Perfect Timing, Joe

By Tom Callahan

Montana moves San Francisco from cellar doldrums to superdreams

The two-minute warning, for San Franciscans looking back at a glorious football season and forward to this Sunday's Super Bowl, has come to mean two minutes until Joe Montana. Thanks partly to his good timing in going to a football team that was without a great quarterback three years ago--and without a great anything else for that matter except maybe a great coach--Joe Montana's gifts and charms are coming out just at the perfect moment. That should not be a big surprise. Timing is his strength. He was made for certain moments, and was kept from them for a be wildering period at Notre Dame, but they are here now.

With two minutes, and still 49 yds. to go in the conference championship game against the Dallas Cowboys, Montana's will was the wonder, and people across the country started getting the fever. "Most quarterbacks lose control right about here," says Coach Bill Walsh, whose time has arrived as well, "and they start getting their time outs ready in their mind and they're trying to think of everything and they can't think."

Their control begins to waver; Montana's becomes focused. Such drives are his trademark. In three more plays he drove the 49ers to the 13 only to miss an unattended receiver in the end zone. "It kind of shook me up a bit," he would say later, "because there it was--he was open. How many times is it going to be there for you?" Even that flicker of concern did not show, not to the crowd, not to his teammates. Montana sent Lenvil Elliott around left end to the six. Time out. Third and three, with 58 sec. on the clock.

Unlike everyone else, the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers sees the live play in slow motion. He sees the receiver he will throw the ball to, and he sees the linebacker he must loft the ball over, and, on those fortunate occasions when he is not lying on the ground by this time, he sees the ball in flight. Joe's first target on this play, Freddie Solomon, was covered. Wide Receiver Dwight Clark stationed himself at the back of the end zone and then went sliding in the direction Joe was darting. Under pressure and leaning the wrong way, Montana let go, and Clark leaped for a ball aimed where he would get it or no one could. The extra point was good, and when the Cowboys tried to rally, they fumbled. By 28-27, the 49ers were going to Super Bowl XVI.

"We stopped them pretty good most of the game," lamented Charlie Waters, the Cowboy safety, "but that last drive for some reason, was unstoppable." And Waters' coach, Tom Landry, who doesn't usually say anything so impolitic, or feel anything so publicly, murmured: "Montana has to be the key. There really is nothing else there except him."

Roger Staubach and John Brodie were there, on the sidelines, Cowboy and 49er quarterbacks of another time. "I'll tell you, he's something special," said Staubach. Brodie senses something more. "I saw Joe Montana the first time three years ago. He walked into the room and I said, 'There's a man.' I can't define it for you. He knows what he's doing. You know it and he knows it. Joe Montana, I think, will become the best quarterback who ever played the game."

Though he is just 25, Montana's command is equaled by his concentration. He could not see Clark's catch, but he heard it. "When you're concentrating, the crowd noise is in the back of your head," he explains. "After the catch is made, it's like someone turned the speakers on." Until then, it can be as quiet as Wimbledon, particularly in the huddle. He doesn't have to tell the other players to be still, because his inner silence does. He observes laconically: "Once I get down on the knee, nothing is usually going on." When he gets up, and starts jump-passing, scissor-kicking, twisting one way, tossing the other, everything is going on.

Walsh says, "He gets better and better. He's different now than he was four weeks ago, that much more innovative. As time goes on, the more say he will have; by the middle of next year, he'll be running the show." This year's show wasn't bad: 64% completions, 3,565 yds., 19 touchdown passes, the best marks in the National Conference. His salary now is something more than $100,000, but real riches await. Says Walsh: "It's almost limitless what Joe can become."

Super Bowl champion comes to mind, but the Cincinnati Bengals will have much to say about it. If this is Montana's moment, it is Walsh's Super Bowl. Cincinnati is one of the teams that he assisted in the past, the one that should be most chagrined at not promoting him to head coach. While he was there he molded Ken Anderson (see box), and both quarterbacks in this game are likely to be sending up a song of Walsh all week in Pontiac. "Genius" is a word being tossed around in praise of the 49er coach, but he prefers"expert" and does not object to "artist."

In the three 49er seasons of Walsh and Montana, the team has been 2-14 when Joe played very little, 6-10 when he played more, and now that he plays all the time, 15-3 and dreaming. With all of the attention to Walsh's ingenuity and Montana's resourcefulness, it is easy to forget that San Francisco might fairly be called a defensive team. Lineman Fred Dean, the leading looter and sacker, has been most influential. He defected from San Diego this year either because the Chargers misjudged the importance, or couldn't quite afford the price, that the best pass rusher in the National Football League placed on himself. The Los Angeles Rams were also obliging enough to see no use for Linebacker Jack Reynolds, the gruff new foreman of the 49er defense.

Three other players--Secondary Men Ronnie Lott, Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson--rate applause too, if only for batting down one of pro football's most worn samplers: "Isolate on the rookie." They are all rookies.

If Walsh is the only N.F.L. coach unconventional enough to send out a rookie trio, the only city unconventional enough to react with yells and yawns in nearly equal portions is San Francisco, where many people send back the wine. (A good team, not a great team; we think you will be amused by its impertinence.) "Still," says Walsh, in a thoughtful moment, "you can't say the ballet, or the orchestra, cuts across as many boundaries as sports--especially pro football. Where else does one side of the city come together with the other? Regardless of their circumstances--economic, geographic, ethnic--people can have at least one thing in common. That's the tangible value of professional sports, bringing people together."

Except when rivalries hold them apart. "I have lived my 49er life among [Oakland] Raider fans," sighs Harry Troutt, president of the 49er team's local booster club. This has not been a happy season for the Raiders (the Raiders crashed from World Champion to 7-9), but San Franciscans are being big about the reversal of fortunes and are quoting Gertrude Stein on Oakland ("There's no there there") no more than usual.

Anthropologists like Berkeley's Alan Dundes are resuggesting that football is "a way of proving one's masculinity"; and, if so, wouldn't losing too steadily feminize a city, and couldn't that be the reason it is so easy to find a gay bar in this town? Meanwhile, the Starlight Room on upper Market Street during the championship game passed out free drinks to its all-male clientele at every 49er score. There is a general mood of giving. Rector Cadillac in suburban Burlingame is offering cars at dealer cost to anyone in the 49er organization. The players have found another opportunity irresistible: free hamburgers from the Canyon Inn. The team has been piling on. The John Travolta of this "49ers fever" is Montana, with his finger pointing up and his hair hanging down. He is "Golden Joe" on the bedsheet banners flapping in the usual windstorm at Candlestick Park; "Big Sky" to the San Francisco Chronicle, which decided he needed a nickname and ran a contest; and "David W. Gibson" to the entrant who recognized that what Joe Montana needed was a real name.* He proposed David W. Gibson. Montana liked that, and it's the name above his locker now.

Montana is a snowbird, a Californian by choice, not circumstance, who migrated from the cold country of Monongahela, Pa., and South Bend, Ind., two months before the 49ers drafted him. The beaches called him West first. He looks like a beach boy, light haired, lighthearted, seemingly lightheaded. Nothing about his appearance hints at the violence of his work. His build is unremarkable and his countenance unbattered, though the bridge on his Barry Mamlow nose is a little barked at the moment as the result of a two-dachshund accident at the intersection of his living-room sofa. The sportswriters frequently stacked up on his locker stoop probably presume it is a war wound.

They have been eager to make a legend of him since he was at Notre Dame, where he put together a rout of improbable comebacks by coming off the bench, and a national championship in 1977 when, by the third game, he was finally the starter to stay. If his rise has been a little jerky to now (after all, a man must keep returning to the bench in order to vault from it again), there is no stopping the legend this time. The sportswriters wonder if he had been confident before the game, if he knew he was going to win, whether he had been afraid, if he had been excited. When exactly in his life had he realized all this might come to him? "I don't know," he says.

There never seems to have been a doubt that Montana would become some sort of ballplayer. His father was chiefly responsible for his dedication to games and, it could be argued, was the dedicated one. Joe Sr. is a trim and youthful, silver-haired and hatchet-faced man, just 49, born on the same day but a year after Walsh. He is the custodian of his only child's memorabilia and his own memories. The "fundamentals" he preached to the boy were learned in the Navy, where Joe Sr. played all the games. He had filled out slowly and had been too spare to make any of the teams at Ringgold High, where Joey would star in three sports.

Passion for sports is indigenous to Monongahela, 30 miles upriver from Pittsburgh, a steel-gray place of mines, mills and farms, hunting caps, lumberjack shirts, car dealerships and finance companies. It is shot-and-a-beer country, "Iron City" beer. Real boilers are made there as well, and so are quarterbacks. Western Pennsylvania has turned them out as stoic as Johnny Unitas, as extravagant as Joe Namath and as plain tough as George Blanda. Joe Montana Jr. favors all of them somewhat.

"Sometimes you look at a kid and you know he's a natural," says Joe Sr. "I'd come home at lunchtime. He was about seven or eight months old. He'd have a ball and a bat in his hands, standing there waiting for me when I came in the door." Out in the backyard, Joe served Joey as both center and receiver. He swayed the tire through which Joey flung the footballs. In those games, the natural child was never anything but the quarterback. No time was wasted punting the ball or running with it. When he was eight, to qualify him for midget football, they lied and said he was nine.

Preoccupied with his own playing schedule, he never saw either a Steelers or a Pirates game in person. As determined as he was to be the quarterback, he manned every position in the other sports, a matter of particular pride to his father. Even now, the football star's affection for basketball may be greater; his least favorite pastime was baseball on the days he had to catch. "'I didn't care much for foul tips," he says, wincing still, "but I could catch and. to my father, not liking something you were good at doing wasn't a good enough reason for not doing it."

To his father, a responsibility attended the natural gift, and to his credit, Joe Sr. took greater pains than foul tips for his son. He stayed in one place, working at the Civic Finance Co. and with Joey, so that there would be no restraints on the boy's career. (His wife, Theresa, worked as a secretary in the same office.) "I remember when he was ten, he wanted to quit midget football. His mother said, 'If he doesn't want to play, why don't you leave him be?' So I said, 'The hell with it, go ahead and quit.' After work, when I got home, I said: 'Get your equipment; you're going to practice. One day, Joey, things are going to get tough in your life and you're going to want to quit. I don't believe in that.' "

In the retelling, this probably sounds more like a story from a military academy than it should. Even thumbing his scrapbooks in absent reverie or sitting down to supper at home, where the dinner music is a taped interview of young Joe, the elder Montana seems a most benevolent stage father, and his boy's enduring emotion, of many complex ones, appears to be gratitude. "I love my kid, whether he ever played football or not," says the father softly, "but the part of him that made him so special, I loved that too. I'd say to him: 'Joey, it's not easy for me to holler at you; it kills me.' Joe understood. He wanted the things for himself that I wanted for him." Gentler still, the son says: "Sometimes I just want to tell him, 'You accomplished for me what you wanted; it's time for yourself.' "

By the time young Joe was a Ringgold High Ram, he had asked backyard waivers on his first receiver, and drafted a neighbor who liked to pretend he was Jim Seymour; Montana was Terry Hanratty. Those were Notre Dame's stars at the time. The setting of most of Joe's dreams began to be South Lend.

The start of the Irish legend, Cool Joe the Comeback Kid, is also the start of the misunderstanding. He has been taken to be cold, indifferent, standoffish. "I am affected by things, but I don't show it." He is unflappable. I'm emotional, but nobody knows it." Off the field, he is undemonstrative. "At Notre Dame I was awed by the place in general and lonely at being away from home for the first time. Plus, all of a sudden, there were eleven other quarterbacks. I was feeling all the things people say I don't feel."

In the second semester he married his home-town sweetheart, Kim Moses, and brought her from Monongahela to Notre Dame. She worked in the sports-information office. After the games he would keep Kim company as she typed the team's statistics. Joe was grateful to have an ally from home in residence, but the marriage ended in divorce after three years. He says simply: "We were too young."

In 1975, Joe's sophomore year, Rick Slager was the favored quarterback of Coach Dan Devine, though the leading receiver at the time, Ken MacAfee, still wonders why. According to MacAfee, "The pattern began to be that Rick Slager would start the game and then Montana would have to come in and save it." Joe sat out the entire season in 1976 with a separated shoulder, extending his eligibility one year and increasing his frustration.

Montana's enthusiasm for all the comeback lore is restrained, which helps explain why he talks so little about those years. He spent too much of the games on the bench. But even there his self-assurance showed, and it could have rankled Devine or his assistants. Teammates may see more virtue in his kind of sanguine temperament than college coaching staffs do. Whether shooting baskets in the intramural "Bookstore Classic," or pool at Corby's or Frisbees at beer cans in the hallway hockey games, Montana was a natural competitor, and the players knew it. His jokes, another element probably only they understood--icebreaking one-liners--were not automatically funny. They were only funny when he said them.

"That pass was a little off the mark," he deadpanned after finally getting into the Purdue game the championship year and then throwing his first pass out of the stadium. "The coach is going to really think I'm a jerk." Joe had sat on the bench in that game watching first Rusty Lisch, then Gary Forystek, then Lisch again. When Montana at last came on in the fourth quarter, the Boilermakers led 24-14. From that first miss, he went on to complete nine of 13 for 154 yds. and a 31-24 victory. "The team responded to him that day," Devine says quietly and pauses. "And I responded to him."

There were six registered miracles in Montana's time at Notre Dame, more than enough to elevate anyone to the rank of blessed. In his final college game, in arctic conditions at the Cotton Bowl, the Irish lagged behind Houston 34-12, almost as if to test the limit of his magic. Montana got to work, and with four seconds left, a pass play to Kris Haines would have scored the winning touchdown, except Haines slipped. Kris remembers: "We went back into the huddle with two seconds to go, and Joe said, 'Don't worry, you can do it.' He gave me that little half-smile of his and called the exact same play again, right on the money for the touchdown." The final score was 35-34. Joe was ready for the pros.

At the time, most pro scouts thought less of Montana than Bill Walsh thinks of most scouts. "They have no command of what the quarterback position takes, but they are good at reinforcing each other's opinion on what they don't know. All they care about is how tall he is, his build, how heavy he is, his delivery and if he can 'throw the ball a country mile.' "

Montana cannot throw the ball that far, only far enough. "They said he was erratic, skittery, not particularly well built, not particularly strong-armed; and he had a side arm delivery." They missed the things Walsh has seen since. "He's a natural football player--really, a natural competitor. He competes instinctively. It's like he's so used to competing that he has no awe for it, nor for himself."

Walsh knew few of Montana's special strengths when he drafted Joe in the third round of 1979. Montana's reputation as a hot-and-cold player intrigued Walsh: "If he can have one hot game, why not two, why not three?" This man knows something about quarterbacks. As an assistant in Cincinnati and San Diego, he once took the rawest rookie and fashioned Anderson, and later found a floundering failure and made Dan Fouts. When he got his first N.F.L. coaching job three years ago, it was overdue.

"Early in Joe's second year, I privately decided he was to be our quarterback. As a rookie on a poor team, he did a fair job, is all. But his skills were obvious. He was just so active, so quick on his feet, so instinctive. The second year, we eased him in carefully, so as not to break him." Breaking Montana seemed a small danger to Assistant Coach Sam Wyche, a man who can speak of the relative gifts handed out to quarterbacks. He was a backup in the N.F.L. for nine years. "Montana made this fake against the Giants," says Wyche, referring to the first playoff victory over New York. "The linebacker was slackjawed. That's some thing you don't coach. You take credit after it's over, as if you did. A coach can improve technique but not instinct. I guess I envy Joe something he started with that I never had."

Wyche is talking about unbeatable confidence. "At the end of the exhibition season this fall," says Walsh, "we traded a quarterback who had broken an N.F.L. record for completions, Steve DeBerg. Honestly, I can't think of anyone Joe wouldn't have beaten out eventually." For Montana, surpassing DeBerg was a victory, and a loss. "As a kid, did your neighbor ever beat you at something four out of five," muses Joe, "and you still said you were better? I mean, you honestly felt you were better? You knew you were? Well, Steve and I were both that way."

Roommates, they shared a fondness for all contests, and if the Marriott Hotels that the N.F.L. teams frequent did not feature rumpus rooms buzzing with electronic whizbangers, DeBerg and Montana might have played checkers with match sticks on the tiles of the bathroom. "We could never quit," Joe laughs, "because somebody was always behind." Then he stops laughing. "It was unspoken, but we both knew. At practice, if one of us threw a pass that wobbled, the other would quack like a duck. We teased each other into staying friends, but we knew one eventually had to go if the other was ever going to have complete confidence."

DeBerg comes from Anaheim, where the team retreated to practice when fierce rains soaked San Francisco before the Dallas game. The two friends met for drinks. "It was great to see him," says DeBerg, "especially after all the triumphs he's had. We just talked about the good times. I can see that he loves it out here. He bought a place in Skyline [a half hour south of San Francisco]. He's had some of the best of California so far." Joe agrees. "I do like California," he says. "No snow, no scraping windshields. In the wintertime back home, there's just football. Here, it may not even be football weather. You can hide a little better. People say it's boring, but I like it a little boring."

He is devoted to the new Mrs. Montana, Cass--"Cass Montana," a more buckskin name even than his--a pretty, bubbly, outdoorsy woman, as outgoing as her husband is shy. "If I didn't know better," she says, "I'd think he was a California boy. Blond hair, blue eyes--and unbelievably laid back." She is a United stewardess, with no plans to stop flying. They met on a Notre Dame charter flight to Los Angeles, his second-to-last college game against U.S.C.

Cass, 29, is not much awed by her husband's celebrity, which works out well, since he is not either. His three game-balls from this season decorate the mantel of their sitting room, but as homes of star athletes go, the exhibits are sparse--a few pictures, the footballs and a golf trophy (a long-drive contest--fourth place) hidden in a plant. "There are no heroes around this house," says Cass, who has a remedy for artistic temperament all prepared if it ever comes up. She will just hand Joe his shovel and point him to El Makata and Ghafad Asim's stalls.

A pair of handsome Arabian horses, a chestnut and a gray, are the Montanas' nearest neighbors and two of their closest friends. When the football year is out (fearing injury, Joe won't ride in season), Cass and Joe can be seen galloping through the buckbrush up and down the peninsula hills, sometimes clear to the ocean six miles off on the horizon. Joe has a great fondness for animals. The two obstreperous dachshunds, Broadway (a tribute to Namath) and Bosley (after Charlie's Angels' major domo) reside underfoot. Says Cass: "Joe will just sit here and get lost for hours in an animal book."

After Pontiac and the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, where Cass was born, a safari to Kenya is on the itinerary. One day Joe announced: "I want to see some things I've only seen in books." It's an odd expression for someone who might be expected to be worldly. "He's curious, full of wonderment," says his wife, "not at all worldly." It delights him to have installed the sprinkler system in the horses' shed himself and to have managed a good deal of the carpentry. Life is good.

She understands him well. "When everyone else was out cruising, he was out practicing. Sport sheltered Joe." They have been married since July but have been together since 1979. At times Cass has difficulty reconciling the man with the quarterback. "On our tape player, there is a piece showing Joe walking from the huddle to the coach and back again--swearing, or shouting at least, every step. We ran it back about 15 times one night--and laughed and laughed. I finally said: 'I don't know that man.'

"The man I know isn't a ranter or a raver--he's not even a talker. He's very proud of his successes, but he doesn't care about fame and fortune. He really doesn't. He's very easy to live with--I'm the maniac. I liven him up; he calms me down. Joe doesn't say a lot, but whatever he does say is interesting, thoughtful. He's funny--he makes me laugh. Still, I sometimes think that if he played football the way he conducts his life--well, he just wouldn't be a football player. He's not a leader. 'What makes you so different out there?' I've asked him. He stutters and stammers around and says: 'I don't know.' "

It is getting more difficult for her to make cheerful allowances for the fans who pursue Joe and track him even to their home. In the storm the week of the Cowboy game, several large trees on their property were uprooted and turned on their sides. Joe mourned the loss, "almost like they were animals," as Cass said. They struck her as symbols: the Montanas' privacy is being cleared away. "The man is going to be a household word," she says almost regretfully. "There's no stopping him now. We had to make some security arrangements the other day." They are gaining the Super Bowl and losing the wilderness. --ByTomCallahan

* Joe's name is real and comes from Northern Italy where it was Montani. The Western echo in the Americanized version is also real; he is 1/64 Sioux.

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