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They have been eager to make a legend of him since he was at Notre Dame, where he put together a rout of improbable comebacks by coming off the bench, and a national championship in 1977 when, by the third game, he was finally the starter to stay. If his rise has been a little jerky to now (after all, a man must keep returning to the bench in order to vault from it again), there is no stopping the legend this time. The sportswriters wonder if he had been confident before the game, if he knew he was going to win, whether he had been afraid, if he had been excited. When exactly in his life had he realized all this might come to him? "I don't know," he says.
There never seems to have been a doubt that Montana would become some sort of ballplayer. His father was chiefly responsible for his dedication to games and, it could be argued, was the dedicated one. Joe Sr. is a trim and youthful, silver-haired and hatchet-faced man, just 49, born on the same day but a year after Walsh. He is the custodian of his only child's memorabilia and his own memories. The "fundamentals" he preached to the boy were learned in the Navy, where Joe Sr. played all the games. He had filled out slowly and had been too spare to make any of the teams at Ringgold High, where Joey would star in three sports.
Passion for sports is indigenous to Monongahela, 30 miles upriver from Pittsburgh, a steel-gray place of mines, mills and farms, hunting caps, lumberjack shirts, car dealerships and finance companies. It is shot-and-a-beer country, "Iron City" beer. Real boilers are made there as well, and so are quarterbacks. Western Pennsylvania has turned them out as stoic as Johnny Unitas, as extravagant as Joe Namath and as plain tough as George Blanda. Joe Montana Jr. favors all of them somewhat.
"Sometimes you look at a kid and you know he's a natural," says Joe Sr. "I'd come home at lunchtime. He was about seven or eight months old. He'd have a ball and a bat in his hands, standing there waiting for me when I came in the door." Out in the backyard, Joe served Joey as both center and receiver. He swayed the tire through which Joey flung the footballs. In those games, the natural child was never anything but the quarterback. No time was wasted punting the ball or running with it. When he was eight, to qualify him for midget football, they lied and said he was nine.
Preoccupied with his own playing schedule, he never saw either a Steelers or a Pirates game in person. As determined as he was to be the quarterback, he manned every position in the other sports, a matter of particular pride to his father. Even now, the football star's affection for basketball may be greater; his least favorite pastime was baseball on the days he had to catch. "'I didn't care much for foul tips," he says, wincing still, "but I could catch and. to my father, not liking something you were good at doing wasn't a good enough reason for not doing it."