I just knew Jim Harbaugh would end up where he is now, 10 yards downfield from me on a fall Thursday afternoon, playing catch. No way could he resist.
He’s wearing his usual outfit — black 49ers sweatshirt over a black 49ers T-shirt, black 49ers hat and cheap khakis with a can of dip protruding from the back pocket — and not showing signs of the tension I’m here to explore: why, exactly, his methods seem to have a shelf life.
San Francisco coach Jim Harbaugh is known to be competitive even when just playing catch. AP Photo/Matt Slocum
His talent at turning losers into winners is matched only by his propensity to piss off people in the process. He’s in his fourth year with the 49ers, a team that before he arrived was in a decade-long morass. But after three NFC Championship Game appearances and a close loss in Super Bowl XLVII, the team seems to have all but concluded that unless this season ends with a championship, Harbaugh’s way of winning is probably unsustainable.
Many successful coaches can be jerks, of course. But in San Francisco, it’s gotten strangely personal.
I had happened upon a video of Harbaugh instructing high school quarterbacks, and when he picked up a ball, he seemed to come alive, energized by the power and possibilities at his command. It made me want to throw with him. You can learn a lot about someone playing catch, including why they grate on people. There’s a late-night bar story told in NFL circles about Peyton Manning’s free-agent visit with the 49ers in 2012. Harbaugh and Manning were throwing the ball, so it goes, when the coach couldn’t help but remark that his passes had more mustard on them than the still-rehabbing future Hall of Famer’s did. You can guess how that went over.
Harbaugh tried to steer me toward profiling one of his assistant coaches or players. But it was catch and he is, at heart, a quarterback. “I’ll throw with you,” he said. “But I’m not sure I’ll answer questions.”
Two days in July served as a harbinger for the strange season that’s unfolded for the 49ers, a first month of blown leads and chronically undisciplined play and reports surfacing every few days that years of strain between Harbaugh and seemingly everyone in the building is finally spilling over.
The first day was the ribbon cutting to christen Levi’s Stadium, a building decades in the making. It was not only a big deal: It was a chance for everyone to celebrate after a tense offseason.
At the time, few knew the barely functional relationship between Harbaugh and 49ers general manager Trent Baalke — two men who can talk football but at the NFL combine didn’t look at each other on a shared elevator ride — had started to spread to the front office and the locker room. Team CEO Jed York says there was a “rawness” that festered after coming up short three straight seasons. Harbaugh worked the players hard, tightening his grip, which prompted a few of them to voice concern to management. He had twice turned down contract extensions, and now, with two years left on the five-year, $25 million deal he signed in 2011, nobody knew whether he wanted to coach the 49ers next year and beyond, or even whether the 49ers wanted him.
Harbaugh attended the Levi’s Stadium ribbon cutting in his usual practice clothes and didn’t stay long. Kelley L Cox/USA TODAY Sports
So when Harbaugh scheduled a rookie practice during the ribbon cutting, meaning that assistants and their wives couldn’t attend, team officials were irritated. With everyone in suits and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in attendance, Harbaugh showed up in his usual practice getup and left shortly after the ceremony ended.
A cold war was heating up. A speech Harbaugh delivered to the team a few days later, entitled “2014 1st Team Meeting,” explained his approach to battle. He usually writes in a spiral notebook, but this was typed and eight pages long. “I will be your alarm clock and wake you early,” he said. “It can be a great temptation to rest on the field and let the opponent have a play without making him pay for every inch. I must hold his pain where it is. Mine does not matter. … The punishment I inflict, his fatigue, and that he is up against something that he does not comprehend is everything.”
It was vintage Harbaugh, sincere and obsessive, inspiring and crazed. And its decisive moment, as Harbaugh described how he fights in the trenches, contained a clue as to why a coach who has won 74.5 percent of his games might just be expendable: “My opponent is going to have to die. But does he have to kill me too? He is killing me. But he has a right to. I have never seen a greater opponent than him.
“I do not care who kills who now.”
When I first read the line, I didn’t buy it. If anything, Harbaugh cares too much. “Jim can’t have an interaction without a winner or loser,” one 49ers staffer says. But as we’re playing catch, an old Harbaugh story makes me reconsider.
As a rookie benchwarmer in 1987, he begged the Bears to let him play special teams. He throws me the ball — even at 50, his passes produce the hiss exclusive to pro quarterbacks — and recalls the moment. He was on kickoff duty, charged with keeping contain. He was sprinting, battling a blocker, when a second one drilled him under the arm, knocking him off his feet, out of bounds and into excruciating pain. “It was embarrassing,” he says.
It’s strange to watch a proud man relive a story about getting his ass kicked. But as I throw back to him, I remember another line from his preseason speech — “Keep your head clear and suffer like a man” — and think maybe it isn’t so strange after all.
He is a vessel of pain. He inflicts it and welcomes it. Practice is supposed to suck. Games are supposed to hurt. Most coaches arrive with a calculated, five-year plan. Harbaugh’s plan is kick ass.
At the University of San Diego, where in three years he turned a joke of a program into a two-time Pioneer League champion, he ran hills with the players, sometimes pushing through his own vomit. At Stanford, where he engineered a once-in-a-generation turnaround, he renamed the Oklahoma drill the Stanford drill to signify the toughness he wanted to instill.
At San Francisco he makes the winning side run gassers after two-minute practice. “He’s really good at making it suck,” says Vernon Davis, who loves him. Harbaugh doesn’t want a happy team. He wants the “least unhappy” team. “In the workplace, I don’t look for friends. I look for allies,” he said in the preseason speech, cribbing a line from TV’s “Blue Bloods.”
Who’s tough enough? Who can hang? Harbaugh creates tests the way a workaholic creates work. His battles with the Stanford administrators, mostly over admitting qualified recruits, are legendary, and not missed, in Palo Alto, California. He’ll burst into York’s office at the crack of dawn with a problem that needs to be solved now. He sometimes uses his news conferences to back players in contract disputes, pitting them against the suits. Then he puts those players through miserable practices, leaving some of them to wonder whether, despite his mantra, others do have it better than they do. It’s exhausting. According to someone who knows him well, Harbaugh has “figured out how to not be liked and how to function. It’s been a strength his entire life. If he’s going against you, he hates you.”
Harbaugh doesn’t want to be liked. He just wants to win. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
That explains why Harbaugh, after taking over at Stanford, took dead aim at Pete Carroll and USC. But a few 49ers staffers think the absence of that hate may have played a part in why the 49ers lost the Super Bowl to the Ravens and his older brother, John, in 2013. The one moment when Harbaugh couldn’t hate his opponent coincided with the biggest game of his life. Before kickoff, the brothers chatted at midfield. As they shook hands to part ways, Jim pivoted away, his warrior instincts kicking in. But John, realizing the gravity of the moment, grabbed his younger brother’s wrist and literally pulled him in for a hug. “I love you,” John said. “Be good today.”
“OK,” Jim said, giving a one-armed pat. He left and didn’t look back.
Not a week passes in the 49ers facility without someone reliving the strange play calling in the fourth quarter of that game. Some on the team later wondered if Jim was thrown off his game because John had confronted his younger brother with something he had no defense for: an act of love.
Many Harbaugh interactions are uncomfortable. He has habits that mask his discomfort and any true introspection. He almost pathologically cloaks himself in catch phrases and quotes. Lincoln, Hemingway, Johnny Cash, Shakespeare, God, Nelson Mandela, Judge Judy, Bo Schembechler and even Calvin Coolidge, make appearances in Harbaugh news conferences, speeches and conversations. And he doesn’t just quote outside sources to inspire players. He uses them to speak for himself, often when he’s demoralized. “A man can be destroyed,” he said after the loss to Seattle in last year’s NFC Championship Game, nodding to Hemingway. “But he can’t be defeated.”
When he has nothing to say, Harbaugh can get his point across with a stare. Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
And when he’s thinking about football, he detaches from the known world. You can ask him a question and he basically doesn’t hear it. Brad Seely, the 49ers special teams coach, tried to make small talk with Harbaugh before a recent game. Harbaugh is famous for wearing one-inch cleats, and this game was on turf, so Seely asked, “You got turf shoes?”
Harbaugh stared at Seely with that familiar open-mouthed gaze. He stared, and stared, and stared. Seely wanted to disapp
