Being Hero Is Tricky Business

Joe Montana! You’ve just directed the 49ers to another Super Bowl championship with a record-smashing display of passing and leadership! You have cemented your place in history as the quarterback of the ‘80s and one of the all-time clutcho-stupendo greats of football! What are you going to do now?

Are you going to Disneyland?

Or will you simply duck quietly out of sight?

I think Plan B is the ticket, Joe. Forget Disneyland. Mickey Mouse and Goofy might go into a sulk because you’re getting all the attention.

“Just because we’re not hotshot football stars,” Mickey and Goofy would say, “is no reason for everyone to treat us like animals.”

Your genial Disneyland guide would write a book, telling all. How you tossed a candy-bar wrapper that missed the wide-open litter can by 5 feet, and how you sadistically refused to let your daughters have those huge lollipop they cried and begged for.

Hey, Joe, pack up your wife and kids and head for a Tibetan mountaintop. It’s the off-season there--great rates, no phones. Go somewhere far away, because things are already getting ugly around here.

First of all, your partner in crime has turned on you. Jerry Rice!

The day after the Super Bowl, Rice is in a deep funk, bitter and depressed. Why? Because he has not cashed in commercially on his Super Bowl most valuable player award.

“I would say it’s the media’s fault because they’re not getting my name out there,” Rice said. “If it were Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, it would have been headlines all over.”

Wonder how Rice thinks the MVP is chosen. By vote of the stadium hot-dog vendors?

The football media, which is about 98% white, votes on the award.

The media declared Rice to be the winner, even though in this observer’s humble opinion, the 49er quarterback was clearly the MVP.

Joe, apparently what’s bothering Jerry is that he got the MVP but you got the “I’m going to Disneyland” commercial, $50,000 for 4 words. That selection, of course, was made before the game. It seems logical that the Disneyland people offered the spot to a 2-time Super Bowl MVP quarterback, rather than to a wide receiver who says his injured ankle is so sore he can’t cut on it.

I can understand Rice being ticked off if he hasn’t landed a bunch of big endorsement contracts. I can even forgive him blaming it on media racism, even though that’s a cheap, malicious cop-out.

What I can’t understand is him dragging your name into the dirt, Joe. Who threw the guy all those passes?

I’m not saying Rice should be grateful. But it has been a great partnership, like Rogers and Astaire, and it would’ve been nice for Jerry to leave you out of it when he was lashing out at the injustice of it all.

Rice, I’m sure, will get his commercial due, although I don’t like his chances of signing a fat deal with Subaru. The MVP award winner is given a new Subaru, and when Rice was handed his keys, he sighed, “I’ve got so many cars, I don’t know what I’ll do with a Subaru.”

Shoot, he could give it to his mailman. He could fill it with dirt and make it into a planter. He could donate it to the homeless; with its fold-down bucket seats and roomy trunk, it probably would sleep 10.

On behalf of the nation’s press, I apologize to Rice for cluttering his driveway.

Meanwhile, another problem lurks on your horizon, Joe. I hear that your ex-wife, Cass, has written a steamy book about the marriage and divorce that is (according to a publicist) “laced with Joe’s emotional and highly revealing love letters.”

What I want to know, Joe, is how you could have walked out on a classy lady like this. The incredible courage of this woman, granting the public access to these vital and socially relevant documents, even though doing so might cause embarrassment to you.

Joe, didn’t anyone ever tell you? If you plan to get rich and famous, don’t send letters to your sweetie, send Candygrams.

Say, Joe, isn’t this the same ex-wife who tried to keep your Super Bowl MVP trophy and your Super Bowl ring? When the Joe Montana Museum is built, this lady has to be the leading candidate for curator.

Fortunately, you’re an optimist, Joe. I’m sure you’re grateful that your first wife hasn’t written a book yet, or that your retiring center, Randy Cross, hasn’t accused you of hogging the headlines, or of having cold hands.

Still, it doesn’t seem right.

Your head coach quits on you this season, tries to demote you to second string, and when you beat back the challenge, he blames all the controversy on--guess who?--the media.

You fight off shoulder and back and elbow problems, take injections, play hurt and never say a word, even when your back surgeon announces that you’re putting your life on the line by continuing to play.

In the end, on the last play of the season, you’re firing an amazing rifle-shot touchdown pass to some guy we’ve never heard of.

And nobody is surprised, because you’ve been doing pretty much the same thing for 10 years.

That’s the way the movie would end, with a freeze frame on that moment of victory in the Super Bowl.

But this is real life, not a movie, and life plods forward, up hills and down valleys.

Yes, life is a journey you have to walk yourself, Joe, unless Rice will lend you his Subaru.