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If Walsh is the only N.F.L. coach unconventional enough to send out a rookie trio, the only city unconventional enough to react with yells and yawns in nearly equal portions is San Francisco, where many people send back the wine. (A good team, not a great team; we think you will be amused by its impertinence.) "Still," says Walsh, in a thoughtful moment, "you can't say the ballet, or the orchestra, cuts across as many boundaries as sports—especially pro football. Where else does one side of the city come together with the other? Regardless of their circumstances—economic, geographic, ethnic—people can have at least one thing in common. That's the tangible value of professional sports, bringing people together."
Except when rivalries hold them apart. "I have lived my 49er life among [Oakland] Raider fans," sighs Harry Troutt, president of the 49er team's local booster club. This has not been a happy season for the Raiders (the Raiders crashed from World Champion to 7-9), but San Franciscans are being big about the reversal of fortunes and are quoting Gertrude Stein on Oakland ("There's no there there") no more than usual.
Anthropologists like Berkeley's Alan Dundes are resuggesting that football is "a way of proving one's masculinity"; and, if so, wouldn't losing too steadily feminize a city, and couldn't that be the reason it is so easy to find a gay bar in this town? Meanwhile, the Starlight Room on upper Market Street during the championship game passed out free drinks to its all-male clientele at every 49er score. There is a general mood of giving. Rector Cadillac in suburban Burlingame is offering cars at dealer cost to anyone in the 49er organization. The players have found another opportunity irresistible: free hamburgers from the Canyon Inn. The team has been piling on. The John Travolta of this "49ers fever" is Montana, with his finger pointing up and his hair hanging down. He is "Golden Joe" on the bedsheet banners flapping in the usual windstorm at Candlestick Park; "Big Sky" to the San Francisco Chronicle, which decided he needed a nickname and ran a contest; and "David W. Gibson" to the entrant who recognized that what Joe Montana needed was a real name.* He proposed David W. Gibson. Montana liked that, and it's the name above his locker now.
Montana is a snowbird, a Californian by choice, not circumstance, who migrated from the cold country of Monongahela, Pa., and South Bend, Ind., two months before the 49ers drafted him. The beaches called him West first. He looks like a beach boy, light haired, lighthearted, seemingly lightheaded. Nothing about his appearance hints at the violence of his work. His build is unremarkable and his countenance unbattered, though the bridge on his Barry Mamlow nose is a little barked at the moment as the result of a two-dachshund accident at the intersection of his living-room sofa. The sportswriters frequently stacked up on his locker stoop probably presume it is a war wound.