The ties that bind San Francisco and the Super Bowl-bound 49ers

The red and gold “SF” emblem plastered to the side of Christian McCaffrey’s helmet during the team’s 34-31 comeback win over the Detroit Lions in the 2023 NFC Championship Game was the same one John Brodie sported while he slung touchdown passes on a muddy field in Golden Gate Park during some of the franchises earliest days.

It’s also the same crest embroidered and printed on flags hung outside hundreds of residences and bars in every San Francisco neighborhood.

The 49ers represent San Francisco in a way few other pieces of its culture do. There’s a reason why an authentic throwback gold Starter jacket retails for hundreds of dollars at every flea market around The City. And it’s why so many fans are biting their nails before Super Bowl LVIII.

“It’s not just that they're the home team. They’re literally the home team,” San Francisco native and 49ers diehard Christopher Caen — son of the legendary columnist Herb Caen — told The Examiner.

The Giants moved here from Upper Manhattan. The Warriors started in Philadelphia and were rooted in Oakland until moving across the bay just four years ago. But the 49ers are The City’s one major sports team born and bred here, starting out on a field shoehorned into San Francisco’s backyard: Kezar Stadium.

Those early days of the franchise, beginning in 1946, began to shape the team’s identity that resonated with residents. Kezar gave the games and the team a working-class and neighborhood character, mirroring the core of The City as well as the raucous and inebriated crowds who watched them play.

“There was no place to park,” longtime San Francisco sportswriter Ray Ratto said. “(Going to 49ers games) became a communal thing because to get to the stadium, you either had to take a cab or take a bus because you weren't going to find street parking. The field was right up against Golden Gate Park. You had to ride in with other people. It became a social tradition.”

Mario Alioto, former San Francisco Giants vice president and current board president of the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, said watching the Niners takes him back to his earliest days, sitting on Kezar’s wooden benches with his dad watching Brodie.

“I think for some of us, that excitement is there not just because of the story of this year, but it brings us back to how we first got introduced to the game to begin with,” he said. “Sports always brings us back to a more innocent time when we were kids. I think it's a big part of what you see with the 49ers.”

The Niners tested the faith of The Faithful during most of their first three decades of existence. But that all changed when Bill Walsh, Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, Ronnie Lott and a host of other greats ushered in one of the greatest eras in sports history with a 13-3 record in the 1981 regular season and a 26-21 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl XVI on Jan. 24, 1982.

If those early days hardened the fanbase, the glory years cemented the Niners into the fabric of The City.

The beginning of the Niners dynasty coincided with a series of mounting tensions and unrest in The City — the Zodiac killer; the Jonestown massacre; the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk; the White Night riots; the AIDS epidemic.

David Talbot — a longtime San Francisco writer and the author of “Season of the Witch” — said the 49ers “saved the soul” of The City.

Those emotions were magnified because San Franciscans saw a lot of themselves in the team, Talbot said.

There was the undersized, underdrafted and — to that point — unheralded quarterback Joe Montana, and the free-thinking, outside-the-box head coach Bill Walsh. Fred Dean, the team’s top pass rusher, would often quote Shakespeare, and he once said that when he felt like he needed to exercise, he would sit down and smoke a cigarette.

“It was a diverse, crazy, weird fringe city in many ways that was aware of its history — its gay history, its history as a rock 'n' roll city, and as a hippie city,” Talbot said. “And the team that Bill Walsh coached was a weird team, too. In so many ways, they mirrored this weird town.”

“This city was really devastated in many ways,” he said. “And so for his lowly team that has always been chronic losers to suddenly win and lift the city up was an amazing accomplishment.”

Talbot pointed to the team’s parade through downtown atop Muni’s buses in 1982, commemorating its first Super Bowl title, as a perfect encapsulation of the unity the team brought to The City.

“It was the entire city — working-class people, white-collar people, gays, lesbians, straight people, Asians, Blacks, whites,” he said. “Every corner of the town, every aspect of San Francisco was represented, showering the team with confetti.”

It remains to be seen if another Super Bowl title can similarly pull a struggling city out of its funk can similarly pull a struggling city out of its funk amid a downtown exodus and a reputation for being swallowed by a “doom loop.” 

Still, win or lose, that 49ers craze continues to sweep through The City today.

It helps that, as Ratto eloquently put it, “football is heroin.” And it’s a drug that San Franciscans and Americans can’t quit, even with as brutal and morally questionable as it can feel at times.

But San Francisco’s enduring love of the Niners is also a product of all those who witnessed that euphoria of yesteryear passing on those emotions to a new generation of fans who have never experienced them.

“Your grandparents are tied to it, your parents are tied to it,” Ratto said. “And they're going good now, maybe about as well as they've done since the ’80s. Now they’re on the verge of maybe another Super Bowl trip, and so they pulled everybody back in again. It's a little like the mob — you try to get out, but when they’re good, you’re sucked back in.”