I WAS THERE: WHEN THE 49ERS BECAME OURS

Growing Up Faithful With Montana, Rice, The Catch, and the Team That Taught Me to Believe

I was there.

I've written those words differently before.

When I wrote about Star Trek, I said I wasn't there. I inherited it. The original series had already made its first trip through the universe before I was old enough to understand what I was looking at.

But this time?

I was there.

I was there when the San Francisco 49ers went from being the team people teased you for loving to a team that seemed capable of magic.

I was there when Bill Walsh showed up and changed everything.

Image: Bill Walsh. Source: 49ers.com

I was there for Joe Montana.

Image: Joe Montana. Source: Biography.com

Ronnie Lott.

Image: Ronnie Lott. Source: NFL.com

Dwight Clark.

Image: Dwight Clark. Source: CNN.com

Jerry Rice.

Image: Jerry Rice. Source: 49ers.com

I was there when a football team taught a young girl something about loyalty, transformation and what can happen when everybody else has already decided you're nothing.

And I was there for The Catch.

Image: Dwight Clark San Francisco 49ers 1981 NFC Championship "The Catch". Source: 49ers.com

Literally.

It was my first football game.

Yeah.

THAT was my first football game.

I Wasn't Always From San Francisco

I usually tell people I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's true, but it leaves out a few miles.

I was an Army brat.

Southern California. Reno. Oklahoma. Hawaii. There were other places, other homes and other chapters. My father's last duty station, where our family went with him, was the Presidio in San Francisco. I was still quite young when we arrived.

And that's where something happened.

My formative years erupted in the Bay Area.

This became home.

The music, the culture, the people and, eventually, the sports became part of how I understood myself.

I became a Bay Area sports fan. Basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer. If somebody was representing the Bay, I was probably somewhere cheering.

But football became different.

Which is funny, because initially I couldn't understand why anybody cared about it.

Apparently the Gladiators Had Math

I grew up in a football family. My brothers played in school, and Sundays could involve an awful lot of yelling at the television.

We also had a professional football player in the family. My cousin Horace Jones played for the Oakland Raiders during the John Madden years.

Image: Horace Jones, Oakland Raiders DE. Source: Raiders.com

The first time I met him, I was a little girl and he might as well have been ten feet tall.

Actually, all the professional players I met seemed gigantic.

Gladiators.

And there I was, this nerdy little girl who wanted stories about spaceships and dragons, wondering why everybody was so excited about a bunch of enormous men fighting over a ball.

I told Horace I hated football.

He laughed.

Then he asked me a very simple question.

"Do you like math?"

Math was all right.

So he explained football to me as a math problem.

This side has the ball. They need to get it to the other side. They move down the field. Ten yards gets them another set of downs. Keep solving the problem until you reach the end zone.

Wait.

Apparently the gladiators had math.

Now he had my attention.

I started watching over my brothers' shoulders. I learned the downs. The penalties. Field position. Scoring. Strategy.

I began decoding the game.

Then Horace taught me something else about football.

He was injured, and we visited him in the hospital. I remember seeing this enormous man with his leg in a huge cast and thinking how much that must hurt.

He said something I never forgot.

"Pain is the price of the game."

The first lesson taught me how football worked.

The second taught me what it cost.

Becoming Faithful

Eventually, Horace was traded, and our family's connection to the Raiders changed, but football stayed.

And there was this local team.

The San Francisco 49ers.

They weren't the 49ers people think of today when they hear that name.

There had been earlier successful years, but by the late 1970s the franchise was struggling badly. Bill Walsh took over as head coach in 1979, and within three seasons San Francisco would win its first league championship.

But before that happened, I remember what it felt like to love a team that couldn't seem to win anything.

And yes, people teased you about it.

Teased because you liked a football team?

Really?

Yeah. Really.

When you're young, the things you love somehow become representatives of you. If your team is terrible, apparently you have made a terrible life decision and everyone in your immediate vicinity is entitled to commentary.

I watched anyway.

I even liked the colors.

That seemed like a perfectly reasonable basis for loyalty.

I remember the Faithful. I remember images of fans sitting out there at Candlestick in miserable weather, rain coming down, fog making it difficult to see what was happening on the field.

And still they showed up.

That's what being Faithful meant before the championships.

You didn't love them because they won.

You loved them.

Then Bill Walsh arrived.

And something began to happen.

Adult me can look back now and understand systems, coaching, ownership, drafting, leadership and the pieces that were being assembled.

Young me knew something much simpler.

We started winning.

The team everybody could laugh at wasn't funny anymore.

The Bay Area lit up.

Shirts. Jerseys. Hats. Shoelaces. Red and gold everywhere.

And for the first time in my life, I became a full-blown sports fangirl.

This is mine! I still have my copy.

The Monsters Arrive

Then came the players.

Oh, the players.

Ronnie Lott was unimaginable.

Ronnie was the monster.

Image: Ronnie Lott. Source: East Bay Times.

You waited for him to hit somebody so hard their ancestors complained.

I swear, that man could come through a collection of football players like somebody had scattered children's toys across the field.

Bodies everywhere.

Ronnie coming through.

Somewhere along the way, the little nerd who once wondered why anybody watched this sport was now sitting in front of the television waiting for Ronnie Lott to destroy somebody.

Apparently the gladiators had won me over.

And even one of the great pieces of Lott mythology has a wild truth behind it. No, he did not have the tip of his injured pinky cut off on the sideline and immediately return to the game, as the story sometimes gets told. The actual decision came later, when he chose amputation rather than reconstructive surgery that could interfere with the following season.

Honestly, I'm not sure that makes the story substantially less insane.

And whenever I think about it, I remember Horace.

Pain is the price of the game.

And Then There Was Dwight

Image: Dwight Clark. Source: NFL.com

Dwight Clark wasn't Ronnie Lott.

He wasn't some mythical monster tearing through bodies.

Clark was tall. Hardworking. Dependable.

He contributed what the team needed when they needed it.

And then one day, Dwight Clark became immortal in the Bay Area.

January 10, 1982.

The NFC Championship Game.

49ers versus Dallas Cowboys.

There were 58 seconds left when Joe Montana rolled right and put the ball into the back of the end zone. Dwight Clark went up for it.

Today, I can watch that replay and see what actually happened.

A very tall professional athlete jumped into the air and caught a football.

That's not what I remember.

I remember Dwight Clark jumping a hundred feet into the air.

Image: Dwight Clark, The Catch. Source: San Jose Mercury News.

That's what it looked like from where I was sitting.

Because I wasn't watching on television.

I was at Candlestick Park.

It was my first football game.

Montana threw that ball. Clark went up, and for one impossible moment it seemed like he just kept going.

Then he came down with it.

Candlestick exploded.

The 49ers won 28–27. The play sent San Francisco to its first Super Bowl and eventually became the signature moment known simply as The Catch. Even Clark later said he didn't understand until much later how important that moment would become to the franchise and the Bay Area.

Neither did I.

I didn't know I was watching history.

History hadn't happened yet.

I was just a young girl at her first football game, screaming with everybody else.

But when I look back now, I know what happened that day.

That's when they became our San Francisco 49ers.

Not Bill Walsh's team.

Not Joe Montana's team.

Not just the team that played at Candlestick.

Ours.

And I was there.

Our Quarterback

Then there was Joe Montana.

Image: Joe Montana. Source: Pro Football History.com

I loved watching Montana play, and I loved watching him lead this team.

There was something relatable about him. Something safe.

He wasn't walking around wrapped in the ego of being a superstar quarterback.

He was our quarterback.

When things went wrong, there was something about seeing Joe out there that made you believe it wasn't over.

And he became magnificent.

He led that team into history and became a legend while we were watching.

But one of the things I remember most is that the relationship didn't seem to stop when the game ended.

The players connected with the community. There were charity events, partnerships, school visits and mall appearances. Young people had opportunities to encounter the people they screamed for every Sunday.

They weren't just figures trapped inside a television set.

We loved them. And somehow, it felt like they loved us back.

For years, watching the 49ers felt like watching magic.

And then somebody apparently decided Joe Montana needed Jerry Rice.

Image: Jerry Rice. Source: LA Times.

Seriously?

That was just unfair.

Rice arrived in San Francisco as the 49ers' first-round draft choice in 1985, carrying the work ethic that would become almost as legendary as what he did on the field.

And then it became:

Montana to Rice.

Man.

That's gold.

Today those names arrive already packaged as football history.

I didn't inherit Montana and Rice as legends.

I watched them become legends.

That's different.

What Bill Walsh Taught Me

There is another reason this little chapter of my life matters so much.

I grew up with people teasing me because I loved a team that couldn't win anything.

If you loved nothing, apparently you represented nothing.

Then Walsh showed up.

He took over a struggling football team and, within three seasons, had them playing for and winning their first championship. He would ultimately lead San Francisco to three Super Bowl victories as head coach.

Long before I studied leadership, Bill Walsh taught me something about transformation.

Image: Bill Walsh and Joe Montana. Source: 49ers.com

He showed me that where you begin does not determine where you finish.

People can laugh at you while you're becoming something.

People can dismiss you while the pieces are coming together.

They can decide what you are based entirely upon what you have been.

And then one day, if you've done the work...

They have to look at you again.

The team people laughed at became champions.

And changed the way the world saw them.

I was young, but I saw it happen.

Meanwhile, Hundreds of Miles Away...

There's one little piece of this story I've left out.

While I was sitting inside Candlestick watching Dwight Clark jump approximately one hundred feet into the air, there was a little boy hundreds of miles away sitting with his family watching the same game.

He saw The Catch too.

He was becoming a football fan too.

He was becoming a Faithful too.

Neither one of us knew the other existed.

Years passed.

Then one day I met a young man while I was out with a friend.

There was interest, but we never quite managed to get together.

Until one Sunday morning when my phone rang.

Last-minute invitations are not my thing.

Then he said something along the lines of:

"Hey Angel, I've got tickets to the game today. Do you want to go?"

Excuse me?

Of course I wanted to go.

I warned him that he had not given me enough time for glamour, but I would show up.

And I did.

Then I saw the seats.

Two rows up from the 50-yard line.

I could practically reach out and touch the players.

My entire life as a football fan had apparently been condensed into one date.

How does that line go?

He had me at hello?

Nah.

He had me at the 50-yard line.

There was only one problem.

I was trying to be ladylike.

This was a date.

So I sat there quietly, holding myself together and attempting to behave like an appropriate young woman.

Then the officials made a call.

Now, let's talk about "bad calls."

Sometimes instant replay proves that a call was genuinely terrible.

Most of the time, a call is "bad" because the official has made a decision that is inconvenient to our team's interests.

This was one of those.

The guys sitting near us were losing their minds.

I sat there.

Be ladylike, Angel.

More yelling.

You're on a date.

I couldn't take it anymore.

I stood up and threw down like a football fan does.

And instead of looking horrified...

he loved it.

He had discovered something.

This woman knew football.

Of course I knew football.

My cousin had explained the math to me.

And that is the beginning of the story of how that young man met his future wife.

Eventually I learned something else about him.

He was that little boy.

While I was inside Candlestick watching The Catch, the man I would someday marry had been hundreds of miles away watching the same moment with his family.

Two kids.

Same play.

Same team.

Neither knew the other existed.

Years later, there we were together.

Still Faithful.

Funny how life does that.

I'm Still Here

And that brings me to tonight.

Thursday Night Football.

My San Francisco 49ers are opening their 2026 season against the Los Angeles Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, taking the red and gold all the way to Australia for the NFL's first regular-season game there.

And once again...

it's football time.

Music is the soundtrack of my life.

But football occupies a place beside it that almost nothing else does.

There is one important difference.

Bands have a kind of continuity. The band is the band. Sometimes they're still here. Sometimes they're gone, and what remains are the records, the songs and our memories.

Football doesn't work that way.

A football team is always becoming somebody new.

The men I grew up loving aren't running onto that field tonight.

Ronnie Lott isn't there waiting to hit somebody so hard their ancestors complain.

Joe Montana isn't walking into the huddle with that strange calm that made us believe everything was going to be okay.

Dwight Clark isn't going to jump a hundred feet into the air.

Jerry Rice isn't waiting for Montana to put the ball exactly where it needs to be.

Those are my memories now.

Today there are new names wearing those jerseys.

New monsters.

Instead of Joe Montana, I watch Brock Purdy.

Instead of Ronnie Lott, I've got George Kittle out there being...well...

George Kittle.

Image: George Kittle. Source: 49ers.com

Different players.

Different generations.

Same team.

I loved them when people laughed because they couldn't win.

I was there when Bill Walsh showed us that where you begin doesn't determine where you finish.

I was there when Dwight Clark jumped a hundred feet into the air and the 49ers became ours.

I watched Montana and Rice make football look like magic.

Years later, the team gave me one hell of a first date with the man who would become my husband.

And here I am again.

Older.

Probably louder.

Still wearing red and gold.

Still prepared to dispute perfectly reasonable officiating decisions whenever they inconvenience my personal interests.

Still Faithful.

I was there.

Candlestick Park is gone now, replaced new hightechi’s Stadium.

I'm still here.

My team is about to take the field.

And I am ready for some football.

Thanks for taking this trip back with me.

What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or remember your own team, share it with someone who remembers too.

Follow and subscribe to Rock ’n’ Roll Angel for more music, memories, pop culture, and wonderfully strange adventures from growing up Gen X.

Until next time...

Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

#RockNRollAngel #GenX #49ers #FTTB #49ersFaithful #TheCatch #JoeMontana #JerryRice #SanFrancisco49ers #GenXMemories

Sources: San Francisco 49ers historical archives and official coverage of The Catch; Pro Football Hall of Fame team history; official NFL and 49ers coverage of the 2026 Melbourne season opener.