Plague Journal, Day 41: Grieving Joe Montana

I missed the most dramatic sports story of my life.  

I grew up near the San Francisco Bay Area in a family that cared about sports — mostly pro teams, the big three: baseball, basketball, football. My father bought season tickets to the 49ers in the late 1940s, shortly after the team became San Francisco’s first major league sports franchise (in the fledgling AAFC, which merged with the NFL in 1950), decades before fans needed second mortgages to pay for “licenses” granting the right to buy overinflated annual tickets. 

From the franchise’s birth through the year of my high school graduation, the 49ers were often entertaining, sometimes terrible, mostly mediocre. My youth was marked by two-hour Sunday drives to watch Candlestick Park losses, then two-hour drives home. In my father’s reckoning, the team had never won a big game. He waited his adult life for a franchise quarterback who could play with poise in the biggest moments: an Otto Graham, a Johnny Unitas, a Roger Staubach. The quintessential 49ers QB: John Brodie, who put up impressive numbers in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and, in Dad’s view, folded in the clutch like a cheap suit. 

Then came owner Eddie DeBartolo (in 1977), coach Bill Walsh (1979), quarterback Joe Montana (in the 3rd round of the 1979 draft). The ’79 (2-14) and ’80 (6-10) teams were still bad; the starting QB was Steve DeBerg, who threw for lots of yards, with lots of goal-line interceptions. (Walsh, later: “DeBerg was just good enough to get you beat.”) Montana mostly came off the bench in 1980. He was intriguing, but no one predicted franchise glory any time soon. In the fall of ’81, as I headed for a post-high school year as an exchange student in Israel, oddsmakers predicted San Francisco would finish in the NFL’s bottom third. Odds to win the Super Bowl: 50-1. 

If you lived through the season, if you cared at all, you’d remember. Montana had a magical year, launching a career that made him the NFL’s greatest quarterback (until replaced by another underrated college arm, Tom Brady). His casual flair, his knack for the dramatic, made him transcend sports, as Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali had before him, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods after. The 1982 Super Bowl still has the highest rating of any Super Bowl — 49.1 percent of U.S. TV households watched. 

The media world was different in the 1980s. I communicated from Israel with my family by aerogram, a thin sheet of blue, gummed paper that folded to become its own envelope. (A wretched correspondent, I sent home three all year.) I lived with two families, both in the Tel Aviv suburbs (Holon, Petah Tikva). I was supposed to attend high school, but both school principals said, in essence, “Why? You don’t speak Hebrew. You’d learn more traveling.” In Holon I bucked the advice, went to school. In Petah Tikva, I took it, spent a month working on a West Bank archeological dig, another month on a kibbutz. The latter meant that during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon I had a ringside seat, from Kibbutz Shamir in the upper Galilee near the Lebanese border, where I watched Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon land near the town of Kiryat Shmona, watched Israeli jets in distant dogfights with Syrian planes. My parents, worried as it was, had no idea I wasn’t safe in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. 

The only way to get U.S. news was to read the New York Herald Tribune, sold in Tel Aviv newsstands. I had little money, but through the fall on Tuesdays I’d buy the Monday edition, which had the weekend’s scores. I really paid attention after Week 6, when the 49ers crushed Dallas (improving to 4-2); I thought something special might be happening after Week 9, when they beat the Steelers on the road (7-2). A couple of times, short on cash, I shoplifted a paper; the last time I was pursued by the news agent, who found me in a nearby park, grabbed the paper from my hands, whacked me over the head with it, twice.

My family sent yellow envelopes filled with a month’s worth of Sports Illustrated that arrived weeks later. I fell in love with Paul Zimmerman, SI’s football writer, who conveyed personalties, tension, strategy; reading his pieces you’d learn why a team won or lost, how a defensive end was neutralized, a safety exploited. (This was years before ESPN, 24-hour talk radio, non-stop sports jabber.) I knew the 49ers were good because they rotated defensive lineman to keep fresh their fourth-quarter pass rush; because they had great offensive guards (Randy Cross, John Ayers); because Walsh’s plans were designed with the precision of a wily field marshal’s. 

It was all thin gruel. I loved games: the build-up, the developing tension, the back-and-forth, the testosterone surges. From age 8 to maybe 13, I usually had to stop watching televised games, go outside, play basketball in the driveway for 5 or 10 minutes until I could stand to watch again. Now, finally, my team was having a fairy-tale season, and I had to imagine all of it.

During the entire year my parents called Israel one time: Monday morning, Jan. 11, 1982. With Mom listening, Dad told me about the 49ers 28-27 win over the despised Cowboys (winners over the 49ers in excruciating playoff games in 1970, ’71, ’72): about the six S.F. turnovers; Montana’s resilience; The Catch, Dwight Clark’s leaping last-minute end-zone grab (“But it still wasn’t over!” Dad said); Dwight Hicks’ horse-collar TD-saving tackle of Drew Pearson; Lawrence Pillers’ sack, Jim Stuckey’s fumble recovery. Amazing. I got off the phone thrilled, deeply depressed. 

Two weeks later. Another Monday morning. I listened as an announcer from the Voice Of Peace, an English-language radio station broadcasting from a ship anchored in the Mediterranean, read the final score of the Super Bowl, an event no one I knew in Israel cared about one whit: 49ers 26, Bengals 20. The 49ers had led 20-0 at halftime. That was it. I raised my arms in the air. My team had won a title. No one else was in the room. I called the family’s German shepherd, shut my door, cried into his muzzle. 

I’ve long since replaced following the NFL with English Premier League soccer. But the Girlfriend keeps wondering why I’m not following what’s happening with any sports in CoronaWorld. 

“Because there are no games,” I tell her. “Without games sports are … nothing.”

The other day The Girlfriend walked into the bedroom. 

“What are you watching?” 

“Highlights of Gary Lineker’s best goals.” 

“Who’s Gary Lineker?”

“He’s host of BBC’s 'Match Of The Day.' He’s quite a good host. He used to be an English national player, scored 10 goals in World Cup finals matches, the national record. I have to say, I’ve never seen such a collection of scruffy goals: chips, lobs, dinks, bloops, wrong-footers. Not a rocket in the bunch.” 

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” I shut the laptop.

Major League Baseball is apparently considering playing a season’s worth of games in Arizona. Will they play in empty spring training parks? Subject Arizonans to Covid-19 by having players and coaches congregate? Make fans stand six feet apart in the beer line? The idea’s so painful I can’t even read about it.

I watched highlights of a Champions League soccer game played in early March in an empty Parisian stadium (Paris St. Germain 2, Borussia Dortmund 0). Men In Blazers compared it to watching “The Office” after Steve Carell left. I found the metaphor too weak by miles. To me, it was like hearing the final score of Super Bowl 16, my sole company another family’s German shepherd. 



(New York state numbers as of Wednesday: 257,216 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 2.2 percent; 474 dead, to a total of 15,302, up 3.2 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,118, to a total of 42,200, up 5.3 percent.)