Quarterback Mike Giardi: Up Front and Under Center

Michael Giardi knows that the end is near.

The senior has been under center for two-and-a-half seasons as Harvard's starting quarterback, and this spring he will lead the baseball team into battle as captain and starting shortstop. But it does all have to come to an end, no?

"Fortunately, I've got baseball to fall back on, so it's not really over for me yet," he says. "But I'm sure once that final gun goes off, Saturday against Yale..."

The voice trails off, ever so briefly pausing to contemplate a future without...but it's only a passing notion. The future must continue to be now.

"Right now, we're just taking it game by game," he continues. "Even with a [league] loss, we still control our own destiny. We have lots of games to go--right now a 1-1 record is not so bad, because we can still go out and do everything on our own."

Always focused on what can be done. Giardi is so committed to the Ivy League chase of the Princetons and Pennsylvanias that one wonders if he ever steps back and admires what has been a wonderful two-sport career.

What might he focus on? Maybe the records. Giardi recently passed the legendary Charlie Brickey '15 in career touchdowns with 25, and his career totals of 3,179 passing yards, 3,878 yards of total offense, and 152 total points are all second on the Crimson all-time tallies.

Maybe his play on the diamond. Coming off a year in which he hit .375, Giardi has demonstrated an ability to carry the Crimson with some timely hitting. And he plays the role of field leader like, well, a quarterback might handle things.

Possibly, he might look at the Big One That Got Away, way back in 1991. The Army game. A 21-20 loss against a Division I-A school. Giardi lit up the stat sheet that day for 275 passing yards and a passing touchdown along with 40 ground yards and two TDs.

"Honestly, I think that game changed the season that year," he recalls with a mixture of disbelief and frustration. "I think if we win that one game, we go on and win the Ivy League that year. 4-2-1 in the Ivies, and it could have been so much better."

But seriously, Mike--what a great game you yourself played. Right?

"We lose 21-20, and we missed a field goal, I bobble an extra point, we fumble twice inside the 20, and we were still up 20-7 halfway through the third. I vividly remember how well the Multiflex was working that game, almost to perfection.

"But we just didn't get the breaks we needed to win. I was so devastated, I came home from that game, called my mom and said, 'I wanna come home.' During the game it was great, because everything was going the way it was supposed to, but when you looked at the scoreboard at the end of the game and it still said 21-20, that hurt."

That game and that year led to many individual honors for the still-young Giardi. Voted ECAC Division I-AA Rookie of the Year by the media, he was deemed by his peers to be Harvard's Most Valuable Player, the first-such sophomore to be so selected.

"I was really surprised," he recalls, and he continues to be very quick in deflecting the honor to his team-mates. "The Multiflex just focuses on the quarterback a lot, running the option or throwing over 60 percent of the time. I mean, I'm happy for it, but everyone around me just made me look so much better than I might have been."

Ah, and about that much-maligned offensive creation from the mastermind of Joe Restic. Clearly, Giardi has become the definitive product of the revolutionary creature known as the Multi-flex, but he can recall his initial horror upon first reading the playbook.

"The first meeting I sat in [as a sophomore]," he smiles, "we had nine quarterbacks who sat down in Coach Restic's office. He started drawing plays on the board, and I just said, I'm moving to split end. I mean, I just had no idea.

"But it's not arcane--it's just a system that needs to be learned. I know it well enough that I can start making my own plays up in the huddle...which can be a problem when the other guys start looking at me as if I have 16 heads. It's difficult to break into the system, but once you're in, you've got it."

Giardi has had three years to figure the system out, a period of time in which he has drawn closer to Restic both as an athlete and a person.

"I have a lot of respect for him, and I think it works both ways," he says of a man who has coached the Crimson since 1971. "I can almost talk to him in terms of a player talking to another player, and he often asks me questions he might ask another coach. 'Can the offense do this? he might wonder.

"But we're always talking about things outside of football, too. Like today, I came into practice and we started talking about the NLCS [here he mutters something under his breath about the Braves' inability to win the big ones]. A lot of people seem to think that he's almost a god, some kind of untouchable, but he's really a down-to-earth kind of guy."

With Restic stepping down at the end of the season, critics have wondered if the graduation of his star QB might have a lot to do with the timing. Giardi thinks there's much more to it than that, but it does make some sense.

"Obviously, Coach thought in my sophomore year that I would be able to run the Multi-flex; why would he leave if he thought he still had a player who could effectively run it?" he says. "If he's going to leave anyways in the next few years, why not go out with a quarterback he's had for three years who he thinks can do some things?"

Giardi has thrived on pressure throughout his career; last year's solid performance in the 14-0 victory over Yale salvaged a frustrating season. But then again, he grew up just down the road in Salem, where the rivalries and passions run just as hot.

"The big game in high school was Salem-Beverly, on Thanksgiving; I think it's the fourth-oldest high school game in the country. It's just like Harvard-Yale: if you have and 0-9 record going into that game and win, you're champions, because that's the game everybody remembers, and it gets everybody pumped up.

"There's so much going on out there, it's such a circus. You try to get it all out of your head, but then you realize just how great it all is. It's a lot of fun."

Giardi grew up coming to the Harvard-Yale games, but it wasn't so clear-cut that he would always wear the Crimson. North Carolina, the Air Force Academy and several other local schools were in the running, but in the end, all the factors pointed to Harvard.

"I wanted to play two sports, I wanted to get a good education, and I kinda wanted to be close to home," he says. "It just so happens that Harvard came out on top; I wasn't thinking that I had to get A's my freshman year because I was going to Harvard."

In addition to successfully balancing his studies with his two on-field passions, Giardi the shortstop has another hobby: baseball card collecting. Sitting in what can euphemistically be termed the "ordered chaos" of his Mather House low-rise residence, one can hardly expect the patience and diligence associated with that hobby. But he has over 20,000 cards, many of them valuable.

"My dad was a high school baseball coach, and when he'd come home from work he'd always have two packs of baseball cards, one for me and one for my brother. Every day since, like, 1978. All of the sudden I had a big collection, and then I started buying on my own. I've got some valuable cards--some Clemens rookie cards, some Goodens, but I've gotta hide them now. My mother might throw them away."

The anecdote tells just how intertwined his family life and his passion for sports have become. The blood-lines are there--his father, Al, was a defensive back at Boston College; an uncle, Tommy Thornton, quarterbacked for Boston University and now is a high school coach in Maine.

"It's funny, in a way, that I go to a school where half the people don't even know what football is, it being such a large part of my life," he grins. "I mean in high school, me and my roommates were all studs; I can still go back to Salem and people will come up to me and say, 'Hi, Mike, how's it going?' A lot of them I don't even know; many of them I know through my parents."

But he keeps plugging along in relative anonymity, even though the media won't forget him. "It gets over-whelming at times, but you know you always want to do it because some day its gonna be over and you're going to miss all that stuff."

A rare somber moment for the senior facing his final five games under center. But he knows there is work to be done in pursuit of his first Ivy League ring.

"Each game is an individual game," he says. "You can't look at it as being 'the road to the championship' or anything like that; we'll just take each win and keep going with it. Play our game and we will win, period."

And with Giardi's assuredness leading the Crimson into battle, one senses that Harvard might yet fulfill that promise.