Harbaugh hype is deafening nationally, but resonates more deeply in Ann Arbor

First in an occasional series

ANN ARBOR, Mich. —If you landed from the other side of the world, knew nothing of American football and shied away from conversation, you might miss the whole spiritual upsurge here. Ann Arbor isn’t prone to shouting. She hasn’t festooned herself with garish billboards or telltale signs. ¶ There’s almost zero outward signal of how a city of 117,000 can find exhilaration from the influx of one. Other than a few T-shirts in a few store windows — “Ann Arbaugh,” “Welcome Home Coach,” the No. 4 jerseys of a former quarterback who last played here in 1986 — the loud hiring of Jim Harbaugh as football coach last Dec. 30 doesn’t make itself conspicuous. ¶ That’s almost amusing given Harbaugh’s phantasmagorical offseason — his tweets about Judge Judy et al, his visit to the Supreme Court, his strange radio interview with Colin Cowherd, his trip to Paris, his shirtless turn in his trademark khakis at a football camp, his trip to Peru. All of it lured eyes and drew clicks across a big country, but Ann Arbor remains Ann Arbor in sound and feel, a 43,000-strong campus tucked next to a neater-than-average downtown, a 73-year-old theatre as centerpiece, coffeehouses, wine bars, bookstores, farmer’s markets, the depressing intrusion of chain stores, the sidewalks thickening as classes approach Tuesday, the regular sight of absurdly young faces alongside people who so obviously are the parents.

“If you were to do anthropological reporting of how you experience it, the ambience, no, it’s not manifestly obvious,” said Andrei S. Markovits, a political science professor at the University of Michigan and the author of three books on sports cultures. “You wouldn’t prima facie know that there is this major shift and this major environmental happening, that this godlike figure has assumed a major role in this university.”

Even the figure himself, Harbaugh, 51, who spent seven years of childhood and four years of college (1983-86) cementing his rare coach-to-town attachments, shares the aversion to common self-promotion. He’s thoroughly believable when he says, “Not striving to be creating any buzz. Just striving to coach the football team. Not trying to be popular or anything.”

Michigan Michigan head coach JimHarbaugh, center left, sit with his players in Michigan Stadium for a team photo, during the NCAA college football team's annual media day in Ann Arbor, Mich., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015. (Tony Ding/AP)

Yet buzz he has created, by bringing along his 58-27 record at two challenging colleges (San Diego, Stanford), his 44-19-1 record with an NFL team (San Francisco) that went 46-82 in the eight seasons prior, his deep understanding of Ann Arbor, his unpredictable personality. Add all that to a seven-year lull (46-42) at a football program unaccustomed to lulls, and the upturn turns up in scores of conversations, e-mails, exchanges, dinner parties.

“It’s this anticipation,” Markovits said. “It’s known. It’s happening. Everyone talks about it. And it’s more identified with him. The language is amazing. It’s almost not, ‘How will Michigan do,’ or, ‘How will our team do,’ it’s, ‘How will Harbaugh do?’ So Harbaugh has become almost this emblem.”

How different is preseason 2015 from preseason 2014?

It manifests in a party concept.

“I’m invited to a football party on Thursday” for Michigan’s season opener at Utah, said Lorin Cartwright, who spent 32 years at Pioneer High across from Michigan Stadium, 17 years as its athletic director. “You have to wear a pair of khaki pants and a Michigan shirt and you have to look like Jim Harbaugh when you walk through the door. We didn’t do that for Brady Hoke [Harbaugh’s predecessor] or Rich Rodriguez [Hoke’s predecessor]” — or, one might add, even for Lloyd Carr (Rodriguez’s successful predecessor).

Asked if she owns khakis, Cartwright said, “You can’t be an athletic director without having khakis.”

Then: “The hardest part is I still haven’t found my whistle.”

Michigan head coach JimHarbaugh, left, gives his socks to running back Drake Johnson, right, before a team photo during the NCAA college football team's annual media day in Ann Arbor, Mich., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015. (Tony Ding/AP)

It manifests in back-to-school chatter among nine housemates.

“We’re all really excited to go to the football games, and last year, same time, talking about football with the guys at my house, it was like, ‘Ehhh, maybe I’ll go,’” said Zach Goulson, a rising senior civil engineering major. “Or, ‘I’ll watch it on TV.’ ‘I don’t know if I’ll pay that much attention to it.’ ‘I’ll turn it off when we get down 14 points,’ something like that. But now, I mean, Harbaugh hasn’t won a game, and people are like, ‘Okay, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to watch the game.’ ”

And it manifested in a telltale Frisbee story.

That came on the chilly, sweatshirt night of April 14, when the Michigan men’s ultimate Frisbee team began a typical three-hour practice.

“It was really strange because it was dark,” Goulson said. “Nobody else was on the field except for us. And you have the big lights and everything. We were doing our warmup drills, and just, nothing really out of the ordinary, we were just doing our thing. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes into practice, you just see this guy wearing, I don’t know if you’ve seen the black, puffy ‘M’ jackets that they [coaches] have, but there was just this guy that was leaning up against the post, and he’s got a hat on, I think.

“Just like a person. All alone. Just sort of leaning up against the light [post].” And: “It wasn’t like he was trying to have an overbearing presence.”

The team captain had invited Harbaugh, half-satirically, to attend practice, and it began to buzz through the team that Harbaugh, full-surprisingly, had come. So as Goulson recollects with rich detail, Harbaugh chatted with the captain (Eli Leonard), and they thought he might leave from there. But he came over to greet the team and join the huddle, and they thought he might leave from there. But he chatted with the coach and took a bit of a lesson, and they thought he might leave from there.

When finally he did leave, it had been maybe two hours.

“I don’t know the exact words, but he was very proud and very strong-willed in the fact that he was at the University of Michigan,” Goulson said. “He kept saying, like, ‘This is the university.’ ‘The university.’ . . . It was special that not only did he come, but that he was happy to be there, which was a great feeling that somebody of his importance not only to the NFL, to the country, is able to just be in that moment with, you know, 30 goobers from the University of Michigan. And I think his character is caring about where he is in the moment and doing everything he can to help his situation, and I think his situation is the football team, but I think it’s also the university.”

Markovits stresses Harbaugh’s crazy-rare combination: proven coach, alumnus, quarterback-alumnus, former hometown lad. Said Ron Sartori, owner of Fraser’s Pub, a 53-year-old town institution, “The enthusiasm, I haven’t seen anything like it. People are looking forward to it so much. This is the height.” At Bivouac, the near-campus store selling outdoors gear and lots else, 24-year-old Anthony Huhn might help you pick out backpacks and say, “Everyone who has been hiding in their basement has come out, and now they’re saying, ‘Football, yay.’ ”

Cartwright saw the Bo Schembechler days of 1980, her arrival year at Pioneer High (just after Harbaugh had left for California when his assistant-coach father, Jack, moved from Michigan to Stanford). She has seen the energy of the Carr national championship of 1997, when it seemed everybody angled to get into her school’s 5,000-strong parking lot for Michigan games. She has seen Michigan’s typical reticence, noting its lack of any fuzzy wolverine mascot to offset, say, Michigan State’s hunky Spartan. And now, come late summer 2015: “There’s an absolute surge in energy, and it’s electric,” she said. “You can feel it. You definitely can feel it.”

One guy relocates and you can feel it, even if you can’t necessarily see it. At a school that loves its football but loves also its sophistication, its internationalism and its self-image decorated with at least some ivy, the Harbaugh effect shows mostly between the temples.

There’s gratefulness. “Now I kind of understand that my time here is limited, and nine months from now I’m going to have to leave and I’m going to miss it,” said rising senior Alfred Cerrone, a math major and former manager for men’s hockey, where Harbaugh’s attendance at a game wreaked a roar. “When Jim Harbaugh comes in and talks about how much he loves this place, you realize you’ve made friendships here, and had experiences here, that you might not ever be able to live again.”

There even was inner balm for the nasty winter. “That definitely affects the students’ moods, when it’s that cold,” Cerrone said. “So it was just kind of a dreary winter, Harbaugh comes and people are so excited.”

“He’s here to sell memories,” Cartwright said. “So when I go to college and I have grandkids, I can say, ‘I was here when that ball went into that end zone on that day . . .’”

First comes a Thursday night for which the bar owners recommend early arrival, a Thursday night with a place-to-be downtown, that could make a student or a hundred come back to school early. Still, it’s the marriage of the loudly understated town and the loudly understated coach who, tellingly, stopped by Frisbee practice.

“When I was watching him walk away, I just expected him to get into a car or something, and he just kept walking and he just walked [several blocks] back to his office,” Goulson said.

It seemed “a really small detail.” But, still, “At this point, it’s probably 11 o’clock. Maybe it was 10 o’clock. But it was night time, pitch-black . . . It seemed like he spontaneously just was like, ‘I don’t need to drive over here. It’s my campus, too.”