Notes : Rice Leaves Practice After Aggravating Ankle Injury

The first (little) bit of news from Super Bowl XXIII:

Jerry Rice is hurting.

The San Francisco 49ers’ star wide receiver aggravated a right ankle injury Monday, had to leave practice and may miss the next couple.

The 49ers are listing him as questionable, but Coach Bill Walsh said, “I’d assume he’s fine.”

Trainer Lindsay McLean told the pool reporter: “(Rice) had a sprained ankle in the middle of the season that bothered him for 6-8 weeks. He made a cut and felt a sharp pain in the tendon area. So it’s more tendinitis than anything else.”

The story lines are already drawn:

The 49ers’ ongoing story is Bill Walsh’s future.

The Cincinnati Bengals will tell everyone what big underdogs they are.

Cincinnati Coach Sam Wyche is wearing a pin for a fictional school team that he made up--the man is always thinking --called the Sunnyvale State University Cherry Pickers.

What he’s trying to say is that the Bengals have been given no more chance than his SSU Cherry Pickers.

Said Wyche: “We’ve got a quarterback named Boomer (Esiason), a running back named Ickey (Woods) and a coach whose name can’t be pronounced by anyone born and raised in America. How good can we be?”

Add Walsh: There is no better than 20% chance that he will return as coach, 49er owner Eddie DeBartolo told the San Francisco Chronicle in today’s editions.

Those closest to Walsh on the team are also saying that he will retire after Sunday’s game for these reasons:

--He is concerned about his place in history and a victory Sunday would make the 49ers only the third team to win 3 or more Super Bowls since the series began.

--In a more perfect world, Walsh would stay and go for 4 next winter. But he is convinced that it’s no longer possible to win the Super Bowl in successive years--or even, in fact, more often than once every 3 or 4 years.

If the 49ers win this time, they will figure to be out of the race for a while. And Walsh, who is 57, doesn’t want to hang around until he’s 60 or older, chasing a quarry so elusive.

--He has been hesitant to commit himself this week because if the Bengals upset the 49ers, he will stay another 12 months in San Francisco to play out the last season of his long-term contract.

Next year’s 49er team can be better than this year’s, he reasons, and more likely to win the championship--if it fails this time.

Moreover, Walsh would like to go out as the National Football League’s biggest winner of the 1980s.

That’s a distinction he holds now. But the Washington Redskins’ Joe Gibbs could catch him next fall if Walsh retires now.

Walsh’s current thinking:

--If he wins his third Super Bowl this week, he has decided that he might as well let Gibbs overtake him in the 1989 regular season.

--Only if he is still looking for a third championship starting next September will Walsh return to seek both prizes, a third title and the 1980s record for most games won. Or so his friends say.

But DeBartolo told the Chronicle: “If I had to guess again, I’d think that Bill would want to take some time off (from coaching). The outcome of this game has nothing whatsoever, in my opinion, to do with his decision.”

The lopsided scores of most of the Super Bowls have come as no surprise to Dick Vermeil, the former UCLA and Philadelphia Eagles coach.

Vermeil reasons that euphoria guides the players, who build early Super Bowl leads, influencing them to, in their enjoyment, play better than ever.

Second--and more significant--teams that find themselves losing the championship game, after such long and widely publicized buildups, are consumed by negative thoughts, and, in effect, give up.

“Teams separate faster, emotionally, in the Super Bowl,” Vermeil said. “A team that gets on a positive roll gets hotter, thinking, ‘My God, we’re going to be world champs.’

“A team that gets on a negative roll gets colder: ‘My God, we’re blowing it!’ ”

They’re running a Superstars competition here and this was how they finished in the hot qualifying heat of the 100-yard dash: 1. Willie Gault, 9.77 seconds; 2. Herschel Walker, 9.84; 3. Tim Brown, 9.91.

The only teams to have won 3 or more of the first 22 Super Bowls were the Pittsburgh Steelers, the 4-time champions of the 1970s, and the Raiders, who won in 1977, 1981 and 1984. Pittsburgh’s Chuck Noll, however, is the only coach to have won 3 or more--the distinction that is meaningful to Walsh.

The Raiders won once with John Madden and twice with Tom Flores.

In an era of increasing parity, it has proved impossible to win twice in a row in the 1980s. For one thing, injury luck seems to control the draw.

Teams injury-free enough to beat their peers one season seem to have been using up several years’ supply of injury luck. They can’t seem to keep their best players in the lineup in successive seasons.

Lately, National Football Conference teams have taken charge of the Super Bowl, winning 6 of the last 7 games--starting with the 49ers’ conquest of the Bengals in 1982.

The NFC also won the first 2 with the Green Bay Packers. Of the 13 games in between, American Conference teams won all but 2.

Since the beginning, the AFC has also won most of the interconference games. In the 1980s, although NFC champions have been clobbering AFC champions, the AFC has continued to win or tie NFC teams in every regular-season series.

Quote Department:

Cris Collinsworth, Cincinnati receiver from the University of Florida, recalling that he didn’t expect to come home to Florida again this winter: “In training camp, I remember saying, ‘The Super Bowl’s in Miami. Too bad we’re such a crummy team.’ ”

Times staff writer Bob Oates contributed to this story.