Are the 49ers just smarter than everyone else?
“Sure,” quarterback Steve Young said. “Why not?”
At eye level across the foyer rest five Lombardi trophies, sleek, shiny, smug. Oddly, only four Halas trophies are arranged above them. This would indicate one fewer NFC title for San Francisco than Super Bowl victories.
I ask if one of the Halas trophies has been lost or stolen.
“Oh, it’s somewhere,” my guide says. “We don’t keep track of silver medals around here.”
Game balls, championship rings, team photos–nothing else clutters the 49ers’ trophy case but mementos of the Super Bowl years, as if there were no 49ers before the first one and none after the last one.
As if there are no 49ers at all without one.
The 49ers have not only endured at the top of pro football for nearly two decades, they have been the single constant of the NFL, the standard against which all the occasional intruders must be measured, Green Bay being only the latest.
“Everyone in this locker room is very aware of the tradition,” Young said. “I take it very personally.
“That’s something I’ve thought a lot about . . . to keep it going, to build on it. There has been a long period of success, and not on my watch is it going to go down.
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“I think we all feel that way. I mean, we don’t talk about it or make secret pledges in blood, none of that stuff. We just live it.”
It started with the Cowboys, with Dwight Clark’s catch in the end zone. It outlasted the Cowboys as America’s Team and as America’s Most Wanted.
The Bears were mere passers-through. One of the Halas trophies offers a reminder, 23-0, the year before the Bears’ only Super Bowl.
The Redskins flowed and ebbed, the Giants came and went and came again. Thirteen of the last 17 years, the 49ers have won their division. This year was the fourth time they have swept their division.
And now the Packers. Few teams got to where they were going without going through the 49ers. And so it will be again.
“There is a sense of the inevitable,” 49ers coach Steve Mariucci said. “You kind of felt 49ers versus Packers was the way it was meant to be.”
This one is so cross-referenced it makes an eye chart look like haiku.
Take notes. I had to.
Green Bay’s head coach once worked for his hometown team, the 49ers, and once hired the 49ers’ head coach to work for his boyhood heroes, the Packers, where he became the Packer quarterback’s guru and soul mate but is now the 49er quarterback’s, though in college the Green Bay coach was, and for four years in the pros, and we are not going to get into migrating assistant coaches and the general offensive philosophy that started way back with the granddaddy of it all, Bill Walsh, a certified genius and seed-spreader.
Whew.
In other words, not only has San Francisco sustained San Francisco, it has brought back the Pack as well.
“We’re used to these connections,” Young said. “It’s nothing new from our side.”
You mean that your coach used to be Brett Favre’s coach?
“No,” Young said. “That’s a new one.”
San Francisco has only itself to blame for the Packers, win or lose, and it has been lose the last three times, twice in the playoffs.
Beat me once, good on you. Beat me twice, shame on me.
To meet the challenge of Green Bay, the 49ers coldly excused George Seifert, a coach who had won two of those Super Bowl trophies, and replaced him with the younger, more offensive-minded Mariucci.
They paid big dollars for notables like Rod Woodson and Kevin Greene on defense, got another place-kicker and hired a running back, Garrison Hearst, fixing what needed fixing to stay at the top.
“This goes on year in and year out,” Young said. “Each year if there is any sign of demise, there’s a loud call to it. Because people have been waiting for it.
“Each time there is a real resiliency to fighting back and holding on and building on it. That’s what has separated this organization. They’ve built on prior success rather than just trying to hold on.”
It’s called vision. The Bears might try some.