GOTT COACHING TALENT? Former college coach Mike Gottfried (center) poses with family friend Merle Hutson (clockwise from left) and Gottfried’s cousins, John, Jack and Jim Harbaugh. (Gottfried family photo)
Mike Gottfried knows better than most exactly what Super Dad Jack Harbaugh’s emotions will be come Super Bowl XLVII, when his Super sons, Jim and John, become the first brothers to coach against each other with the world watching this historic HarBowl.
“Jack’s gonna be nervous the whole game,” Gottfried told The Post yesterday. “Whoever loses that game, Jack’s gonna go to first and he’s gonna console him. He’s gonna tell him, ‘Remember all you’ve accomplished. Some days you win, and some days you learn. So take what you learned and get back here.’ ”
Gottfried’s mother and Jack Harbaugh’s mother were sisters, which makes them first cousins. But it was a family tragedy that drew Gottfried and the Harbaughs closer through the years — so close that Gottfried, a celebrated college football coach at Kansas, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, is delaying hernia surgery scheduled for this Friday to Feb. 6 so he can visit Jack Harbaugh before the Super Bowl and see the Harbaugh boys he has watched grow up coach in the biggest games of their lives.
Gottfried was 11, and living across the street from Jack Harbaugh in a heavenly Ohio town called Crestline, when his father succumbed to a heart attack in 1956.
“You go to bed one night and wake up the next morning at 3:30 in the morning and watch your dad die in front of you,” Gottfried said.
His father was a Pennsylvania Railroad engineer, as was Jack’s father, Bill. Gottfried’s mother wasn’t working at the time, and his father didn’t have insurance, so the family separated. His mother moved in with an aunt. Gottfried’s brothers, Joe, who was 15 at the time, and Johnny, who was 7, were sent to their grandmother’s. For six months, until his mother took a job as waitress at Sherer’s Dairy, Gottfriend lived under the roof of Bill Harbaugh, whose son, Jack, was 15 years old.
“Probably the reason the Harbaughs are so tough is because [Bill] was tough,” Gottfried said.
How’s this for tough?
“One time he quit smoking,” Gottfried recalled. “He put a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket so he saw it every day. But he never took another smoke.”
How’s this for disciplined?
“Bill said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna clean your plate every day.’ He said, ‘You’re not gonna drink anything at the meal,’ ” Gottfried said. “It was just his rule, just the way he ran his house.”
Jack was the quarterback and safety on the Crestline High School team that also featured former Tigers outfielder Gates Brown. One time, Brown carried the ball eight straight times from the 10-yard line all the way down to the opponent’s 1-yard line. Where Jack announced, “I’ll take it from here.”
Gottfried credits a beloved figure named Merle Hutson, who coached at Crestline and ran the parks league, for inspiring Jack Harbaugh.
“He was the guy who influenced Jack to go into coaching,” Gottfried said.
Jack was a chip off the old block and John, the Ravens’ coach, and Jim, the 49ers’ coach, are chips off the chip off the old block. Almost every summer, Gottfried returns to Crestline from his Mobile, Ala., home and meets up with the Harbaughs at functions or banquets.
“Jim’s an attacker. … If he has a feeling, he’s gonna go with it, no matter what everybody thinks,” Gottfried said. “John’s more of a thinker, more of a figure-it-out before he moves. When I think of John, I think of Bill Walsh.”
So Gottfried was hardly surprised when Jim made the bold quarterback switch from Alex Smith to Colin Kaepernick midway through the season.
“I’ll bet he thought about his dad and grandpa,” Gottfried said. ‘”My grandfather and my dad would have done what they thought was right and make the move even though it didn’t look like the conventional move.”
Often in life, what goes around comes around. In the late 1980s, Jack Harbaugh worked for one season as a defensive assistant for Gottfried at Pittsburgh.
“He was the head coach at Western Michigan and got let go. … I knew he was out of a job, and I knew he could help us,” Gottfried said.
He sure did.
“Jack’s a fighter,” Gottfried said. “Jack believed in getting after it. Jack was always trying to figure something new out, a different coverage, or a different this or that. Jack was gonna tell you what he thought. He wanted to be an attack secondary.”
When Western Kentucky athletic director Jimmy Feix was considering three candidates for his vacant head coaching position, Gottfried’s brother Joe, the athletic director at Southern Alabama, called him.
“Just do me one favor,” Joe Gottfried asked Feix. “Interview Jack.” So Feix did. And hired Jack Harbaugh.
John Harbaugh worked as a graduate assistant when Gottfried was at Pittsburgh. Gottfried’s offensive line coach at his three college stops, Mike Solari, is the offensive line coach for Jim’s 49ers.
“I talk to Jim through him,” Gottfried said.
Gottfried, via Team Focus, works now with boys between the ages of 10 and 18 without fathers across the country. His nephew, Mark, is the head basketball coach at North Carolina State. His daughter, Marcy, is a big Ravens fan.
“I took her to three games this year,” Gottfried said.
Who will Gottfried be rooting for?
“I’m gonna be neutral,” he said. Same as Jack Harbaugh.