The Good Son : 49er Lineman Harris Barton Discovers What Really Matters Is His Father

The answer is there if you look hard enough .

With that outlook, Harris Barton has approached life.

Barton, a San Francisco 49er offensive tackle who has spent seven years protecting Joe Montana and Steve Young, was the kind of player who studied game films at home at 5 a.m.

He was the kind of player who knew the assignments of every other lineman, who could figure out a defense by the way a safety moved his feet, who could recall the formations used in a game three years ago.

He was the kind of player who, when his parents came from Georgia to visit him, would put them up in a nearby hotel before a game so he could prepare without distraction.

Harris Barton--athlete, scholar and an all-star bulwark of the NFL’s strongest franchise--never thought there was anything he couldn’t figure out.

Until the week of Thanksgiving, when he found himself in a shopping mall, fighting back tears, roaming from store to store, lost and confused.

He was looking for something to give his father, Paul, on his 56th birthday--his final birthday, if doctors were correct in their diagnosis of incurable brain cancer.

“His birthday has always been around Thanksgiving,” Barton said. “It has always been a joyous celebration. Now, it was horrible. It was like, what do I buy him?”

He picked up a jacket.

“Then I thought, ‘He’s not going to wear it,’ ” Barton said.

He picked up a watch.

“I thought, ‘He’s not going to appreciate it,’ ” Barton said.

Where were those answers now? Was there no playbook for dealing with the impending death of a loved one?

As he has done throughout this longest season, Barton called an audible. He phoned home on Thanksgiving with a different sort of present.

Harris told his father that he was thinking about him, that he would be coming home to Atlanta in three weeks, as he had done on four other occasions this season.

During those trips, while his teammates were practicing on the West Coast, Barton was helping his father brush his teeth and button his shirts.

He reminded his father that no matter what, he would be there for him.

He then went out and played one of his best games in perhaps his best season as the 49ers won their fifth consecutive game, crushing the Rams in Anaheim.

Such is the irony of our hurried lives. After rushing to the top rung, we’re often too busy looking back to enjoy the view.

In a year that Barton should finally receive a long-deserved trip to the Pro Bowl, honors are farthest from his mind.

“It’s funny, but I’ve been spent the last 12 years focused only on trying to be a great football player,” Barton said. “Now, all I want to do is be a good son.”

*

Everywhere you looked during the upwardly mobile decade of the 1980s, a career was tugging someone away from home and family.

For Harris Barton, it was football.

There was that late night when the darkness in the Barton home was punctuated by a repetitive tsk, tsk, tsk .

Paul Barton stumbled outside and found his teen-age son, Harris, skipping rope.

“What are you doing?” his father asked.

“Making my feet quicker,” Barton said.

His father walked back inside, accepting, if not completely comprehending.

Paul Barton was not an athlete, he was a traveling salesman. Women’s uniforms, southeast region.

“He didn’t care about football, didn’t care about me being a football player,” Barton said. “He would rather I be an economist, a violinist, something like that.”

Yet Paul Barton would rush home from his trips to attend his son’s football games at Dunwoody High.

And when Harris decided to get serious about football the summer before his senior year in high school, it was in his father’s spirit of dedication that he spent eight hours a day in the gym, gaining 35 pounds of muscle to become a top prospect almost overnight.

“The man was not a great supporter of football, but he was something far more important--a great supporter of his family,” recalled David Kelly, one of Barton’s high school coaches and still a close friend.

When Barton was ready to leave the University of North Carolina after quitting the team in his sophomore year, it was his father who made him finish the season.

“I remember calling home, telling him that I didn’t like football and wanted to come home,” Harris said. “He didn’t like football either, but he told me he didn’t want me home. Told me that I had made a commitment, and that I had to go back and apologize to the coach and at least finish the season.”

After that, Barton began an ascent that carried him into the realm of a first-round draft pick and two-time Super Bowl champion.

But he lost something along the way. He lost touch with the rest of his life.

“Twelve years passed me by and, you know, I don’t remember any of them,” Barton said.

Kelly watched it happen and wished he could have stopped it--except it was also happening to him, a rising young coach. In the mostly isolated world of those who work at football, it happens a lot.

“To be the single best in anything, you have to be so totally focused that everything else becomes a distraction,” said Kelly, coach of Dunwoody’s nationally ranked team. “This is what has happened to me--and what happened to Harris.”

Kelly wonders if he doesn’t have any children because his commitment is to working 20-hour days at the high school during the season. He said that Barton, who is single, has expressed similar concerns.

“I remember Harris telling me that sometimes when he walks down the street and passes a pretty woman, he doesn’t see her because he is thinking about an opposing team’s formation,” Kelly said. “That is what it takes to be the best. That is why there are so few who are at the top. But there is a price they pay.”

Barton realized that after his father’s condition was diagnosed as cancer last spring. He was given 18 months to live after having apparently beaten a similar cancer more than a decade ago.

“All of a sudden it was like, I wasn’t worried about what John Madden said about me, or what other people thought about my play,” Barton said.

He prayed it wasn’t too late.

He began calling home every day, more than once a day. He searched for ways to ease his father’s growing pain and loss of mobility.

“It has been so hard for Harris because he was faced with one of few things in his life that he couldn’t fix,” Kelly said.

Barton learned of several agencies that help those in his father’s circumstances, which led to an unusual plea from 49er officials to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

Even though this year’s United Way commercial with the 49ers was scheduled to be a 20-year retrospective of previous commercials, they asked Tagliabue if he could substitute a special commercial with Barton and his father.

“The commissioner called us and told us about the special situation, so our crew flew right to Atlanta, got there on the last day before Harris was going to leave for training camp,” said Mario Pellegrini, executive producer of the United Way series. “It was one of those commercials that was so real, we just let them tell their story. They really are a special father and son.”

You can see that commercial during any televised 49er game. It features Barton helping his father walk through a wooded back yard, and then holding his father’s hand after saying, “I want you to meet my greatest fan, my greatest coach, my best friend--my dad.”

Paul Barton, who wore a Super Bowl cap during the filming because chemotherapy has taken some of his hair, has difficulty speaking. But he was somehow able to say, loud and clear, “Harris, you, too, have been my best friend.”

Once the season started, it was Barton’s turn to make an unusual request. This player who never missed a meeting was asking to make stops in Atlanta after road games so he could help care for his father.

“He was getting worse, and even though we have my mom and a nurse, they needed my help,” Barton said. “I had to be there.”

He stayed in Atlanta for two days here, then three days there, then an entire bye week. He felt so uncomfortable missing three practices that week that he bought lunch for the entire offensive line.

“And the thing was, he is so intelligent, he didn’t miss anything,” said Bobb McKittrick, 49er offensive line coach.

Like many who have been in this game many years, McKittrick is sensitive to Barton’s problems.

McKittrick remembers sleeping next to his ill father in a hospital for three nights, then being called back to San Francisco to undergo tests for his own medical problems. His father died while he was gone.

“Harris is having as good of a year as he has ever had, and I wonder if it isn’t because he is not so worried about the game, but doing other things he is supposed to do,” McKittrick said.

Barton also believes he is having a good year--as the right tackle, he has done well protecting left-handed Steve Young’s blind side.

But suddenly, preventing sacks is not as important as making sure his father can live the rest of his life in peace and dignity.

“When it comes to my family, football is on the back burner,” Barton said. “If anything comes out of me talking about this, it is that people should appreciate their parents while they still have them. Appreciate them now.”

Earlier this year, after a game in New Orleans, Barton called Kelly at home.

“He told me to be in my office at 5 in the morning, that he wanted to talk,” Kelly said.

While his teammates flew back to San Francisco, Barton flew to Atlanta. A few hours later he drove to Dunwoody High.

At 5 a.m., right on schedule, he and Kelly met. Out poured Barton’s anger and frustration and fear.

“A lot of times, people who reach the top look back and realize that the important thing is not the final result, but the journey,” Kelly said. “During the journey there are always some things they miss. And they wonder, ‘Is it worth it?’ ”

Kelly and Barton have had talks before, during off-seasons, after which Barton often went to the high school weight room and lifted.

Not this time. This time, he went home. His father needed to be dressed for breakfast.