By Art Spander
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — It was a television reporter who asked Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers coach, the question nobody who regularly covers the team would have asked, to wit:
Did Shanahan get a sense of regional uplifting that a win such as the one over the Vikings can do for the Bay Area?
There are football people who would have dismissed the idea out of hand, telling us their job is about what happens on the field, not in the stands. But that’s not Shanahan.
“That stuff does it for me too,” Shanahan said Monday at Niners headquarters, responding to the question. “Not just as a coach, but as a fan. I love sport.
“When I watched the Warriors do good here for the two years I was here prior to this year, that uplifts me, and I love what sports does for people.”
What the 49ers have done this season is call down some recent echoes. They are in the NFC Championship game Sunday night against Green Bay at Levi’s Stadium. Suddenly, it’s the 1980s once again.
This isn’t Charlotte where, when a major golf tournament, the PGA Championship, was played there, a local reporter asked the golfers what they thought of the city. Not the course, the city, the restaurants, the stores.
We know what people think of San Francisco, of Oakland, of San Jose. Who cares if the Niners play in Santa Clara? Not TV, which during games offers shots of the Bay Bridge, when it isn’t showing us the Golden Gate.
Kyle Shanahan has been around and part of winners: offensive coordinator on the Falcons, who went to the Super Bowl three years ago; an intern with his dad’s Broncos, Super Bowl champions in 1997 and 1998.
“Anytime you have a team that has a chance to be in the situation we’re in,” Kyle Shanahan said, “where the Warriors have been a lot, sports are great. It gives everyone a break from stuff. You always want to support your home team, and I’m glad we’re giving something to be proud of this year.”
True, Northern Cal has had its share of titles, every pro team other than the Sharks taking a championship. When the Niners finally won, in the 1981 season, it was, dare we use the word, a virtual earthquake — the team that was here first, after seasons of disappointment, coming in first last.
The Bay Area, California, the entire west, had only college sports and minor league baseball until 1946. Then the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles. Then the 49ers were formed in San Francisco.
No Giants until 1958. No Raiders until 1960. No Warriors until 1962. No A’s until 1968. No Sharks until 1991 (although the California Golden Seals were around from 1967-76).
The Niners were the original, the attraction and, for 35 years without any sort of playoff win, eternal frustration. So when Dwight Clark made “The Catch” in January 1982 against Dallas (after a divisional victory over the New York Giants), the elation was understandable. And, for a long while, unstoppable.
Bill Walsh was the coach who broke the spell. “You can stop writing we can’t win the big one,” he told me maybe an hour after Clark’s catch. Since then, there have been numerous big ones.
Another is Sunday. Will this be a return to greatness, to the Super Bowl, a game that in the 1980s and early ‘90s almost seemed part of the Niners’ regular schedule? Or will this be only a letdown?
In the glory years, the Niners won their championships while playing at deteriorating Candlestick Park — then-owner Eddie DeBartolo called the stadium “a dump.” But it was full and loud. But now the home games, as this coming Sunday's game will be, are at Levi’s, which was mostly empty and very quiet. Until last weekend.
“The fan noise,” said Shanahan of the last game, “is as big of a difference as probably our team is. They’ve gotten a lot louder as we’ve gotten better. It was just unbelievable Saturday.
“All I saw in the stands were red jerseys. It gave us a special feeling.”
Just as winning teams invariably give their communities.