CATCH OF THE DECADE : When Montana and Clark Hooked Up in the 1982 NFC Title Game, It Signaled a Change in the NFL Power Structure

Football fans tend to measure time not with clocks and calendars but with big games or big plays.

Thus in Dallas all week they have been saying that today’s 49er-Cowboy game in San Francisco will define the end of the long 49er dynasty and the beginning of a new one for the Cowboys.

If they are right, it won’t be the first time that these two powerful NFL franchises have turned around on a drenched, muddy field at Candlestick Park, although there is one pertinent difference now.

When it happened last time, 11 years ago, the bell tolled for the Cowboys--ending a spree of five 1970s Super Bowl appearances.

The 49ers set off the other way that day on a championship run that was to take 1980s San Francisco teams to a record-tying four Super Bowl victories under Bill Walsh and George Seifert.

“The (Cowboy-49er playoff game) marked a real power shift in pro football,” Walsh, the Stanford leader who built all four 49er winners and coached the first three, said recently.

“It (matched) teams going in opposite directions. And for us, of course, it all began at the end of the game with The Catch.”

THE CATCH

In the Bay Area, it is called simply that.

“I met Dave the night before The Catch,” a 49er fan said at a Christmas party last month, introducing her husband.

She meant the big play of Walsh’s first big game, the meeting for the NFC title on Jan. 10, 1982, in which, with 51 seconds to play, Dallas still had the lead, 27-21.

But it was 49er quarterback Joe Montana who had the ball at the Dallas six-yard line.

Chased by three or four Cowboys, Montana sprinted to his right and threw a high, hard one over the goal line to his best friend, wide receiver Dwight Clark, who sprang up to make The Catch for the winning touchdown.

That one play knocked Dallas out of the NFL’s throne room and swept San Francisco in.

When kicker Ray Wersching added The Point,

with Montana holding, it was 28-27, Dallas was through--until today--and the 49ers were off to their first Super Bowl, where, against the Cincinnati Bengals, they won more easily than they had turned back Dallas.

“Luckiest play I ever saw,” longtime Cowboy President Tex Schramm said again last week. “(Montana) was trying to throw the ball away.”

Schramm was perhaps the most efficient of the NFL’s front-office persons, a distinction he held for 25 years, but the 49ers swear he is wrong about the Montana-Clark play.

It only looked like a throw-away, they insist, because Montana, a former basketball player, jumped above 6-foot-9 Dallas lineman Ed (Too Tall) Jones as he threw it, and because Clark, who stands 6-4, jumped above Dallas cornerback Everson Walls as he caught it.

“The play was in our (game plan),” Walsh said. “Joe and Dwight had practiced it many times.”

In the locker room the night of The Catch, Clark said: “We’ve been working on it since (training camp at) Rocklin.”

The game film, as viewed today, is a how-time-flies commentary. The two fresh-faced, long-haired kids in the postgame interview--their upbeat personalities as yet unspoiled by age, adulation or money--are Montana and Clark.

As Montana said not long ago: “The Catch changed all our lives.”

A MIRACULOUS YEAR: FROM RONNIE LOTT TO THE DRIVE

In its historical context, the NFL’s biggest catch of the 1980s was more frosting than cake.

Two fresh kids didn’t pop up out of nowhere to take over pro football.

“(The Catch) was just one play that kind of demonstrated what had gone on that entire season,” Clark said from 49er headquarters in Santa Clara, where he is the club’s operations coordinator.

As a whole, 1981 was a miraculous season, he meant. And so it seemed.

Two years earlier, after taking over a 2-14 team, Walsh had led the 49ers to a second consecutive 2-14. They finished last in the NFC West that year in the season of the Rams’ only Super Bowl team.

Their swift rise under Walsh from 2-14 in 1979 to the Super Bowl at the end of the ’81 season was an almost exact precursor of the rise of the Cowboys under Jimmy Johnson 10 years later. A 3-13 club the year before Johnson, the Cowboys fell to 1-15 in 1989 before beginning their rapid climb to the NFC title game this season.

And doing it the same way, Walsh and Johnson accomplished these feats as the preeminent talent scouts of their time in the league.

For the 49ers, the beginning of a golden era was the draft of USC safety Ronnie Lott in the first round of 1981. In his rookie coaching season, 1979, Walsh had drafted Montana in the third round and Clark in the 10th, but they were to become only the foundation for greatness.

To reach a championship level, the 49ers still needed a Super Bowl secondary and a couple of enforcers. Three-fourths of the secondary was drafted in 1981--Lott, Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson--and two castoffs were brought in as defensive enforcers: Fred Dean from the San Diego Chargers and Jack (Hacksaw) Reynolds from the Rams.

This crew was to pay dividends continuously. After The Catch, the game still had to be saved. And Wright saved it on the next play, which was a long Dallas pass, quarterback Danny White to Drew Pearson, the club’s most dangerous receiver.

Pearson had broken open and was going for the winning touchdown when Wright reached desperately and clutched the back of his shirt, bringing him down with The Tackle.

A moment thereafter, White fumbled, and it was over.

In the fourth quarter that day, matching The Catch in importance was The Drive leading up to it. In the game’s last 4:54, the 49ers had to go 89 yards, and each of their 13 plays--seven passes and six runs--was a nail-biter.

Tom Landry, the first coach to use seven defensive backs, opposed Montana frequently during The Drive with a unique 4-7 defense, which the rest of the league soon copied.

The 49ers simply ran around the 4-7. On five sweeps by a journeyman halfback, Lenvil Elliott, they ran down the field behind pulling guards Randy Cross and John Ayers.

Walsh didn’t yet have a quality running back. He is known as The Genius because, in part, he could win a Super Bowl without one. Even so, he made Elliott famous that night, at least in the Elliott family.

DESIGNED ROLLOUT: JUST ANOTHER BILL WALSH PLAY

At a banquet for Clark two weeks later in Chicago, the show was stopped suddenly by a woman in tears. A Cowboy fan, she had come up to Clark at the head table as they were planning to introduce him.

“My son has been crying for two weeks,” the woman sobbed, adding that every time the boy remembered The Catch, it depressed him.

As he tells the story now, Clark, who isn’t one to gloat, decided to apologize.

“I was just doing my job,” he told her.

But before he did it on The Catch, time was running out on the 49ers.

The Drive had reached the Dallas 13-yard line with little more than a minute to play, and Montana, on first down, had overthrown wide receiver Freddie Solomon in the left flat.

On second down, Elliott, running another sweep, gained seven yards.

Third and three.

The 49ers came out of the huddle into one of their customary simple formations, with both wide receivers flanked right. As a strategist, Walsh doesn’t think much of four wide receivers, or even three, except in a crisis. And he doesn’t favor shotgun plays.

His football rests on threatening the defense with basically the same look on every down, from first and 10 to third and long.

Against the Cowboys, Walsh saw no reason to change on third and three. As usual, he had two backs in position to run, block or catch; and, as usual, the tight end was in position either to block or catch.

Ready for everything, the Cowboys didn’t think Montana would try to draw one of his running backs through the line, but they didn’t really know.

A wink later, Montana and Solomon were both sprinting out as Clark, edging slightly to his left, made for the back of the end zone. There Clark slowed, turned and slid the other way.

“Solomon was the primary receiver,” he said of 49er planning for The Catch. “We had run that same play early in the game (when) Freddie made a move and scored.”

The design of the play, Walsh said, enabled Solomon to pick off Dallas cornerback Everson Walls, who was covering Clark. Although a pick is supposedly illegal in pro ball, Walsh popularized it, and today most teams coach it.

When Solomon couldn’t get open, his pick had at least stopped Walls for a second or two, getting him off Clark’s back.

Accordingly, when Montana, racing to his right with Too Tall Jones on his heels, gave up on Solomon, he turned to secondary receiver Clark, who was now sliding to his left with his back to the end line.

Like a synchronized dance team, Montana jumped and threw the ball an instant before Clark jumped and caught it.

Walls wasn’t at the dance.

“In all fairness, (Walls) had me covered,” Clark recalled. “I just think, in my opinion, he thought the ball was (overthrown) and just chose to let it go.”

From Cleveland, Walls, who now plays for the Browns, said: “I thought the ball was going out of the end zone. I couldn’t believe it when he went up and caught it.”

The play wasn’t a scramble by Montana. Despite a heavy, muddy field that was much like today’s in Candlestick--inducing eight turnovers, two by the Cowboys and six by the 49ers, including three interceptions--it was a designed rollout.

“(The idea was) to throw (the ball) where either Dwight would catch it or it would go out of the end zone,” Montana said.

The Catch still befuddles Clark.

“I thought at the time I had caught it cleanly until I saw some pictures of it,” he said. “Apparently, I just knocked it down and caught it on the way down, which makes me nervous just to think about it.”

The play, known to the 49ers as Sprint Right Option, was never Montana’s favorite.

“We hated it,” he said. “It wasn’t an easy route for (Clark). And at (practice), when you try to throw while running and jumping, it was hard to throw it hard enough for (Walsh). He would say: ‘No, no, throw it harder, throw it higher.’

“We used to ask (ourselves), ‘How many times are we ever going to use this play?’ Little did we know.”

In San Francisco, The Catch has made Clark a legend.

“When a player retires, he’s usually forgotten pretty quickly,” he said. “Luckily for me, I was a part of a play that 49er fans will cherish.”

His friends keep Clark from getting too enthusiastic about it.

“When I seem to get a little bit cocky,” he reported, “they say: ‘You know, that could have been The Drop.’ ”