PRO FOOTBALL : 49ers Turning NFL’s Attempts for Parity Into a Private Party

The two most remarkable things about the champion San Francisco 49ers are their dominance in a parity era and their extraordinary improvement in just the past year and a half.

Parity is a condition that the NFL strives for with the inverse draft and other policies designed to cripple winners. And it works. Of the league’s 28 teams, 17 are evenly matched, and 10 others are only a bit better or worse.

The 49ers alone stick out.

They are the dominant team that American sports fans have yearned for since learning to love the old New York Yankees and Green Bay Packers.

But they weren’t that good a year and a half ago. After 11 games in 1988, the 49ers were the shining symbol of NFL parity. They stood 6-5 that day. They had just lost a 9-3 game to the Raiders, who were to finish 7-9.

Suddenly, and strangely, the 49ers started winning a week later, and they’re still at it, having won 24 of their past 27 games, including two Super Bowls.

If they are the best of all time, how could the 49ers so recently have stood 6-5 with the same personnel that clobbered Denver, 55-10, in Super Bowl XXIV?

Even against the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl XXIII, quarterback Joe Montana had to bring them from behind to win in the final seconds, 20-16.

The 49ers are a unique but mysterious success story.

After succeeding Bill Walsh as the 12th leader of the 49ers this season, George Seifert instantly found that he inherited a team highly motivated by Walsh’s resignation.

Moreover, he had a cast of players handpicked by Walsh, who ranks as one of the most shrewd talent scouts of his generation.

This season, accordingly, it couldn’t have been too hard to coach the 49ers.

As Seifert said Monday: “Bill sort of forged this team. I’m satisfied just to be part of it.”

Next season’s team, however, will belong more to Seifert. Of the 55 49ers now under contract, he can protect only 37 under Plan B.

He will also have to come up with a new way to motivate the players. In football, wanting to win is seldom motive enough.

“Usually, you’ve got to fear something,” Montana said last week.

And this season, the 49ers feared that they might lose without Walsh. Specifically, they feared what people would say about them as football players if they lost without Walsh, who showed them how to win three Super Bowls.

Seifert’s task will be at least twice as difficult next season. But he’ll have these two advantages over most other coaches:

--From Montana to Jerry Rice to Roger Craig to John Taylor to Tom Rathman to Brent Jones, the 49er offense is so talented that it will be less dependent on a motivational crutch than most of its opponents.

--The club’s two work-ethic models, Craig and Ronnie Lott, are so diligent that they inspire the whole organization.

The magazine and newspaper reporters who ignored Montana this winter in their player-of-the-decade rankings should be required to stand in a corner until they understand what the 49er quarterback accomplished in the 1980s.

A man who directs a pro football team through four Super Bowl-winning seasons in nine years should win North American player of the decade by acclamation.

Sports Illustrated, which chose hockey’s Wayne Gretzky, overlooked two things about U.S. sports:

--In nationwide interest, football is far ahead of hockey.

--It requires more talent and courage to play quarterback well than to succeed in any position in any other major team sport.

In baseball, for instance, it takes talent to pitch effectively--but there are no blitzers bearing down on the pitcher as he waits for a teammate to find a clearing in the maze of a zone defense.

In basketball, pro players are doubtless better athletes, on the average, than football, hockey or baseball players, but the full repertoire of an NBA player is incomparably simpler than Montana’s.

In hockey, Gretzky can fight back. In football, Montana has to stand there and take it.

Three months ago, the Philadelphia Eagles sacked and bloodied Montana eight times, but he got up to win, coming back with four touchdown passes in the fourth quarter.

The question is whether there’s a better athlete in any sport than Montana. Although Bronco quarterback John Elway is a spectacular athlete, Montana has better physical coordination, better balance and better agility. In physical resources, Montana is arguably the better man.

Montana as an athlete is like a deer out there, or a dancer, or a leaf in the wind--graceful, fluid, effortless.

Gretzky is grand--no arguments there--but the leader of four Super Bowl champions is the player of the decade.

What the Denver defense discovered Sunday is that there’s no way to defend against the four-time champions.

On their first touchdown drive of the second quarter, the 49ers, after opening a 13-3 lead with passes, rested their wide receivers and gave the ball to running backs Craig and Rathman on 13 of the 14 plays.

In the last two minutes of the first half, Montana, who had been clobbering Denver with short passes, needed a big play to beat the clock, so he launched one to Rice for a 38-yard touchdown.

When the Broncos rushed Montana with three defensive linemen, he could and did wait a tick, then picked out the open target.

When they rushed him with three linemen and a linebacker, he hastily fired over the middle, usually to Rathman.

The 49ers can play every kind of football. Although Rice, for example, is known for his brilliance as a receiver, he showed the toughness to fight off one of Denver’s toughest hitters, safety Steve Atwater, when Atwater tried to knock him down on the five-yard line on a touchdown play.

“I should have gone for the sure tackle,” Atwater said afterward.

It was the most true to form of the 24 Super Bowl games--the blowout that most coaches and scouts expected--but for the sports fans who appreciate beauty and greatness in a football team, it was worth watching all the way. With Walsh gone from the NFL, it may be years before there is another team that can play on this level.