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"I think people form an impression of Jim because he's friendly," she says. "But they won't really get to know him because he'll only get to let you know him a certain degree until he trusts you."
And because Zorn is so honest, so sincere, so decent, it seems to trouble him when people are not the same in return.
He can still recall, vividly, the day at training camp more than 20 years ago when, as a player in Seattle, a local writer spent much of a lunch hour interviewing him about Christianity, wondering how his faith molded him as both a person and a player. When they were done, Zorn was met at the bottom of a staircase by a group of kids asking for his autograph. As Zorn signed, the writer suddenly appeared from under the stairs, looking at Zorn in such a way that to this day the quarterback is certain the man was hiding in the stairwell to see if Zorn was truly the man he said he was and would stop to talk to the children.
"I don't think he set the kids up, but he said, 'Okay, I'm going to see, ah ha,' " Zorn says, his voice still tinged with surprise three decades later. "And he came out looking at me like, 'Uh huh, so you passed thaaaat test.' And I'll always remember that it was kind of interesting, as if how I was going to respond in that moment was going to solidify who I was for him. Now I was on the fortunate side of it. But it also wouldn't have reflected who I was . . . if I had just walked away [from the kids] and said, 'I can't do anything now.' "
Zorn believes if he treats his players with respect, they will reciprocate with their best efforts. This has always worked with the quarterbacks he coached and who ultimately gave him some of the finest performances of their careers, players such as Charlie Batch in Detroit, where Zorn coached in the late 1990s, and Hasselbeck and Dilfer years later with the Seahawks. "He treats you like a man," says Sherman Smith, a friend and former Seattle teammate who is now Zorn's offensive coordinator with the Redskins.
It is a concept that has backfired on many NFL head coaches, but in many of those cases, the coaches who treated their players like men didn't back it up with truthfulness.
And perhaps because Zorn is so curious about so many things, this makes him a good teacher. He has so much enthusiasm for what he has learned built up inside that he wants to spill it all out on his players.
"There's a biblical principle that talks about being clay in the potter's hands," Zorn says. "But to be clay in the potter's hands, you have to be formed. So you have to have pliability, you have to be formed. Clay has to have moisture in it so it can be manipulated. That's a great analogy for a future NFL star and all these guys playing the game. We're trying to bring out the best in them, and the ones who aren't so rigid will understand.
"Players will trust each other. So the idea is the veteran players will have a lot of respect over the younger players that come in. And they'll listen to the veteran players. The veteran players can smell a rat quicker because they've been around it for a while. They can whiff the air and sense what's being thrown out there to them. So I guess my point is you can earn the trust of a veteran player."
Only Zorn's closest friends knew how much he wanted to be a head coach. He was never comfortable with the maneuvering normally required to attain the position, and he hoped his body of work in Detroit and Seattle, as well as previous stops at the University of Minnesota, Boise State and Utah State, would stand out so much that hiring him was a must.
Largent would chide him by saying, "That's not how it works," and urged him to hire an agent. Zorn always resisted.
"I knew what the formula was: be a coordinator in the NFL, and I was heading towards that, but the thing that was always frustrating was, What was the formula for becoming a head football coach?" Zorn says.
