49ers Remind San Francisco of Glory Years

SAN FRANCISCO â€" Last weekend at Candlestick Park, it felt the way it used to feel when “Montana” and “Young” and “Rice” were stitched onto jerseys, when the 49ers boasted a franchise as successful as any in sports.

To Coach Jim Harbaugh, it felt like a fortress, as “good as it can get.” To Ted Robinson, the team’s radio announcer, it felt like a renaissance as he nearly lost his voice. To the former running back Roger Craig, it felt like the glory days, when the 49ers won five Super Bowls in 14 seasons, when he never played on a losing team.

“Candlestick was shaking,” Craig said. “Martians on Mars could have heard us screaming.”

As Jed York, the team president, left the stadium, his first phone call was to his uncle, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., a cellular link between present and past. DeBartolo’s ownership tenure, from 1977 to 2000, produced the 49ers’ juggernaut. He later, when ensnarled in the corruption case that sent the former Louisiana governor Edwin W. Edwards to prison, ceded control of the team to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York.

Her son, Jed, wanted Uncle Eddie to return to Candlestick on Sunday and serve as an honorary captain when the 49ers host the Giants in the N.F.C. championship game. DeBartolo accepted.

“It will be the most emotional moment I’ve spent with the 49ers,” he predicted last week.

DeBartolo arrived here from Youngstown, Ohio, and, with his three-piece suits and outsider status, bombed at his initial news conference. His decision to hire Joe Thomas as the general manager proved equally disastrous.

In 1979, a friend and local radio announcer introduced DeBartolo to Bill Walsh, the coach who would change the way the N.F.L. played offense. Their interview, DeBartolo said, lasted all of 15 minutes. He made the hire on the spot.

Walsh held back nothing the first time he addressed the team. “I know what you’re all thinking,” he said, according to Randy Cross, an offensive lineman for 13 seasons in San Francisco. “You’re thinking, ‘I’ve been here for a while. I’ve survived three, four, five coaches. I’ll survive this one.’ Look around, gentlemen. You’re the worst team in the league. If you can’t play here, where are you going to play?”

DeBartolo, in what became the hallmark of his leadership style, empowered the chosen few that comprised his inner circle. He allowed Walsh, on a hunch, to draft a skinny quarterback from Notre Dame named Joe Montana in the third round in 1979. He hired John McVay as the general manager. He brought in Carmen Policy, an old friend from Youngstown, as an executive.

In Walsh’s first season, the 49ers won two games. In 1980, they won six, including a victory against New Orleans that was the largest comeback at the time. The next year, when Montana and Dwight Clark connected for “the Catch” and the 49ers later won the Super Bowl, changed everything.

A dynasty was born, even if it did not seem that way in 1982, when San Francisco finished with a losing record and Walsh needed to be talked out of quitting by DeBartolo that off-season. The 49ers then won at least 10 games a season for the next 16 years.

The city of San Francisco needed a football team like that, after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and the politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, and after the Jonestown massacre. DeBartolo gave it to them. In the days before the salary cap, he provided Walsh with an embarrassment of talent, including, at one point, three All-Pro nose guards. He flew the team on a private plane and gave players’ wives necklaces after Super Bowl triumphs.

When the 49ers crushed Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl after the 1984 season, Robinson sensed the dynamic shifting. More locals wore 49ers gear. Tickets seemed impossible to obtain. The 49ers became the dominant presence in Northern California sports, and, Robinson said, “second place wasn’t even close.”

Those teams were so good, for so long, the Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young said on an ESPN conference call last week, he could not remember how many championship games he played in.

Cross said: “With good teams, you could put them in jock straps, without shoes, on broken glass, and they’re going to win. That’s how we felt for the better part of a decade.”

Looking back, DeBartolo said he failed to appreciate the history involved. The expectations reached almost impossible levels, and this levied tolls physical and emotional. When Craig arrived in 1983, the first thing a teammate said to him was “we drafted you to win a Super Bowl.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.