacon's new book, "Overtime — Jim Harbaugh And The Michigan Wolverines At The Crossroads Of College Football" is on sale now. Today we present a pair of excerpts from the book, including its introduction and material taken from the chapter "Growing Up Harbaugh."
Here is Bacon's introduction…
This excerpt is the complete introduction to John U. Bacon’s latest book, OVERTIME: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football, which came out September 3. His book tour is on his website, johnubacon.com
INTRODUCTION: WHY THIS BOOK
When I published Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football in 2015, I thought it would be my last book on the subject.
I had started a decade earlier by coauthoring a book with Bo Schembechler, Bo’s Lasting Lessons: The Legendary Coach Teaches the Timeless Fundamentals of Leadership. In it, Schembechler explained what Michigan football stood for, how it should be run— even if doing it the right way didn’t guarantee a national title— and the lessons the rest of us could apply to our own lives.
After Schembechler died in 2006 many people attached to Michigan football seemed to forget his principles, the program lost its way, and the sport itself seemed determined to self-destruct. That’s what I wrote about in my next three books.
Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football explored what happened when the Michigan football family fractured over a controversial coach. Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, a comparison of four Big Ten programs, warned what could happen if greed overcame
passion. Endzone showed how quickly even a venerable program like Michigan’s could falter when that happened.
In that unhappy epoch Michigan fans sensed that something larger than the Wolverines’ win- loss record was at stake. They feared the program’s traditional values of honesty, integrity, and a deeply shared sense of purpose were eroding. During that dark decade you could hear a common refrain among the Wolverine faithful: “This is not Michigan.”
* * *
I WAS BORN in University of Michigan Hospital, where my dad served on the pediatric faculty for decades. I’ve earned two degrees from the school, I occasionally teach there on the side, and I’ve reported on Michigan athletics for years. Yes, I love the place, without apology.
But I’ve had a few lover’s quarrels with my alma mater, and have never hesitated to call out the university’s leaders when things have gone awry. I’ve exhumed Fielding Yost’s racism in the mainstream press; investigated the Michigan basketball players’ high-end cars that led to an NCAA investigation; and explored the damaging, shortsighted decisions of a former Michigan athletic director, which cost me my press pass for two seasons.
I can’t say any of it was fun, but I can say I would do it all again. That’s because I believe a reporter can be loyal to an institution and still tell the truth about it. In fact, it’s that very loyalty that requires such honesty, or else we are being loyal to a false idol.
Throughout my research on Endzone, I saw thousands of Michigan devotees— students, faculty, lettermen, alumni, and fans— work tirelessly inside and outside the athletic department, often risking their financial well- being, their job security, or both, to right the ship in time to make a plausible pitch for Jim Harbaugh to return to Ann
Arbor. And against all odds, he did.
After Harbaugh restored the program’s foundation, I thought I was done writing books on Michigan football. But a couple of years after publication of Endzone, I saw a new story emerging.
THE HARBAUGH ERA raised a question no one was asking: What would happen if Michigan followed Schembechler’s bible once again and ran the program the right way, but fell short of a national title? How much would the faithful value what had been regained? Would it be enough for them to feel the program was worth following, supporting, even believing in again? I decided these questions demanded one more book.
I interviewed more than a hundred coaches, players, staffers, parents, and others connected to the program, some as many as a dozen times, from July 2018 to May 2019, filling more than a thousand pages of single-spaced notes. Unless otherwise noted, the interviews cited in this book are exclusive.
I wanted to find out how the whole machine worked when it was humming properly, from the head coach to the equipment manager. I wanted to see what the media’s two- dimensional caricature of Jim Harbaugh was missing.
I wanted to learn what a pivotal season looked like from the players’ perspective, and what it meant to them— not just as athletes, but as human beings.
Finally, I wanted to see if the sport’s rewards outweighed its risks for those young men who make those decisions, and those sacrifices.
This book is the product of that search.
This excerpt is derived from Chapter 8, “Growing Up Harbaugh,” in John U. Bacon’s latest book, OVERTIME: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football, which came out September 3. His book tour is on his website, johnubacon.com
CHAPTER 8
GROWING UP HARBAUGH
1973–1977
What Karan Higdon said about Shea Patterson in 2018 was just as true of Jim Harbaugh forty years earlier: if you’re going to play quarterback at Michigan, you better think you’re the best. Harbaugh believe that long before anyone else did.
The Harbaugh brothers learned the game by playing in backyards, schoolyards, junior football fields, and alongside one of college football’s best teams— a life-altering experience.
“My impressions of Bo started when I was nine years old,” Jim told me a few years ago, “and my dad was a secondary coach on his staff. During practice, the coaches’ kids played our own game of football, and whenever an errant kick or pass landed on Bo’s field, he’d blow his whistle and scream, ‘Get those damn kids off my field!’ ”
“Quarterbacks are a special breed,” Schembechler told Mitch Albom for their book, Bo. “They need to be cocky, and the cockiest I ever had was probably Jim Harbaugh. You know how he got that way? By hanging around my practice field as a kid, waiting for his dad, Jack, to finish work . . . Even then, [he] was a devil, running on the field when he shouldn’t, playing with his friends.”
Jim’s brother John remembered it, too. Ohio State week, 1975, was one of the most pressurized of Schembechler’s career. Michigan hadn’t beaten Ohio State since 1971 and hadn’t lost or tied to anyone else in six years.
“We were out there on that little side turf where they worked the offensive line,” John Harbaugh told me. “We were playing with the other coaches’ kids, three on three. Well, the ball goes flying onto the practice field, into the starting backfield. Not good. I look at Jim, and just give him the nod, and he knows he’s the anointed one. He was probably the one who kicked it over there. So he goes and gets the ball, and Bo sees him and yells, ‘HARBAUGH! GET YOUR DAMN KID OFF THE FIELD!’ ”
“I think he was ten years old,” Schembechler told Albom. “So, for the record, that is the youngest I ever yelled at one of my quarterbacks.”
Far from offended, young Jim delighted in the attention— any attention— from this godlike figure. When Schembechler would run into young Jim in the hallway, he would say, “You’re a cocky little guy, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes, I guess,” Jim would say.
But years later Harbaugh told me, with a wistful grin, “No matter what he had to say to you, it always felt great to be noticed by Bo.”
John was two grades ahead of Jim, but only fifteen months apart, and Jim soon became taller and bigger. Everybody remembered Jim always played with John and his friends.
“There was never a question,” John told me. “Jim wasn’t tagging along. He was part of our group.”
Competing with the older boys required Jim to adapt to survive.
“If you’re a young kid and want so much to be a part of your brother’s gang,” Jack Harbaugh told me, “you need to develop your confidence. I think that’s where the cockiness came in. Jim had to believe he could keep up.
“Jim was always the guy who could wear his welcome out in elementary school— and even here at Michigan. But the guy who always brought him back and grounded him was John.”
Jim was a solid if unspectacular student, more interested in athletics than academics, with one notable exception: history.
His fifth-grade teacher at St. Francis, Mrs. Hiller, sparked a lifelong passion for the subject. To this day Harbaugh readily quotes Churchill, and if you drop a line from John Adams— “Facts are stubborn things”— he will start a conversation about Paul Giamatti playing the second president in the HBO series on him, which Harbaugh devoured.
“Mrs. Hiller was a really great teacher,” Jackie Harbaugh said. “She kept the kids interested and attentive. That to me is one of the signs of a great teacher: she could get them hooked lots of ways, instead of just reading the textbook. She might have been the first person who really believed in Jim, academically.”
They would need that ally when the principal phoned Jackie to tell her she and four other parents were being called in because their sons were too loud. When she got there, she saw the principal looking as grim as a doctor prepared to deliver a horrible diagnosis. When she noticed she was the only parent summoned by the principal and the P.E. teacher, she asked, “Where’s everyone else?”
“We want to talk about Jim being too competitive in the field,” he said. It was an ambush.
“Is he being mean or hurting the other kids?” Jackie asked.
“No,” he said.
“Is he cheating?”
“No.”
“Then what’s wrong with being competitive?” Jackie asked. “You’re not going to make Jim less competitive. That’s not going to happen.”
She then turned to the P.E. teacher. “And you of all people should be the first to defend him!”
The teacher sat there, motionless and mute.
Jackie was taking the long view: trying to avoid as many current problems as possible, while not stunting the traits that she believed would allow her son to succeed years later.
Jim took his mom’s advice to heart.
“Tiger” Ray Howland played baseball with Harbaugh at Tappan Junior High School.
“Jim came over to my house a lot to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs, and we’d have table hockey tournaments,” he recalled. “But Jim could never just play to play. Nothing could be just for fun. He always had to keep score, and there always had to be a clock. So I got an egg timer from upstairs, and we went at it. We’re jamming the table around pretty good when we knocked a lamp over. Jim catches it, onehanded, at the exact same moment he says, ‘Stop the clock!’ He put the lamp back and we resumed play. That was Jim.”
Harbaugh’s uncommon talent, world- class competitiveness, and unapologetic swagger could alienate people, but I’ve never witnessed nor heard anyone say Jim Harbaugh tormented anyone, played dirty, or cheated. Almost everyone who got to know Harbaugh well described him as surprisingly vulnerable, genuine, and kind.
“I mainly remember being impressed Jim often befriended guys who weren’t always popular,” Tappan teammate Brian Weisman recalls, “guys who often had some issue they were trying to overcome— which belied Jim’s ‘Big Man on Campus’ image.”
When I mentioned this insight to Harbaugh, he replied with a self-effacing grin, “I wasn’t a real popular guy either, so maybe those guys were doing me the favor.”
Niel Rishoi, a neighbor and classmate, remembers being one of those “different kids” Harbaugh took under his wing. “I had a hearing impairment, and a lisp that went with it, and I felt like I didn’t fit in. Jim lived in my neighborhood, and I used to run into him walking home after school, and he was always— always— unfailingly nice to me.”
“I’ve no doubt, that internally, at least, Jim felt lonely at times because he was so... almost alienatingly different from everyone else in his midst. But that usually happens to people who are not conventionally normal.”
The American playwright and painter Lorraine Hansberry said, “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
“Jim thought bigger, wider in scope, keener in focus, than just about anyone I knew at that time,” Rishoi said. “People like that are not normal. Even if Jim had not become famous, he’d still be the person people remembered most vividly from school. Harbaugh wasn’t a ripple in a pond; he was a meteor that caused a tsunami in the ocean.
“Jim is right where he wants to be, and what was evident early on panned out exactly the way he wanted it to.”
---
• Talk about this article inside The Fort
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, The Wolverine
• Sign up for our newsletter, The Wolverine Now
• Follow us on Twitter: @TheWolverineMag, @Balas_Wolverine, @EJHolland_TW, @AustinFox42, @JB_ Wolverine and @DrewCHallett
• Like us on Facebook
