COMMENTARY : With a Title, There’s No Stopping Deion Sanders Now

Steve Young won the football game. Jerry Rice won the football game. Deion Sanders walks away from the Super Bowl a bigger winner than both of them. He beats Young and Rice the way the 49ers beat the Chargers. The only star in sports hotter today is Shaquille O’Neal. Deion has a title now, and there is no stopping him. It doesn’t matter who likes him, who doesn’t.

Deion would love to have been the star of the game. He just didn’t want to intercept the one ball he did against the Chargers and then get smacked almost immediately. He wanted to pick one off late in the game, and do a number all the day down the sideline that would be as overproduced as the halftime show. It didn’t happen, and it doesn’t matter. He was huge before he ever won anything. With a Super Bowl on his resume, look out.

Right now, Sanders makes it sound as if he is a 49er for life. That also doesn’t matter. He will say anything. Before the Super Bowl, he also said that he had made a financial sacrifice this season so the 49ers could fit him under the salary cap, but would not do it again. I have a feeling Sanders is going to be looking for the kind of money star quarterbacks and star wide receivers make. If the 49ers won’t pay him, maybe a team like the Dolphins--looking to win a title in what should be Don Shula’s final season--will.

“This is my dream,” Sanders said when the game was over last Sunday night. He wore sunglasses, apparently to shield him from the night, and a lot of gold, and a nice-looking suit the color of orange soda. He wore no shirt with the suit. “To win the game here makes it all the better.”

He paused, as a way of letting everyone in this tunnel at Joe Robbie Stadium know something important was coming.

Finally Deion Sanders said, “This is . . . my hometown state!”

He comes from Fort Myers, which is halfway across Florida. He made it sound as if it were across the street. Somehow it all comes back to him, even on a day when he barely was in the game.

Sanders handed the Chargers their first touchdown. He was beaten by Tony Martin in the end zone, but there was no way Sanders would allow himself to be beaten by a nobody with the whole world watching. Sanders shoved Martin and held him, and ended up doing everything except guess his weight. The Chargers got the ball on the 1-yard line, and Natrone Means scored to make it 14-7. It was the final moment at Joe Robbie that Super Bowl XXIX was really a game.

There was a near-interception after that. Sanders was there in the left flat, but couldn’t come up with the ball, even though there was nothing but green grass in front of him. He looked at the crowd plaintively, and even did a quick dance step, just to let them know what they had missed. He finally got his interception off Gale Gilbert, a backup quarterback, in the fourth quarter.

Right after that, he also got a chance on offense. The score was 49-18, and George Seifert, who usually has more class, put Sanders in at wide receiver so that Steve Young could throw him the bomb and pile more points on the Chargers, embarrass them a little more. It was a bush-league call. Sanders streaked down the right side of the field, and seemed to break into the clear. He is the fastest thing I have seen in a football uniform, faster than Rocket Ismail when Ismail was at Notre Dame. But the throw was short and the Chargers caught up with Sanders and the ball, and the pass was incomplete.

Deion Sanders possesses breathtaking talent for football, even more than for baseball. If he played wide receiver all the time, he would be one of the best at that. He made the 49ers a better team this season. But the idea that he put them over the top is just part of the hype that covers him the way he covers wide receivers.

Sanders didn’t even need to show up for the 49ers to beat the Chargers. Young threw his six touchdown passes, Rice caught three. The game was probably over as soon as Rice caught his first touchdown pass on the third play of the game. The 49ers’ offense is the greatest in football history, producing more than 600 points in 19 games. No one was ever going to keep Young and Rice out of the end zone enough to stop them from winning Super Bowl XXIX.

Sanders is the one who is going to make the biggest score, in his next contract, in endorsements, even in Hollywood. Young will do all right. He is coming off one of the extraordinary seasons a quarterback ever had. But he is as dull to people as he is talented. Maybe in another time in sports, Young rightfully would be No. 1 in everybody’s hearts. Just not this time.

Rice is the best ever to play his position. He is a figure of grace on and off the field. The public never has fallen for him, and neither have sponsors. Hakeem Olajuwon is one of the greatest players in basketball history; the kids love Shaq. No one can make them love Olajuwon.

An hour after the game Sunday, Rice slipped on a black vest over a clean white shirt and spoke quietly about what a team sport can feel like at its best.

“So many personalities, so many different people,” Rice said, “coming together in friendship for a common goal, in our case to win this Super Bowl.”

Down the hall, in the area reserved for Young, the game’s MVP, and winning coach Seifert, Sanders stood on a stage and reminded everybody how brilliant he was to sign with the 49ers.

“Now I look like the smartest guy in the world,” he said.

After a while, he did remember to thank his teammates.

“They put a championship ring on my finger.” Then he talked about how angry he had gotten watching some television special on Saturday night, when he actually heard some people pick the Chargers to win the game.

Another dramatic pause.

“We knew all week we was gonna kick their butts,” he said. “We just couldn’t say nothin’ about it.”

Someone asked about a brief altercation with the Chargers after his interception. He took a hard hit from Ronnie Harmon. A couple of Chargers celebrated. Sanders got up and pointed toward the scoreboard, as if the Chargers needed reminding.

“I don’t like people mouthin’ off when they’re losing 40-something to 18,” he said. He prefers what he does: rubbing it in, usually with one of his dances, when his team is way ahead. Deion Sanders is a two-sport man, so it makes sense he is so skilled at talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Kids love him anyway, the way they love Shaq. He will probably end up in the movies, too. He acts as if he’s starring in the movie of his life already. This is not sport the way we want it to be, just sport as it really is.