• Won a national championship with Division I-AA Western Kentucky.
• With wife Jackie, raised two sons — John with the Baltimore Ravens, Jim with the San Francisco 49ers – who became the first brothers to be head coaches in the NFL and, in the process, turn the Harbaugh name into arguably the best known in football right now.
• And then there was Friday afternoon and evening at Eaton High School, when — in a real deja vu moment — he pulled off one of his more wondrous feats: He turned back the hands of time.
No longer was it 2014. It suddenly became 1964, when, in his first head coaching job, he took over the Eagles’ floundering football program and revived it using every means possible.
Much of it was done through sound football practice that was orchestrated by him and three noteworthy assistants, Sam Ridder, Moe Ankney and Ron Eaton.
He also relied on emotion and bluster and sometimes out-of-left-field frivolity. To try to overcome an inability to win on the road, he had his players — whom he thought were tight before games — sing from individual song books he handed out.
Harbaugh also scoured Eaton for new players, finding one working at the local movie theater, another tromping around the woods of Preble County and a couple on the Eagles basketball court.
He even tried lifting the program to new heights from the bed of a “dead animal truck.”
“Don’t Jack, don’t,” Jackie said Friday as she shook her head when her husband — back in town for a reunion of the 1964 Eaton football team and cheerleaders — started to tell the story.
He laughed and did, and that will be shared here after first explaining the time travel he pulled off Friday.
Wearing a purple Eaton High t-shirt, he took the stage at the school’s impressive new Performing Arts Center, which on this day was festooned with four banners displaying his trademark “Attack the day” quote.
Soon he had the entire student body — all those iPhone and X boxers turned into the doo-wop kids of five decades past — out of their seats, clapping, roaring and singing.
With the help of a few of his ’64 players he had on stage, he got them all belting out the spirit song — Ay Ziggy Zoomba — he had refitted from his Bowling Green playing days for the Eaton team a half century ago.
Once he got everybody loose, he then gave them a pep talk that was part coach, part tent evangelist. In the process, he explained the origins of that saying on the banners.
“When we lived in Iowa we had some bitter cold winters and I’d take the boys — they were about 9 and 10 — to school . They’d be all bundled up in leggings, coats, hats, mittens, goo-loshes and they always had these long faces.
“I said, ‘I got to do something,’ so as they got out of the car one day I said, ‘Gentleman, attack the day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind … and now get out there and go after them.’ But they said nothing. No emotion, just more long faces. I said that every single day for two months and nothing.
“Fast forward to 2007 and Jim gets the Stanford job. The team was 1-11 the year before. People couldn’t understand why he’d take the job and a reporter comes up and said, ‘Jim, what’s the first thing you’re gonna tell your team?’
“And out of the blue he says, ‘We’re gonna attack the day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind!’ I thought, by God, he’d been listening.”
Friday, he then explained how he hoped the current Eaton team, which was hosting Greenville in the opener at the new football stadium that night, could apply that concept.
He talked about how such a relentless assault, play after play, could wear an opponent down: “By the fourth quarter their clenched fists will loosen up and it will be your football game.”
And sure enough that’s what happened .
Eaton trailed 28-13 with 3:44 left in the third quarter. The Eagles then scored 21 unanswered points, with the go-ahead score coming on Damon Willard’s 64-yard touchdown run, his third TD of the game, and his two-point conversion with 5:52 left.
As Willard told Jesus Jimenez of the Richmond Palladium-Item at game’s end: “He’s the most enthusiastic man I’ve ever met in my life. … If it weren’t for him showing up today and giving the speech that he did and pumping us up the way he did — he gave us a reason to fight there at the end of the game tonight.”
‘He gave us hope’
Just 24 when he came to Eaton in 1964, Harbaugh had no head coaching experience, a wife of three years, two little boys under 2 and all their belongings in the back of a B & B Biscuits truck.
“They’re from Cleveland, my dad used to fix their trucks for them,” Jackie said.
In Eaton, Harbaugh inherited a football program that had gone 1-19 over the past two seasons.
After playing quarterback at Bowling Green and for a year with the New York Titans of the old AFL, he had been a high school assistant coach at Canton McKinley and Perrysburg before bringing unbridled enthusiasm to Eaton.
“He showed up and gave such an inspirational speech that I literally left the auditorium, ran home and told me parents, ‘You can’t believe this guy,’ ” said Bob Mong, a member of the 1964 team and now editor of the Dallas Morning News.
Dave Moysey, who flew in for the reunion from Osan Air Base in South Korea, where he’s a defense contractor, agreed with Mong:
“It was exciting. He gave us all hope.”
He also gave the team a knowledgeable coaching staff. “Jack and his three assistants all had played college football. They knew what they were doing,” said John Tuggle, who was the primary organizer of Friday’s gathering.
“Jack and those three coaches were like the Four Musketeers,” said Wendy Aker, a 1964 cheerleader who married the late Dave Kiracofe, a co-captain of the team. “Jack came in and lit a fire under all of us. There was a spirit, an energy we had not seen before. It was exciting. It was revolutionary really.”
Realizing he needed all the talent he could find, Harbaugh did whatever he could to bring players into the fold.
Such was the case with sophomore Gary Biser, who had played well in preseason practice, then informed Harbaugh the day before the opener he would not be able to play any Friday night games.
“He comes into my office and said, ‘Coach, I really like football, but Friday nights I work at the theater. I’ve got to work (the concession stand). I can’t afford to come to games,’ ” said Harbaugh. “I told him I’d never heard anybody say that before, but I wanted to work on that.”
He called Bill Blankenship ,who ran the theater and fixed it so Biser could work the rest of the weekend and get Friday nights off.
“After that they called me Popcorn Man,” Biser laughed.
Harbaugh also convinced standout basketball players Tom, Ferriell and Kem Meaderis to try football.
In his over-the-top sales pitch Harbaugh told Meaderis, an end, he might get 15 passes a game thrown his way.
“That didn’t happen,” Meadeis said. “We almost never passed.” And yet, he described his football days as “one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
In 1965, the only other year Harbaugh was at Eaton before taking over at Xenia for a season and then moving to the college ranks, he went to even greater lengths to land Randy Hewitt, who he said he “lived on a farm and loved to hunt in the fall.”
Although he said he had never fired a shotgun in his life, Harbaugh said he’d go hunting with him if Hewitt would play the line for him. And the day after the season, Hewitt woke Harbaugh up at dawn, handed him a shotgun and made sure the coach honored his end of the bargain.
Corky Campbell said Harbaugh wouldn’t take no from him either even though he tried to dissuade the coach: “I said, ‘You don’t take juvenile delinquents, do you?’ Just previously I had been arrested for stealing a blinking light where they work on the roads. Coach Harbaugh said, ‘As long as you done your time you’re OK with me.’ “
In taking Campbell, whose brother Perry also played, Harbaugh not only got two good football players, but that “dead animal truck.”
“They had a fertilizing plant out of town and he’d go around and pick up the carcasses of dead animals from the farms,” Harbaugh said. “Sometimes there’d be six or seven bodies in the back of the truck when he pulled up for practice. Rigor mortis would be setting in and we’d see legs sticking up. That truck didn’t always smell the best.”
Harbaugh soon was putting scaffolding in the back of the truck so practices could be filmed from above and then he convinced Corky to help Jackie move their furniture from one place in Eaton to another.
“I told him to hose it down,” Harbaugh said.
Jackie shook her head: “You weren’t there that day. My mother was and she said, ‘Get a broom and some Lysol.’ ”
Something worked because soon the sweet smell of success drifted off the Eaton football program.
No better example was the game against state powerhouse Northmont, which had beaten the Eagles 60-6 the year before.
Harbaugh and Sam Ridder decided to go with a 10-man defensive line and just one safety. They stifled Northmont’s running attack and Ferriel ran back a kickoff to give Eaton a 6-6 tie at the final gun.
“It was like we won the Super Bowl,” Harbaugh said.
Eaton finished 5-4-1 that year and went 6-4 the following season. During those two seasons they never lost a game at their old Park Avenue Field.
All about family
A long purple and gold trimmed banner hung across Main Street in downtown Eaton on Friday proclaiming: “EHS 50th Football Reunion” and welcoming back Harbaugh and his assistants.
The ‘64 and ‘65 teams laid the foundation that Ridder — in more than two decades as the coach and athletics director — did later. And current coach Ron Neanen, who has had winning teams in 24 of his 26 previous seasons, has now taken it to new heights.
Friday there was a noticeable kinship between the current players and the team from 1964, of which 23 of 40 players — five have died — returned for the festivities. The biggest coup was getting the Harbaughs back.
Over the years they made 17 moves to 15 different schools. They now live in Wisconsin and of course are involved in the careers of their three children — daughter Joani is married to Indiana University basketball coach Tom Crean — and their grandkids.
“We’ve been to a lot of places but we never enjoyed any place more than Eaton High School,” Harbaugh said.
With several of the players from the 1964 team as well as Ridder and his wife Emily sitting around her, Jackie explained:
“We were all young. Sam and Em, Jack and I — we were in our 20s. We all grew up together, Em was teaching and had little ones. We had two little ones. The Ankeys had little kids. After all these 50 years we’re still together. … From that we learned the whole thing is family. Football is family. We’ve been at all these places and you learn football players are the greatest fraternity. They are loyal to one another through all the years.
“These guys, look at them. They’re here after 50 years and still have fond memories. They’re fun and they’re exaggerated and they’re everything else and they did it all without any of this.”
She motioned to the new Performing Arts Center and the new athletic complex, where the football field has special field turf and a giant video scoreboard.
“I’m happy that Eaton has all this now,” she said. “We didn’t have it back then but you did the best you could with what you had, and what we had was family.”
And there’s still family connections now.
Eaton assistant coach Brad Davis played for Harbaugh at Western Kentucky, just as his dad, Bob, did at Eaton in 1965.
Just before the game started Harbaugh and Ridder joined the team captains from each school and the game officials for a ceremonial coin toss.
Before leaving, Harbaugh shook hands with each of the wide-eyed Greenville kids, and then turned to the three Eaton captains — Seth Reynolds, Garrett Eiler and Shane Hammock — and did the same, except to each he drew close and whispered a paraphrased, more profane, version of:
“Attack the day.”
And that’s exactly what they did.
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