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Nick Wagoner, ESPN Staff Writer
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Through a more than 21-year career spent playing and coaching in the NFL, Jim Harbaugh has seen just about all there is to see.
But when Harbaugh takes a moment to visualize in his mind’s eye the perfect football player, he sees someone who defeated all sorts of adversity and, week after week, produced at a high level despite mangled feet and oft-broken hands.
Put more simply, Harbaugh envisions the quiet, smoldering intensity of Patrick Willis, the soon-to-be Hall of Fame linebacker he coached for four years with the San Francisco 49ers.
“Just to know everything that Patrick Willis did, all the things he overcame,” Harbaugh said in February. “When you look at every picture of him, like going back to college, I mean he had a club on one or both hands and also with his feet, too. That’s the epitome of being a football player and, really, a warrior. He’s a mighty man.”
By the standards of many Hall of Famers, Willis’ NFL career was short, lasting for just eight seasons and 120 games across the regular and postseason. When Willis, who dealt with chronic toe injuries late in his career, walked away following the 2014 season at just 30 years old, outside observers believed he still had plenty left to give.
To hear his former teammates and coaches tell it, the biggest reason Willis is set to be enshrined into the Hall of Fame on Saturday, is because he actually gave everything he had all the time whether he was playing a game, participating in practice or sitting in a meeting room.
Safety Donte Whitner spent his first five NFL years with the Buffalo Bills, a team that not only was about as geographically removed from the 49ers as any in the league but also one that didn’t have a winning season in those five seasons.
Upon signing with the Niners in 2011, Whitner knew of Willis from highlight reels but hadn’t seen him up close. It took all of one training camp practice for Whitner to understand why Willis had already racked up three first-team and one second-team All-Pro nods in his first four seasons.
During an early portion of team drills in that practice, Whitner saw Willis give up a 15-yards catch off a play action pass, quickly run down the tight end, knock the ball out of his hands, recover it and return it for a touchdown. The physical ability that made Willis a hard-hitting downhill linebacker against the run and a fast and agile coverage player in the pass game was easily evident, but the effort level in an early practice let Whitner immediately see there was a standard to meet that Willis would require from he and his teammates.
“I didn’t really ever see that in practice (before then),” Whitner said. “I immediately knew what it took to be a San Francisco 49er and what he was demanding from every individual out there. He was always relentless.”
That approach applied to every aspect of his career. Former Niners linebacker Chris Borland spent just one season with Willis in 2014. It would be the final season of both of their careers and Borland was competing for the inside linebacker job next to Willis because NaVorro Bowman was coming off a torn ACL.
In the opening days of that training camp, Borland went out early to warm up only to find Willis already on the field working on his read steps over and over. It was a drill Borland said the average linebacker began as far back as third grade but a prime example that in the NFL all the little things mattered.
When Willis wasn’t setting the example on the field, he was quietly offering guidance and encouragement to Borland whenever he needed it.
“To me, he’s such a good example of the difference between perception and reality,” Borland said. “He’s like the type of player you would create as a kid in Madden — 6’1, 240-plus pounds, fast, looked cool, wore a visor — and when I got to San Francisco, he was soft-spoken, really supportive and a great leader in a way that didn’t draw attention to him. The epitome of speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Willis’ soft-spoken approach to leadership didn’t always carry over to the meeting rooms, though. According to Whitner, Willis “pissed a lot of the players off” because he was “just like a 5-year-old” when it came to firing questions at the coaches about the defense. When teammates would try to slow those queries, Willis would let them know in no uncertain terms that his job as middle linebacker was to know everything about the defense and the game plan.
“There wasn’t a guy that I ever had as a former teammate that took it more seriously than Patrick Willis,” Whitner said.
By the time Willis retired, he had earned the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year award, five first-team All-Pro honors, a second team All-Pro spot, seven Pro Bowl appearances and a spot on the NFL’s 2010s All Decade team.
None of those accolades were necessarily the driving factor for Willis, who grew up in rural Tennessee and still remembers a first-grade teacher reciting the statistical difficulty of becoming a professional athlete. Willis insisted that he’d overcome those odds and once he did, he never stopped working to live his dream for as long as his body would allow.
“Before I even got to the NFL, I told myself I just want to make sure that when I’m done, I can look at my body of work and say ‘Man, you did that,'” Willis told ESPN in December 2020. “For me, I would say that right there would be more than enough.”
Willis’ impact on the Niners and those who were in his orbit during his career liners in the present day. Current 49ers linebacker Fred Warner counts Willis as a friend and the two communicate periodically throughout the season.
Borland still admires how Willis threaded the needle between being an intense, fiery competitor on the field and a quiet, calm and wise advisor off it.
“I think people confuse people who are self-contained with lacking intensity,” Borland said. “And I think the opposite is often true. Still waters run deep…. He could probably get you more fired up just by looking at you in the locker room than some guys could with a kind of bull—t speech… I was lucky just to be around him.”
As Willis makes his way into Canton, he will become the first member from the stout Niners defenses that helped push the franchise back into Super Bowl contention from 2011 to 2013 to reach the Hall of Fame. In many ways, Willis is the ideal choice to represent those dominant groups. As Harbaugh, Whitner, Borland and others are quick to point out, Willis in a gold jacket embodies who those teams were and so much more.
“Patrick isn’t just a Hall of Famer,” Whitner said. “He’s pretty much one of one.”