Super Bowl still eludes 49ers in The City's sports golden age

Even with the 49ers’ devastating 25-22 overtime loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday, The City’s sports teams have experienced an unparalleled run of success since 2010. The Niners, Warriors and Giants have combined to win seven titles in the last 15 years and have been among their leagues’ final four teams standing 16 times over that stretch.  

For San Franciscans of a certain generation, it’s hard to process the new normal. Misery and heartbreak used to define The City’s sports fandom.

But much like the Bay Area tech industry over the past two decades, San Francisco sports has boomed.

This is the golden age of San Francisco sports, said Art Spander, a journalist who has covered Bay Area sports for nearly 60 years, including a stint at The Examiner.

“This grouping here, where all three teams are very good, and have been at least to the championship round in the last few years — it’s rare,” he said

Transcendent stars such as Warriors point guard Stephen Curry and former Giants catcher Buster Posey have spoiled a generation of fans into believing it’s the norm for championships to come by the bundle.

It didn’t used to be this way.

San Francisco’s championship trophy totals used to be stunningly low, considering the absurd number of all-time greats who played in The City, such as Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Barry Bonds, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice.

If there was a Mount Rushmore of San Francisco’s best athletes of all-time, “it would be a mountain range,” said Dan Brown, Bay Area sports writer and editor at The Athletic.

Yet championships, until very recently, were exclusively the domain of that range’s red-and-gold peaks.

The old plight of the San Francisco sports fan

Before 2010, Giants’ fans were satisfied with the smallest achievements, such as Joe Morgan’s home run knocking the rival Los Angeles Dodgers out of playoff contention in 1982 in an otherwise meaningless September game.

Fans had no choice, because the on-field product was a mix of soul-crushing losses and stretches of lousy play.

In 1984 — a year in which the Giants lost 96 games — the team’s slogan was “C’mon Giants, Hang In There!”

“The bar used to be set so much lower ... in 1978 there was a Giants team that finished third, but they were in first place for most of the season,” Brown said. “The Giants ended up having a reunion for that team because they were so indelible in people’s minds.”

The Giants lost the World Series in 1962, 1989, and 2002. Warriors fans, after celebrating their lone title in 1975, eventually became overjoyed with just making the playoffs.

Their team did so just once between 1994 and 2012, following up a stretch of 12 consecutive losing seasons with a shocking first-round upset of the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks in 2007.

“The Warriors were a laughingstock for so many years ... I didn’t think they would ever win” said Bonta Hill, San Francisco native and host of “The Morning Roast” on 95.7 The Game. “I didn’t think the Giants would ever win a World Series. I thought they would be cursed forever.”

Even the 49ers, for the first three-plus decades of their existence, were perennially average. But in the 1981 season, the team morphed — almost overnight — into The City’s gold standard, the lone shining example of the euphoric ecstasy that sustained success can bring.

The Niners’ 1982 Super Bowl win was the first by a team playing in The City (the Warriors’ 1975 championship, though still celebrated in San Francisco, was won while the team played in Oakland) and was accomplished by the only team born and bred in San Francisco.

“I don’t think in terms of cultural impact, in terms of regional pride, in terms of groundbreaking things, that anything compared to that team,” Brown said.

“It was out of nowhere,” he said. “The team had been bad. Then, all of a sudden, it’s got Montana and [Dwight] Clark and they knocked off the mighty [Dallas] Cowboys along the way. It was just such a huge deal ... it was just a transformative moment that raised the bar, because the Niners kept winning.”

Spander said that prior to that championship, the narrative around the Niners was that they couldn’t win “the big one,” starting with their infamous 31-27 loss to the Detroit Lions at Kezar Stadium in 1957.

“That was the game that symbolized San Francisco 49ers results,” he said.

Spander, while working as a columnist for The Examiner, remembered covering the NFC Championship Game in 1982, the game in which Dwight Clark made “The Catch” in the back of the Candlestick Park end zone to beat the archrival Cowboys.

According to Spander, 49ers head coach Bill Walsh often reiterated that he “never read the paper.” But roughly an hour after the game, he said, Walsh approached him in the locker room and said, “You can’t write that we can’t win the big one anymore.’”

In an era in which the Warriors and Giants floundered in mediocrity and near-misses, the 49ers dynasty shined through.

“The expectations for the Warriors were, ‘Can they just make the playoffs?’” Hill said. “For the Giants it was, ‘They’ll always be the lovable losers.’ For the Niners, it was Super Bowl or bust.”

A new golden age

Then in 2010, The City began guzzling championship champagne like a San Francisco marathoner downing water after climbing through the foothills. The Giants, out of nowhere won championships in 2010, ’12 and ’14. The dynastic Warriors followed that up with titles in 2015, ’17, ’18 and ’21. Golden State also lost the NBA Finals in 2016 and ’19.

“I never thought this was possible,” Hill said. “Fans today are lucky. Some of these kids don’t know how good they have it.”

The 49ers haven’t won a league title since 1995, the year quarterback Steve Young threw the monkey off his back with a blowout win in Super Bowl XXIX. Although they failed to crest the championship hill in Super Bowl LVIII, the Niners are still enjoying their greatest success since the glory years.

Jim Harbaugh’s teams made the NFC Championship Game in the 2011, ’12 and ’13 seasons, falling a few yards short of the franchise’s fifth Super Bowl in a loss to the Baltimore Ravens in the second of those campaigns. Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers have made four NFC Championship Games — and now, two Super Bowls.

Even without a ring, the team’s popularity has soared to all corners of the Bay Area, said Jerry Walker, the team’s public-relations director from 1981 to 1993.

“I’ll walk past people who notice my Super Bowl ring or notice my hat, and they’ll say ‘Go Niners,’” he said. “I’ve never heard it said so often. I think that’s almost become a new ‘hello.’”

Spander said the expectations for San Francisco sports are higher than ever, and the highest of his decadeslong sportswriting career. Brown said that Giants fans’ fervor — barely a decade removed from winning three World Series — continues to surprise him.

“Those championships brought shockingly little grace,” he said. “As somebody that grew up seeing all the frustration, I’m thinking, ‘Everybody just chill out, you’ve got what some people literally never saw in their lives. You’ve got three of them, maybe just pipe down for a while, realize it’s not that bad.’”

In this golden era of San Francisco sports, the Niners are playing catch-up to their neighbors. Sprinkle in the 49ers’ recent postseason heartaches, their status as The City’s first champion and a Lombardi Trophy drought of 30 years, and you have a recipe for celebrations of their sixth title superseding all others in San Francisco.

But after another agonizing defeat on the biggest stage, The Faithful will have to wait at least another year to experience that joy.