The 49ers’ Model of Efficiency

Stop three out of three people on the street and ask them who or what a “Keena Turner” is, and chances are you will get a blank look, then a bright one and an “Oh, yeah! Entertainer! Great legs! Does this kind of frenzied dance at pop concerts. Dynamite lady! Like, Wow!”

But if you stop a guy in the French Quarter with a red-and-gold “Go San Francisco” logo on his jacket and a Beat-the-Broncos beanie, he’ll tell you “Keena Turner!? The heart and soul of the San Francisco 49ers! The best outside linebacker in the history of the franchise!”

He is too light--218 pounds--to be a linebacker, too big--6-feet-2--to be a cornerback and too slow to be a safety. But too good not to be anything he really wants to be, too skilled not to be in the lineup whenever his team has to go get the ball back.

The former-coach-turned-broadcaster, John Madden, asked to define the San Francisco 49ers in a word, thought a minute and then came up with: efficiency .

“They are so efficient, they’re annoying,” Madden said. “They are like the kid your mother is always saying, ‘Why can’t you be like so-and-so? How’s come you’re such a slob?’

“They’re a little too neat. Their locker room is a little too clean. It doesn’t even smell. You know how locker rooms are piled high with dirty clothes and towels and guys are going around scratching and spitting? Not the 49ers’. The 49ers’ locker room is like an operating room. You could do an appendectomy there. It’s like their hair is combed underneath that helmet. Their shoes are shined, their taxes are paid, they even let the cat out. You could hate them. You say, don’t these guys ever make a mistake? Why don’t they goof up like everyone else?

“They play football the same way. They let you make the mistakes. They just stand there, kind of amused, and let you mess up. Then they go ahead and do it right, and it’s almost as if they were saying, ‘Here, let me show you how to do it.’ ”

It’s not that the 49ers are robotized. They’re not a passionless team, just a focused one. “That’s it!” Madden said. “They use words like focused and programmed . They don’t even get dirty.”

They play space-shuttle football. Other teams make up plays as they go along. The 49ers don’t chart plays, they chart games. Everything in its place, no wasted motion. And Keena Turner is at the core of it.

When people talk of the 49er defense, they use words like underrated . They mean overshadowed . When a team can 10-yard its way down the field with the surgical precision of the 49ers’ doctors, defense is, at best, an afterthought. But Keena Turner came into the 49er culture at practically the same time as Dr. Montana. Within two years, the team was in its first Super Bowl.

In that Super Bowl year--the ’81 season--Joe Montana threw 19 touchdown passes. But Keena T., on the other side of the ball, weighed in with 84 tackles, three sacks and an interception. In the playoffs, he had seven tackles and two sacks. It was Keena Turner of whom a Cowboy quarterback once said, “He’s never out of position; you look up at the line of scrimmage and he’s right where you don’t want him to be.”

Nothing makes the 49ers angrier than to be told they are a finesse team. They all but froth at the mouth at the notion they win games the way Bugs Bunny wins cartoons. They take it to mean someone is suggesting they play in tutus to a score by Tchaikovsky and faint at the sight of blood.

Lots of units would like to be thought of as nifty, or crafty, able to win by their wits, river boat gamblers, crapshooters, sleight-of-hand artists.

Not the 49ers. They want to be thought of as the Broad Street Bullies, Monsters of the Midway, Purple People Eaters. Brutes, troglodytes. They don’t want to win games by guile, cunning. They want to be the Wehrmacht , not the cavalry.

It’s not that Keena Turner will ever be mixed up on the field with Tina, but he belies the image of the 49ers as muggers. Keena Turner will never be mixed up with Dick Butkus, either, or even Lawrence Taylor. “I realize,” Turner said, “they’re going to bigger linebackers like Lawrence Taylor at New York, or at Green Bay where you say, Is Tim Harris a linebacker or a defensive end?

With Keena Turner you say, is he a linebacker, cornerback or safety? Visiting quarterbacks wished they knew.

Keena Turner has played behind front fours that included Fred Dean and Big Hands Johnson and with linebacking corps that included the redoubtable Hacksaw Reynolds. The outside linebacker has always been Keena Turner in the Bill Walsh-George Seifert era. He is the only linebacker from the 49ers to go to the Pro Bowl in the decade.

If John Elway is unsure which one he is Sunday, he should just throw the ball in Keena Turner’s area. He will introduce himself dramatically. He has made 607 tackles in his career as a 49er. Twenty-four of them were sacks. Twelve times he came up with interceptions. The 49ers may abhor the word, but finesse is the only term to describe the way Keena Turner plays the game.

Unless you want to count victorious . Left fielders create dynasties, too, and on the 49ers, with Keena Turner there, left field is very well taken care of on this dynasty.