Jim Harbaugh didn’t know if he was coming or going.
Exhausted to the point of collapse and parked in the driveway of his Oakland Hills home, he briefly allowed himself to close his eyes — was it for a minute? An hour? — before jolting awake at 4 a.m. in a foggy panic. Had he just returned from his round-the-clock job with the Oakland Raiders, or was he supposed to be on his way back?
Here he was, a first-round pick from Michigan, a 15-year NFL veteran, and now a coaching grunt for the Silver & Black, ready to do whatever was asked.
“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 more than two decades before Harbaugh became coach of the Chargers, long before he established himself as a football fireman — a turnaround artist who revived programs at the University of San Diego, Stanford, the 49ers and Michigan. Now, fresh off a season-opening victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, he’s attempting to do the same in Los Angeles.
Harbaugh’s early coaching roots are relevant this week because his 1-0 Chargers visit the Raiders on Monday night.
Everybody’s got to start somewhere, and in 2002, Harbaugh was at the bottom of the food chain in Oakland — the scrubbiest of scrubs, despite 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 Rich Gannon said. “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 coaching in his DNA, had been hand-picked by legendary Raiders owner Al Davis and was determined to climb the ladder one rung at a time.
“Here’s your contract,” Davis told 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 said later. “It was like getting a doctorate degree.”
So there he sat, parked and bleary-eyed, a young father getting his PhD in coaching, unsure whether to go inside and sleep or turn the truck around.
“I called my brother,” Harbaugh said, 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 back to work.
Al Davis had long believed Harbaugh would wind up with the Raiders.
In 1992, at the dawn of free agency, the quarterback was summoned to the Raiders’ headquarters in El Segundo. Davis outfitted him with a T-shirt, shorts and shoes, assembled a group of receivers and had the workout videotaped.
“I loved it,” Harbaugh said. “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 told him.
He was right.
Harbaugh returned to Chicago for another season, then moved on to Indianapolis, where he earned the nickname “Captain Comeback.” But a decade later, fresh off retirement, he interviewed for the quarterbacks-coaching job at Michigan and didn’t get it. Soon after, he met again with Davis, who still remembered the playoff upset Harbaugh engineered against Kansas City — citing exact stats — and offered him the Raiders job on the spot.
“You’re finally where you belong,” Davis told him.
And Harbaugh believed it.
Fred Biletnikoff, who coached Raiders receivers, remembers Harbaugh as thorough, prepared and no-nonsense.
“I don’t think I saw Jim smile at all,” he said.
Harbaugh was learning on the fly.
“I felt 15 years behind,” he said. “I literally didn’t know how to turn on my computer. I’d never had one before that.”
The Raiders assigned him the laptop that had belonged to their previous head coach, Jon Gruden, and it was overflowing with plays.
“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 still keeps the old laptop in his Chargers office.
“I’ve always said it should go in the Jon Gruden Hall of Fame or something,” he said.
Young Harbaugh worked absurd hours, arriving at the Raiders facility before dawn on the Monday after a game and routinely waiting until Wednesday to going home, stealing a few winks on the floor under his desk while using 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 mostly worked with the backup quarterbacks. He and starter Gannon were peers, both drafted in 1987, and Gannon went on to become the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 2002. That left Harbaugh to focus on the reserves, often running Saturday quizzes on the game plan. He’d write questions on strips of paper, toss them in a hat, and have the backups draw and answer them.
“We were running conditioning drills one time after practice, just our normal gassers routine,” said 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 were neck-and-neck for most of the sprint before, sure enough, Harbaugh suffered a pulled hamstring and had to hop across the finish line.
“We were like, ‘We told you, Jim,’” Tuiasosopo said. “That pissed him off, and he finished like his life depended on it.”
Harbaugh strived for perfection, even in the words he chose.
At one point during the season, Davis passed him in the hall and said, “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 could I be so dumb? Why’d I ask him how he was doing? So he thought about it and readied a proper response for next time.
Two weeks later, they passed again.
Finally, 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 University of San Diego came calling for Harbaugh in 2004, and Davis wasn’t happy when he learned 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 said, “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 point during that span, Davis called and asked if he’d be interested in being head coach of the Raiders. The same call came when Harbaugh was coaching at Stanford.
Both times, Harbaugh said he simply wasn’t ready.
“He believed in me more than I believed in myself,” the coach said.
Davis died in 2011, only a month into Harbaugh’s first season as head coach in San Francisco. He wasn’t around to see his onetime tireless assistant coach restore the 49ers to glory — including falling five yards shy of a Super Bowl victory.
Now, Harbaugh is head coach of the Chargers, where Davis was once an assistant coach.
“I hated to see him go to the Chargers,” Biletnikoff said. “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.”
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