He <i> Was</i> the Key to The City

San Francisco is not so much a city as a myth. It is in the United States but not of it. It is so civilized, it would starve to death if it didn’t get a salad fork or the right wine. It fancies itself Camelot but comes off more like Cleveland. Its legacy to the world is the quiche. People speak in whole sentences, and polysyllabically. It suffers from a superiority complex.

Which is why a lot of people were startled to see its reaction to the departure of Joe Montana. San Francisco didn’t make that much fuss when they thought the Giants were leaving.

You would have thought they were losing the Golden Gate Bridge, Nob Hill, Coit Tower, cable cars, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero. It was “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” all over again.

People were surprised because they didn’t think San Francisco cared that much. About anything. They were losing a quarterback, not a landmark. The fog is still there. Joe Montana might have left his heart in San Francisco. But he took his arm to Kansas City.

He was the most visible symbol of the City by the Bay since Dirty Harry or Emperor Norton I.

You see, the city that had once been saluted as “the Paris of the West,” that had once been the capital, the Parthenon of the Golden West, has been on a losing streak of sorts in recent years. Los Angeles, which it always regarded as a complicated hobo jungle to the south, has long since passed it as a center of commerce, finance, even--if Herb Caen will forgive me--culture. San Francisco has nothing but its frayed elegance left.

It can’t seem to get it right. It gets in one World Series--and it rains for five days in a row. It gets in another--and gets upstaged by an earthquake.

It builds a ballpark--and it becomes a haunted house, a cold, dank, windblown hall of horrors with everything but wolf howls at midnight.

The old San Francisco Call-Bulletin once wrote a line--with a perfectly straight face--”Yesterday was the coldest day in San Francisco since last July 6.” July 6! It’s hard to take seriously a place that is fur-coat weather on July 6--and shorts-weather on December 25.

Enter Joe Montana. He came in with no flags flying, no bands playing. He was, like, 82nd on the draft list. Third round. He had a great career at Notre Dame. But that was Notre Dame. What did they know about passing? Not even the fact that Joe Montana in his last collegiate game, the Cotton Bowl in 1979, took over an Irish team trailing Houston by 34-12, and, with only 7 minutes remaining, engineered a last-second 35-34 victory, could impress the pros.

Joe Montana brought a new element to the city--winning. He was the perfect operator for the complex pass patterns of the new coach, the patrician Bill Walsh, and he put the 49ers in four Super Bowls--and won them all.

San Francisco appeared stunned by this turn of unaccustomed good fortune, even embarrassed by it. They didn’t quite know what to make of Joe Montana.

Even for San Francisco, Joe Montana was a departure. Pale, skinny, long arms, long pianist’s fingers, he didn’t look like an athlete, he looked like a cellist. He was as low key as a librarian, as unflappable as a British butler. He gave new meaning to the word cool. In fact, he had been held out of games in his college career because his temperature was below normal. He had the blood pressure of a coelacanth, the pulse rate of a turtle.

But he gave San Francisco super-respectability. The 49ers had never won anything like a championship in their 33 years previous to Montana-Walsh, but within two years they were not only champions, they were a dynasty. They brought dramas like “The Catch” and “The Drive” into the language of “The City” and made 49er games something other than a place to go before the cocktail party at the Mark.

In San Francisco where Joe used to mean DiMaggio, it came to mean Montana. Joe took his fame in stride. He didn’t appear vain, cocky, conceited. His private life was private. He credited his coaches, his blocking, his receivers. He wasn’t modest, merely gracious. He never starred in nightclub brawls, clubhouse controversies. He simply licked his lips and went out and threw touchdown passes. He was, like San Francisco itself, courteous, civilized, dignified. He didn’t court the press but he accommodated it. Courteously.

No one I knew ever felt close to Joe Montana. With a football in his hand, he was an artist. With a microphone, he was bland. Uninteresting, almost. If you didn’t follow football, you would have figured him for a stockbroker or real estate agent. He married a high-profile actress-model but they were nobody’s Ken and Barbie. Under hobbies, you would have expected him to put, “first downs.”

He’s going to be 37 before kickoff this fall. He has played two quarters of football in two years. That could be a plus. The minus is, Joe Montana will be going to a new team with new personnel, new expectations.

It is considered axiomatic in the NFL that it takes even the cagiest of veteran players a season to adjust to new surroundings, new personnel, new personalities, new coaches, new customs, new city, new state.

At 37, does Joe Montana have a year? It is a point of fact that the infusion of once-star quarterbacks into a new environment has not panned out. When John Unitas came to the Chargers after greatness at Baltimore, he was only going through the motions. Joe Namath, after being all-world in New York, was not even all-city in L.A.

Is there any reason to believe Montana will be an exception? Even though the Chiefs are planning to put in a system similar to Walsh’s, it won’t be exactly the same.

Should Montana have stayed with the guys who, so to say, brung him? Probably. He knew the system, he was comfortable in it. He helped invent it, perfect it. He would know he could look out there at any given play and know there would be that one receiver who always seemed to be open under the Walshian scheme of things.

Should the 49ers have kept him? Assuredly. He would be useful, perhaps even critical to them. He had put them in four Super Bowls. Although it’s unlikely he can put Kansas City in one, it’s in the realm of possibility that he could have put the 49ers into their fifth. Still, it isn’t as if San Francisco was putting him adrift in a long boat on the open sea with a jug of water and an oar. Joe said all the right things--as usual--in his departure, but it was clear he hadn’t relished playing behind Steve Young. That had to be humiliating to a guy who struck gold for the 49ers.

In a political debate some years ago, Lloyd Bentsen turned to Dan Quayle and said, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” Presumably, someone could turn to Steve Young and say, “You’re no Joe Montana.”

But, at 37, in a new setting with new plays and no Jerry Rice out there to make them work, it may be that Joe Montana is no Joe Montana. In San Francisco, a tourist attraction. In Kansas city, a tourist.