Niyo: Harbaugh is winning the celebrity game

Chicago — It was a French author — a Nobel Prize winner, in fact — who wrote that it is “better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

It was Jim Harbaugh, having some fun with his Twitter account while vacationing in Paris this summer, who wrote: “Le Big Mac and Royal with Cheese please.”

And while that’s hardly representative of who or what Michigan’s new head coach is, the reaction to it — and almost everything else he has done since accepting the job at his alma mater last December — surely represents something.

Something Harbaugh himself addressed as he stood at the podium Friday for his first Big Ten media days in Chicago. Asked about all the buzz his arrival had created, both for Michigan and the league — “There’s no doubt about it: It’s a head-turning hire,” Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said — the 51-year-old Harbaugh essentially shrugged.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, before dispensing with the personal pronouns, as is his habit. “Not striving to be creating any buzz. Just striving to coach the football team. Not trying to be popular or anything. Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked.”

That’s not the first time he has quoted Yogi Berra, nor will it be the last. But Harbaugh’s popularity isn’t fading anytime soon, and he knows it. Which is probably why, when asked Friday if he’s OK with being disliked — as he already is in places like East Lansing and Columbus, thanks in part to all this hype before even coaching a game in Ann Arbor — he just laughed.

“I’m not trying to peel back the onion on that one,” Harbaugh said.

For the record, he didn’t make anyone cry here in Chicago, though he left quite a few questions whimpering. Like that first media query Friday, when a reporter from Ohio asked him whether he referred to the Buckeyes in a “special way.” His predecessor, Brady Hoke, called them “Ohio” and his new “adversary,” Urban Meyer, routinely substitutes “That Team Up North” for Michigan.

Et tu, Jim?

“Uh, no,” Harbaugh said. “Just Ohio State.”

“But great to see everybody this morning,” he continued, flipping a switch. “Glad everybody could be here. Wonderful turnout.”

From there, the question-and-answer session turned into another of Harbaugh’s delightfully disjointed media affairs. He brought props — a Chicago Bears Mike Ditka jersey from his Thursday night dinner with “Da Coach” — and he popped a few good one-liners. He talked about his trip to France and even a bit about football, if you can believe it.

But when he didn’t want to talk about something — like the Ohio State rivalry, for instance, or anything else that’s “out in front of the headlights” — he simply wandered off, as only he can.

Harbaugh took a question about changing the “culture” of Michigan football and instead detoured down memory lane, recalling the days of the Big Ten “skywriters” tours — the precursor to the modern-day conference media days — and the time Woody Hayes kicked all the reporters out of practice. That happened in 1958, five years before Harbaugh was born.

“I read about that,” he said, grinning. “I would have loved to have been there.”

Memories good, thick

I’m not sure he loved being here in Chicago this week. He’s itching to get on the practice field for the start of preseason camp next week, and he says that leaves him feeling like a bull at a bullfight. (“You’re clawing at the ground, you’ve got snot bubbles coming out, you’re ready to start,” he explained. “Mainly, that’s how I feel right now. I’m ready to start.”)

But there’s no doubt he loves being back in Ann Arbor, where he and his wife, Sarah, just enrolled their two young daughters — Addie and Katie — at the same elementary school (St. Francis of Assisi) he attended as a child.

The memories there are “so thick,” Harbaugh says, “you have to brush them away.” And as he talked about aspiring to be like his old coach, Bo Schembechler, he practically gave everyone directions to his house, the one that’s just down the street from where Bo used to live.

“No matter which way I take to work,” he said, “whether it’s Devonshire or Geddes or Stadium, I’ll often think, ‘Well, Bo probably took this right on to Washtenaw, or took this left onto Hill ….”

His wife, by now, needs no reminders.

“Everywhere we go, he’s busy pointing out landmarks of his childhood,” she said. “He’s still giddy about it, and that’s neat to see. … He’s still in that stage where it’s kind of surreal to be back.”

His players are, too, and they all seem to find it rather amusing.

“Everybody’s talking about his khakis,” senior linebacker Joe Bolden joked. “I mean, it’s just a pair of pants. I don’t know what the big deal is.”

Harbaugh insists he doesn’t, either. Forget the pants. What about the fuss over that shirtless photo from the summer camp tour, the one that went viral online?

“It was shirts and skins: How does anybody not understand that!” Harbaugh said Friday, throwing his arms up. “It’s just a shirts-and-skins game. Mercy.”

Not taking the bait

Mercifully, the season will be here soon. But in the meantime …

“He caught a mouse the other day in a restaurant, and he’s like a hero,” Sarah Harbaugh laughed, offering up the play-by-play as her husband grabbed a to-go box and chased the rodent around, then celebrated when he’d caught his prey.

“I think it actually hopped in,” Sarah said, adding that the mouse was released unharmed across the street.

“I’ll tease him sometimes. I’ll be like, ‘You are human, you do know that, right?’ ” she said, referencing that “messiah” question from his introductory news conference in December. “But I don’t really have to do much of that. He does that on his own. He’s pretty good at that.”

He’s pretty good at this, too, playing the cat-and-mouse game with his celebrity.

He may not be striving to create it. But love it or hate it, he’s genuinely thriving in it, just the same.

john.niyo@detroitnews.com

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