[Ed-Seth: If you like Harbaugh stories and want to support #ChadTough, read on.
Take This Job & Love It! is a collection of Jim Harbaugh yarns from his friends, family, coaches, teammates, and former players. A small sample of contributors: Shemy Schembechler, Jon Falk, Todd Anson, Jamie Morris, Jerry Hanlon, Bump Elliott, Mike Ditka, and Tappan Junior High coach/Phys Ed teacher Rob Lillie. The book is only available in Michigan stores or online.
The author Rich Wolfe is an old friend of Jack Harbaugh, and he’s written 50 other quasi-biographies like this, where he goes around to his subject’s friends and prints their stories. One is on Tom Brady, before that first Super Bowl.
For this one he called me with an idea: post an excerpt on the blog, and if anyone bought the book from that we’d donate 100% of the proceeds to #ChadTough. So here’s a few bits from a long section titled “A Roomie With a View” by former Michigan player and Harbaugh roommate Jerry Quaerna. If you’d like more, head to www.chadtoughharbaughbook.com. Or you can find it in some stores in Michigan but it’ll be more expensive that way.]
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Excerpts from ‘A Roomie With a View’
By Jerry Quaerna (at right)
1. YOUR DADROCK IS UNACCEPTABLE
I was recruited to play football at Michigan. When I went there, Jim was my roommate. Jim and I were paired up as freshmen. We didn’t know each other. Then we lived together as fifth-year seniors. I got to see Jim before he was a big star and after he was big time. I had a long trip over from Wisconsin. I got unpacked, and I was sleeping on my bed in the dorm when Jim showed up with Jim Minick. He grew up with Minick in Ann Arbor. Minick spent 26 years in the Marines and is now Jim’s right-hand man on his Michigan staff.
I woke up and introduced myself to these guys. What was the first thing Jim did? This was back in the day. This was ’82. We had LPs. I was into music, and I had about 20 LPs and my turntable. Those were going to go out the window in three or four years, but I had a nice collection of vinyl there.
After Jim shook my hand, he went straight to my vinyl collection, and he critiqued it. I’m not kidding you. I had good stuff. I had the Doors, I had Jimi Hendrix. I had plenty of Beatles. I’m a big Beatles fan. Jethro Tull. I had Hot Rocks from the Stones. I loved that album. I had Black Sabbath. I had some great independent records. I had some Priest.
Jim is going through my records, and he’s saying, “Yep, no, yep, no. Doors, no. Beatles, nope. Jethro Tull, no.” When he’s done critiquing my collection, he goes, “You don’t have any Who.”
[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of this and some other stories, or hit THE LINK to get them all]
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Within a week or two, Jim and I had a very heated argument over who would be a better front man. He was a big Who fan, and he was a big Roger Daltrey fan. I loved Led Zeppelin. I’m thinking of course Robert Plant is a better singer than Roger Daltrey, and Jim is taking the opposite side of that debate. The thing you’ve got to understand is when it’s on and it’s go time and you’re defending your position—it’s on. I’m sure this resonates down the road with some of his coaching staffs and all. It’s an all out heated conversation. There wasn’t any “let’s just agree to disagree.”
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When Jim walked into the dorm room that first time, I was sleeping—taking a nap before our first big meeting with Bo. Of course, what happened at that meeting is legendary, because Minick dropped off Jim late. He was about 10 minutes late to our very first freshman meeting. Jim didn’t just get his butt chewed, he was disemboweled in front of the whole freshman class. Seriously, it was just a butt chewing. That evening, Jim and I were back at the room. I was trying to console the guy somewhat over this complete disemboweling in front of the freshman class. Jim had a wooden closet next to his bed. He was pounding on this closet and dropping some choice expletives.
Here I was, four hours into Michigan football, thinking, what did I get myself into? That was Day One.
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2. JOHN WOULD TAKE THE LEAD; JIM WOULD TAKE THE BALL
We had just finished with Rose Bowl practices, and we were going to fly out to California on Christmas Day. But we had the 23rd and 24th for vacation time. Everybody got to go home. I was too far away, and the people that were too far away could stay at a hotel. That would have been fine. But Jim offered to have me go home to Kalamazoo and spend Christmas with his family for two days. Yeah, I don’t want to be stuck in a hotel. Sure, I’ll go home with you 90 miles to Kalamazoo.
So we got there, and I met the Harbaugh family. Very hospitable. Very tight. I got to meet John for the first time. John is different from Jim. John is a little more laid-back. He’s more of a diplomat. Jim is more fiery.
We were having a big debate in the basement. Jack was there, John was there, I was there, Jim was there. What were we discussing? We were discussing if the game were on the line, do you want to be behind and have the ball or do you want to be ahead and be on defense? We’re getting into this knockdown, drag out thing. I knew what position I was going to take. Jim phrased it, in the heat of the moment. He said, “Here’s the situation. It’s the biggest game. It’s the Super Bowl. Do you want the ball and be behind to win the game? Or do you want your defense out there with the lead?” I said, of course, I wanted the defense. Defense wins championships.
I gave him that whole spin. John agreed with me. He wanted the lead, and he wanted the defense out on the field. Jim was doing cartwheels, because he took the opposite side of that debate. He said, “I want the ball.” Now remember, he phrased this one, “The game is on the line, and it’s the Super Bowl.” We were going back and forth, and it was heated. Jack was sitting right there, but he wasn’t chiming in. He was just sitting back and enjoying it. He was soaking it up.
Here was when it went really ugly for me. I was ready to just throw it out and sink Jim’s ship. We were debating fiercely. I said, “All right, Jim … what just happened with your boy Elway, perhaps the greatest college quarterback who has ever played the game? Why didn’t he go to any bowl games? It wasn’t because they weren’t scoring points. It was because they weren’t stopping people.” I was thinking, okay, that was a point for me. The place got real quiet. Deathly quiet. Jim and John both looked at me, stared at me and said, “Damn, that’s just cold, Q.” Okay, I just won the debate. What’s so cold about that?
Unbeknownst to me, Jack was the defensive coordinator for Stanford for Elway’s sophomore and junior years. Here I was, being taken care of really well by this family, and I just threw my foot in my mouth big time. I’ll never forget that moment in my entire life. I had the debate won, and the next thing you know, those guys are looking at me and the conversation just ended. On a dime.
[For the record, here’s what Pro-Football-Reference.com’s win probability calculator said about the 49ers’ chances in Super Bowl 47:
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3. YOUR PHILOSOPHY CLASS IS UNACCEPTABLE
One thing about living with Jim was what you see, that’s reality. What you see on the sideline, that’s reality. It’s not an act. I was more of a guy of let’s just leave it on the field, let’s go back to the dorm and lick our wounds and get ready for the next day. But a lot of times, it was almost like we were shark fetuses sharing a womb in the South Quad for a year. It was just like that. You had to be on, and every opinion was contested.
One time Mike Reinhold—Reiny—and I came back from a freshman philosophy class, a philosophy of religion class. We had to write a paper on the pros and cons—the strong suits and the weak points—of the atheist perspective. Reiny and I were in the dorm. Jim was doing his thing. He wasn’t part of that class. Reiny and I were ripping on point A, point B, point C, point D. Then for the other side of the equation, we had point A, B, C and D. Well, Jim joined the conversation. He was so displeased with the pro-atheist side that he had a conniption.
He barged right in on the conversation and laid down the law according to Jim. “There was a God, and the atheists are wrong. They’re wrong because of X, Y and Z!” He wasn’t even part of the class, and here he was, getting into a heated discussion about atheism. He just jumped right in and called them out and said that it ain’t happening.
Jim was pretty darned mad with that whole atheist debate. There was smoke coming out of his ears. He wanted nothing to do with hearing the “pros” of an atheist. Reiny and I were looking at each other, like, oh, wow. He was pretty hot. And he was only a freshman.
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4. COULD YOU BEAT HIM FOR ME?
I have one story about women and Jim that you can print. I’ve got a lot of them, but I’ve got one that you can print. Jim had a girlfriend when we were fifth-year seniors. Her name was Linda, but we called her Lindy. She was marvelous. Well, Jim and Lindy would play a lot of chess games to pass the time, and Jim had a little plastic cardboard box chess set that he kept in his room. I had a marble chess set that I purchased down in Tijuana when we were down there for the Holiday Bowl. I brought it back on the plane. It was big and had hand-carved pieces. I’ve still got it. I had that chess set out at all times.
There was one time when Lindy came to see me after getting annihilated by Jim for the millionth straight time. She pleaded with me, “Q, will you play Jim in chess? You can beat him. He’s getting too cocky.” I said, “Yeah, okay, Lindy. Send him in. I’ll b---- slap him for you.
Jim sat down.
The thing you have to understand about my hand-carved chess set is that if you weren’t really familiar with it, the bishops and pawns had very similar shapes. The bishops were just a little bit taller. It was easy to not distinguish between the two, unless you were experienced with the set. What I did was—as soon as I could—move my bishops up into the second rank, so that they looked like pawns.
The first time I struck with those bishops, he said, “Are you serious? You can’t move a pawn like that.” I said, “That’s a bishop.” “Are you serious? You’re going to take that?” I said, “Hell, yes, I am.”
We proceeded, and it was beautiful. All of a sudden, the game was going south for Jim, because I was striking from my second row with my bishops and taking his knights. He was getting all heated. “You can’t do that! That’s a pawn!” I said, “That’s a bishop.” I won those games, a couple of them.
Lindy was thrilled. But I have to say—to be honest—there was a little home-cooking going on, a little home court advantage.
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5. SHEMY’S NERF
The relationship between Bo and Jim was pretty special. Did you ever hear what Reiny and Harbaugh did to Shemy’s Nerf football? Shemy was Bo’s son, just a little rugrat running around the complex, and he felt pretty comfortable in there.
Shemy always had his football with him. So Reiny and Harbaugh stole the Nerf football. They took some white athletic tape, and they crawled on top of our lockers in the freshmen locker room—we had a freshmen locker room and then there was the varsity locker room. There were a bunch of pipes on the ceiling, and Reiny and Harbaugh took the athletic tape and they taped his Nerf football to the tallest pipe that they could find. It was probably 12 or 13 feet off the ground. The poor kid couldn’t get it, so he ran down and got his old man, dragged his old man down to the freshmen locker room, and there is the Nerf football taped to a pipe near the ceiling.
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Bo and Jim had similar personalities. If you had an opinion that differed from either one of those two, you had better be ready to defend it with vigor. Even if you did, most likely, if it differed from their opinion, you were wrong. Or so it would seem. There wasn’t a whole lot of “let’s agree to disagree” going on back then.
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6. IS HE TAKING THE COLTS JOB?
Jim is going to do well as Michigan’s head coach. I’ve got an email chain with Reiny and another buddy, Rick Peterson, who we went to school with. Two weeks before the announcement from Jim, there was vigorous conjecture going on in the email chain among the three of us.
I wrote, “You know what guys? I think he’s coming.” They were like, “Why do you think he’s coming?” I wrote, “The thing that stands out is that Jim is smart enough to know—and he’s diplomatic enough to know—that his name is bandied about for this gig. If he isn’t interested, he’d have backed off immediately, just out of courtesy to Jim Hackett and his search committee. He’d say, ‘I’m going to stay in the NFL’ or, ‘I’m going to go to x, y or z college.’ He’s said nothing. His silence speaks volumes to me. He hasn’t said no. He hasn’t discounted the option.”
It would have been a lousy situation for him to have gone and left Hackett dangling for two or three weeks, if he knew all along that he wasn’t going to go. I interpreted his silence as he’s coming, guys.
You put some other perspective in there. Jim loved Stanford, because he was out there when he was in high school. He coached there. Jim’s team for the NFL was the 49ers. He coached there. What’s the next rung in that ladder? Don’t think for a moment that coaching at Michigan is a step down, because it’s one of the best gigs going out there, period. Coaching at Michigan is as big as any NFL gig you’re going to name, in my opinion. This completes his equation. It would be nice to see him coach at Michigan for a good 15 years. It’s going to be fantastic.