ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Rick Connor is juggling both the lunch rush and a sharper image of Jim Harbaugh.
“He’s not just a coach,” Connor said one recent afternoon. The 58-year-old reservations manager at The Pizza House on Church St. helps run an Ann Arbor landmark and his own private fan boy clearinghouse for Michigan’s new coach.
“I was talking to my wife about that this morning. I kind of asked the same question.”
Who is Jim Harbaugh?
“The best way to put it is,” Connor continued, “you just don’t know.”
No, you don’t. We’ve come this far to the brink of the Harbaugh era at Michigan and we barely know him any better than in late December when he was named coach.
We’ve seen him shirtless.
We’ve seem him shock the recruiting world.
We’ve seen the amusing tweets and undying love for Bo Schembechler.
But as the season approaches, a curtain has shielded Michigan football. Whether it’s the media, players, administration or restaurant employees, we’ve learned this much about Michigan’s first-year coach:
Harbaugh is not going to reveal much of himself. Toward that goal, he has succeeded greatly in Year 1 of Har-ball by keeping everyone slightly off balance.
“Where do I start?” senior guard Kyle Kalis said. “For example, a lot of camps will have practices in the morning or at night to ease up on the guys. No, no, no, Coach Harbaugh wants to do it during the hottest time of the day, so it’s 1-4 [p.m.], specifically, to ‘shape the body and mold the mind.’”
Kalis further quotes his coach not wanting to become “emotionally hijacked.” Whatever that philosophy exactly means, it has taken on many forms.
Michigan color commentator Jim Brandstatter has been challenged semantically. When he suggested, innocently, in the spring that the new coach was feeling more comfortable, Harbaugh snapped. “I’m not a comfortable guy,” he said.
Said Brandstatter: “I think he likes throwing people curves.
“I think the only people that spend quality time with him are his assistant coaches and his wife,” he added. “He is so focused. Anybody on the outside of that circle is probably just a passing acquaintance.”
It might be nothing more than focusing on the season. It might be who he is at the core.
Stanford coach David Shaw knows what’s going on from thousands of miles away. He was Harbaugh’s offensive coordinator for four of his years at Stanford.
“What’s it like to work for him? Not boring,” Shaw recalled. “There’s no ‘off.’ We had a lot of guys on the first staff that played basketball. We had pickup games where you would think there was money or someone’s life was on the line.
“There were racquetball games,” Shaw added, “when guys … didn’t know if they were going to get fired or not. That was the intensity of the environment.”
Connor at least feels like he’s somewhat of an insider. This is his 18th year at The Pizza House. (Open ‘til 4 a.m.!) He’s seen them all come through. For the latest coach, Connor bought some khakis the day Harbaugh was hired.
“Brady [Hoke] was definitely in way over his head,” he said. “He’s a hands-off guy.
“I told my son, ‘I don’t understand how the man does not wear a headset.’”
Harbaugh is definitely hands on.
The depth chart battle with Utah is reaching epically hilarious proportions. From the podium last week, Harbaugh might as well have told Utes' coach Kyle Whittingham, “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
When the Michigan depth chart finally came out, it not only listed Shane Morris OR Jake Rudock as the starter, there was no decision on the backup.
It’s Connor’s job to arrange the upstairs dining area for Harbaugh’s weekly radio show. The man could have scalped tickets to Monday’s debut broadcast. For years, Connor has gotten tables for Michigan coaches bringing in recruits for meals.
“He came in exactly like this,” Connor said, pantomiming Harbaugh looking around, casing the joint prior to a recruiting lunch.
“‘Are my guys here?’ he says. As he’s talking to the recruit, he broke away. He’s on the phone a lot. He started walking away. It’s like 2 in the afternoon. Customers that are here, they just quit eating to watch him.
“That was the best, just watching people react.”
Cult is not a word easily tossed around. In this case, it might apply. Harbaugh’s disciples are giddy and hopeful. They are undyingly loyal and determined. There’s a wilderness for Michigan to be led out of. They are all convinced that Harbaugh is their khakied Moses.
“I don’t remember anything quite like it in college or pro [sports],” says Lloyd Carr, one of two coaches ever to win a national championship in Ann Arbor. “You can’t go anywhere in this state without people talking about him.”
These days, you don’t get to meet Harbaugh; there are mere glimpses in the days leading up to Thursday’s opener at Utah. Three weeks into the coach’s self-described “submarine mode” training camp, Harbaugh emerged from a media blackout for about 20 minutes to discuss August drills.
There was a guy to hold the door for him, a guy pointing to reporters taking questions, a guy standing in the back of the room, just listening. This was less coaches’ press conference and more visit by a head of state.
Harbaugh parried more than jollied with the media.
“You want to be at the big boy table,” he said cryptically before corrected himself, “big person’s table. There’s another table in the kitchen for those that aren’t seated at the big person’s table.”
The coach admitted to thinking a call from Michael Jordan regarding the school’s new Nike deal was of the prank variety.
“I said, ‘Come on, the real Michael Jordan?’ the real Jim Harbaugh recalled.
Veteran NFL writer Gary Myers of the New York Daily News flew in for that day in an attempt to get a few guarded moments with the former San Francisco 49ers coach.
How big a kick, he asked Harbaugh, is it to be coaching at your alma mater with your son (Jay) as an assistant?
“Great, on multiple levels,” Harbaugh replied.
Yes, and … ?
“Ah, the levels?” Harbaugh continued after a pregnant pause. “Those levels would be: I love football, I love coaching football, and I love the University of Michigan. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Gold, Jerry. Pure gold.
And yet, the presser was deemed important enough to be beamed across the country on the Big Ten Network. It certainly helped sate a fan base with half a million living alumni.
If Harbaugh wants to play cat-and-mouse about his starting quarterback, he can go ahead. If practices are more secret than Guantanamo, that adds to the allure, too.
We know there’s a genuine heart beating in there somewhere. For at least five years, Harbaugh has maintained a close -- yet long-distance -- relationship with a player who never played a down for him.
BYU quarterback Taysom Hill first signed with Harbaugh’s Stanford, only to take a two-year Mormon mission to Australia. By the time he returned, the coach was long gone to the 49ers.
And yet, when Hill suffered a season-ending broken ankle last season, Harbaugh’s number popped up on his phone.
“A large part of it was him sharing his experience his junior year when he broke his arm at Michigan,” Hill said. “He talked about the things that he did, that helped him overcome. He was still able to progress even if it wasn’t on the football field.
“Things that he told me in that conversation molded my mindset.”
Hill never helped Harbaugh win a football game, probably never will. At that point, something was proven about a laser-focused, quirky, determined coach deep in submarine mode.
Doesn't sound like a passing acquaintance. In fact, underneath that signature polo beats a heart of Maize, Blue and gold.
