While their sons add another chapter to their unmatched slice of NFL history, Jack and Jackie Harbaugh will be tuned in from across the country.
The warm and endlessly enthusiastic couple will be celebrating their 63rd anniversary Monday when sons John and Jim coach against each other for a third time, with Jim’s Chargers playing host to John’s Baltimore Ravens at SoFi Stadium.
The Harbaughs are the only brothers to face each other as NFL head coaches. John is 2-0 in the matchups, having defeated Jim’s San Francisco 49ers on Thanksgiving in 2011 and by three points in the Super Bowl the following season.
The parents were squirming in their seats for those games — can you possibly root for both teams at once? — and this time will be at the Florida home of daughter Joanie watching with family.
For Jack and Jackie, Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans was emotionally wrenching.
“Right up until the kickoff of the game, there was just this euphoria of excitement,” Jack recalled. “Every little thing. Jackie’s dad was 95, 96 years old and he was able to go to New Orleans. He got up on the stage and had his picture taken with John and Jim on the Friday before the game. Everything was great.
“Until the moment the ball was kicked off. When that ball left the kicker’s foot — if I close my eyes I can still see it — that ball’s rolling end over end, higher and higher, and then it’s coming down and all at once I’m realizing, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s going to be a winner and there’s going to be a loser.’ The rest of the game, we were like zombies.”
The parents were watching from a suite with Roger Goodell, and at one point Jackie leaned over to the commissioner and said, “Is there any way this can end in a tie?”
John Harbaugh said that he would welcome having his parents at Monday night’s game, while he and his brother are focused on what’s happening on the field. The 7-3 Chargers and 7-4 Ravens are both in second place in their respective divisions.
“If my parents were there it would be good, but it’s too complicated because this game is really important,” John said. “You’re responsible for all these people in your building. Everybody has futures and everybody has aspirations. And these NFL games are just fights, man.
“On the periphery is the family part of it. Mom and Dad are caught in the middle. They’re kind of in the crossfire. There’s nothing going on between me and Jim, there’s no animosity, it’s just that we owe our allegiances to our players.”
Jack and Jackie first noticed each other as freshmen at Bowling Green University in 1957. Their first encounter wasn’t on the football field — though Jack was a quarterback and Jackie a cheerleader — but in the classroom.
“I claim it was a biology class, Jackie says it was an English class,” said Jack, 85, sitting on a couch in the spacious, memorabilia-filled basement of their home in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Either way, the petite and bright-eyed Jackie Cipiti was sitting in the front row, notebook and pencil at the ready. She was the proud daughter of a first-generation Italian family. In the first roll call, the professor mispronounced her last name as “CHIP-uh-tee.”
Jackie wasn’t going to let that stand. She had a bit of an edge to her, the same spark her sons now show at the postgame podium.
“She said, ‘It’s not CHIP-uh-tee, it’s sup-PEE-tee. C-I-P-I-T-I,’” Jack recalled with a laugh, barking out the letters like a drill sergeant. “She’s calling this guy out the first day of class. Not only is she a great-looking girl, but, damn, she’s got some pop. She’s a firecracker.”
And for the next three years he was friends with that firecracker, until they started dating around Christmas of their senior year. She was beautiful and energetic. He was lovestruck.
“I thought she was so much smarter than I was and so friendly,” he said. “If there was a charity event, most of the girls would just be standing around smiling and Jackie was making the pizzas, hanging the coats, welcoming everybody at the door.”
Within months of graduating, they were married. They had a modest start, living in Canton, Ohio, where Jack was a high school assistant coach. Among the perks of the job, he got two free nosebleed seats to every Cleveland Browns home game. The team was having a hard time moving tickets, so Browns owner Art Modell offered free admission to every high school football staff in the region.
Free Browns tickets? Hello, honeymoon!
“We got married on a Saturday and it was the Ohio State-Michigan game,” Jack said. “We watched that game on television, and the next day we went to Municipal Stadium in Cleveland to watch the Browns play the Giants.”
There, they bumped into a bunch of coaching friends who had attended their wedding the day before.
“We walked into the stadium where the seats are so high up you can’t tell if they’re playing football or ice hockey down there,” Jack said. “Our friends see us and say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”
His buddies ribbed him, all while understanding a proper getaway was too pricey on a high school assistant’s salary. None could have guessed that the budding Harbaugh family would one day make NFL history.
It all came rushing back to Jim Harbaugh when his team played at Cleveland earlier this month.
“I caught myself right before the game started getting super nostalgic,” the Chargers coach said. “The story I’ve heard maybe 50 times about Mom and Dad’s honeymoon. After the national anthem, that’s what I was picturing. I looked into the upper decks and how my dad described walking up the aisle and seeing some of the coaches who were making sport of it, saying, ‘You cheap son of a gun! Great honeymoon, Harbaugh!’”
Sixty-three years later, the Harbaughs have a wealth of memories beyond their dreams.
“It’s an example of two people who didn’t have a lot of means, just their love,” Jim said. “Their love for 63 years is just a source of joy. That’s what they’ve given me, my brother, our sister and our kids.
“That ‘enthusiasm unknown to mankind?’ It’s real,” he said, invoking a family mantra. “That’s the way my mom and dad attack every day.”