Jim Harbaugh Playing Full Speed and Boxing Out His Kids During A Family Pickup Basketball Game Is The Best Jim Harbaugh Story Yet
• Harbaugh on vacationing with brother Jim’s family:
“No one is more competitive than him. He has a bunch of kids now, young kids. Just had a baby, John Paul. … Last Memorial Day we did vacation together. My wife and I have a cottage up north in Michigan on Lake Huron. We get Jim to drive up with the kids and all that, and we have a basketball hoop in the front yard in the driveway, and we were going to play a little game with the kids, and we just started shooting around, and next thing you know it was a 4-on-4 game. It was Jack, who is two-and-a-half, Addy, who is six, Katie, who is four-and-a-half or five at the time, Allison who is 13 or 14 and she is a little basketball player, and Jim and me and Sarah, my wife. We’re playing, and you can picture the kind of game it is, right? Allison happens to hit a couple jumpers and we’re playing to seven, and we’re up maybe 5-1. Next thing you know, Jim starts going over the top of Allison for rebounds, he’s boxing her out 10 feet away from the basket. Next thing you know, it’s 5-5 and Jim has made all the shots for his team of course. I’m like, you know, maybe Addy would like to touch the ball? Maybe Katie or Jack could dribble a little bit now and then? It goes 6-6 and a long rebound comes out the side, he goes and gets it. I see Allison happens to be over there, so I see him going to the basket, he’s going to take Allison to the hole, you know, he’s about 6’3″, 235, so I’m going to go cut him off. I get him with my right arm bar across his chest and I’m trying to body check him into the pricker bushes behind the driveway, and he just powers his way to the basket, lays one over the top, a reverse layup off the board, and all he could talk about is how he won. He picks up Jack and says, ‘Doesn’t it feel great, Jack, to win? Doesn’t it feel great to win?’ An hour later we were crossing paths in the backyard to go get a soda or something, and he looks me right in the eye and he says, ‘Hey John, have you won anything yet?’”
Without a shadow of a doubt my new favorite Jim Harbaugh story. Going on a Memorial Day getaway to a cottage on Lake Huron and promptly initiating a full speed basketball game to the death. Refusing to let the 4 and 5 year olds touch the ball because, fuck em, they probably can’t even dribble, turnover city. Boxing his 13 year old niece out and grabbing offensive boards over her head to secure the rebounds. “Taking her to the hole” on game point. Blowing through a flagrant foul to hit the game winner off glass then shit talking his brother. Bringing it up later in the backyard over some cans of Diet Coke. SO PERFECT. So Harbaugh. And the fact that John Harbaugh is the source makes it that much more believable, not that anyone would doubt this story to begin with. Only thing that surprises me about it is he didn’t send one of his toddler nephews to the hospital with a hard pick on the perimeter.