Jim Harbaugh had two important questions to ask the man who was on the other end of an accident that broke Harbaugh’s leg and left him in a cast for six months nearly 50 years ago. First: Did he cry? And second: How was the car?
“He was pumped up that he dented my car,” says Dan McGivern, who stars in perhaps the most unlikely chapter to date of the Michigan coach’s annual viral string of offseason occurrences.
Harbaugh has told the story before. He was chasing his brother, John, across Benton Street during his family’s first week in Iowa City when he was tackled by what he thought until recently was a mail truck.
Jack Harbaugh had just accepted an assistant coaching job for the Hawkeyes in mid-March of 1971. Jim and his brother were headed home from their first day at a new school when their journey got redirected to the emergency room. Harbaugh spent the next six months on crutches. The first three because of the accident, and the second three because doctors had to reset the bone when they discovered Jim had been racing classmates (and beating them) with one good leg.
McGivern would like to set the record straight on a few items. He was driving his Ford Mustang at the time, not the mail truck he drove in the early ’70s to pay bills while taking correspondence courses toward his degree. More importantly, though, Harbaugh hit him. Not the other way around.
“On a whim two weeks ago I said you know I’ll just drop him a note,” McGivern explained. “I gave him my contact number, and I said I’m the guy you hit way back when.”
McGivern, who sent two kids to Ann Arbor for college, said he was hoping to get an autographed picture to hang on the wall in his office. Instead, he got a chance to rehash and laugh about the collision with Harbaugh in person last week. The coach happened to be on his way to Iowa City for a recruiting trip (One that netted four-star receiver Oliver Martin) soon after McGivern’s note arrived at his office.
“He said, ‘It just dawned on me, I’m going to Iowa,'” McGivern said. “‘Do you want to meet?’ I said ‘sure.'”
The two met at a local indoor pool where Harbaugh was courting Martin and chatted for close to an hour. McGivern explained that he was still in his post office uniform and wrapped his jacket around Harbaugh after the accident, hence the confusion on what vehicle actually hit him.
Harbaugh never actually saw the car. He had a shirt in front of his face as he tried to pull it over his head and sprint across the street at the same time. McGivern swerved to avoid him but the 7-year-old Harbaugh crashed into the rear quarter panel, leaving a dent. McGivern visited him in the hospital the following day and likely assumed that was the last time they’d cross paths.
That McGivern even discovered what became of the boy he hit is a bit of an astronomical unlikelihood. He happened to be at an assembly at his kids’ grade school when then-Chicago Bears quarterback Jim Harbaugh was speaking to the students in his old hometown. One of the students asked Harbaugh about the worst injury of his career. When McGivern heard Harbaugh recount the story from 1971 he couldn’t believe his ears.
“I’m in the back saying, ‘Oh, crap,” he said. “I told my wife, and she said don’t tell the boys. We were all Bears fans.”
It took another decade before he could tell his son and daughter that he delivered the biggest injury their hero had ever suffered when he was a 20-year-old postal worker.
After Harbaugh heard McGivern’s full account of their first encounter he decided that his swerve in the Mustang made his new friend a life saver. He fired off a Twitter photo to commemorate their reunion.
With Dan McGivern of Iowa City. Driver, when I ran into traffic & took on his car @ age 6 #LifeSaver #DefiningMoment pic.twitter.com/UOM055euuY
— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) January 26, 2017
When McGivern told the coach that well, as a matter of fact, he was in the life insurance business, Harbaugh couldn’t resist another tweet.
For comprehensive Life Insurance coverage, call Dan McGivern at 319-351-4307 pic.twitter.com/m0d0Af1TpQ
— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) January 26, 2017
Linebackers coach Chris Partridge, who was on the trip to Iowa with Harbaugh, warned them that blasting McGivern’s phone number out to all of Harbaugh’s 1.32 million followers might be a bad idea for the insurance office’s phone lines. McGivern has been in the business for 40 years though. He said he knew better than to expect a deluge.
To date, he’s received a grand total of five calls from people that saw the tweet — three reporters, one guy who actually wanted an insurance quote and another who called within minutes (McGivern’s office line forwards calls to his cell phone) and just wanted to talk to Harbaugh. The coach graciously took the phone and talked for a couple minutes before the caller asked about the end of this past fall’s Ohio State game. The call was promptly disconnected.
The McGiverns will be guests of the Harbaughs at some point next fall for lunch and a football game. For the record, no, Harbaugh didn’t cry the day he dented McGivern’s Mustang with that broken leg of his.
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