David Talbot knows San Francisco needs a morale boost, and he’s looking to a Super Bowl victory Sunday as the best vehicle to bring it
By Kent German Feb 8, 2024 (SFGate.com)
David Talbot knows San Francisco needs a morale boost to escape the “doom loop” headlines and conservative media schadenfreude over the city’s current malaise. And the author, former journalist and San Francisco historian is looking to a 49ers win in Sunday’s Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs as the best vehicle to bring it.
“I love San Francisco. I’ve lived here most of my life, and I think the city really is lost,” Talbot told SFGATE in a phone interview last week. “We need the Niners. … I can’t think of any other institution that represents all of the city at this point that pulls us together.”
Talbot’s belief in the football team and the lift it could bring comes from experience rather than just starry-eyed optimism. In his 2012 book “Season of the Witch,” which grippingly covers the history of San Francisco from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the 72-year-old Talbot writes that the 49ers played a city-saving role in 1982 when the team beat the Cincinnati Bengals in its first Super Bowl appearance. At that time San Francisco was mired in trauma, but of a vastly different kind.
A city at war with itself
As the 1980s opened, San Francisco was reeling from a tumultuous two decades that brought radical change, profound hope and unmitigated terror to its population. As Talbot writes in his book, events like the Summer of Love and anti-war movement, the birth of the gay rights movement in the Castro, the Symbionese Liberation Army and Jonestown plunged San Francisco into a war with itself. Newly arrived residents embracing tolerance and eager to push cultural and political boundaries clashed with more conservative native-born residents resistant to liberal change, Talbot writes. That war culminated tragically with the 1978 assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White.
“There was the emerging city, the gay city, the city of San Francisco values,” Talbot said in his interview. “And there’s the traditional city represented most violently by Dan White. The two had clashed with disastrous results.”
That whiplashing cycle of events left the city dazed and delirious. And in the last section of the book, titled “Deliverance,” he describes how he thinks the 49ers helped San Francisco slowly regain its spirit as the decade turned. Edward DeBartolo Jr., whose family bought the team in 1977, and Bill Walsh, who became coach in 1979, transformed a scrappy team considered “the worst in the NFL” into a promising group with Ted Lasso-like potential.
“Wounded by one civic trauma after the next — San Francisco was not quite ready to give itself over to 49ers fever,” Talbot wrote in the book. “But the numbness from all those years of grisly headlines slowly began to lift from the city.”
Three years later as the team’s fortunes built into an underdog winning season, it faced the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC playoff game. Known as “America’s Team” at the time, the Cowboys, Talbot writes, were a conservative, militaristic team confident it would vanquish the godless “Sin Funcisco.” But before a packed Candlestick Park, the 49ers won 28-27 with an extraordinary touchdown that’s now simply known as “The Catch.” And when they clinched the Super Bowl win in Detroit on Jan. 24, San Francisco was ecstatic. (The San Francisco Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)
Though Talbot had moved to San Francisco only the year before, he eagerly attended the victory parade. When talking with SFGATE, he described that day as a unifying experience.
“The victory parade called out all sorts of people, all kinds of people, the entire city. Blue collar, white collar, Black, white, Asian, everybody was lined up along the parade route,” he said. “The team saved the city’s soul and healed the city at the right time.”
A city that doesn’t work
Four decades later, Talbot speculates that San Francisco is no longer at war with itself, but it suffers from a new and more intractable problem: It doesn’t know what is. As he puts it, factors like the tech invasion, homelessness and the pandemic have knocked the city off kilter.
“What is San Francisco? Is it boarded up?” he said. “It doesn’t work anymore. The city is kind of lost.”
Talbot takes the sense of loss personally. He and his wife raised two sons here — his son Joe Talbot wrote and directed the 2019 film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” — and he’s not about to leave despite San Francisco’s challenges. And nothing has shaken his love for the Niners or his confidence in the team’s power to unify.
“I love the team,” he said. “My sons, my wife and I were glued to the TV all season long.”
Talbot also drew parallels between the 49ers of today and the team of 1981, saying both are eccentric and reflect San Francisco itself, even now that it plays its games 45 miles away in Santa Clara at Levi’s Stadium.
Talbot said he sees shades of famed quarterback Joe Montana in current quarterback Brock Purdy, whom Talbot calls “the real deal.” Though Montana looked more like “a regular guy” than an imposing athlete, he was just what the 1981 team needed.
“The team was weird and poetic under Bill Walsh. It reflected the city,” he said. “I think the team today under [tight end George] Kittle and Purdy is also a magical group of men of athletes that in some ways reflects the city, too. It’s different, it’s unique.”
Along with the Super Bowl win, Talbot in his book also credits the mayorship of Dianne Feinstein with getting San Francisco back on track. He said she knew the team and believed in it. As he writes in the book, her support of the 49ers went so far as to inviting DeBartolo and Walsh to dinner days before the game with the Cowboys, telling them, “I don’t know if you realize it, but San Francisco needs this team.”
He’s not as confident, though, that Mayor London Breed shares the late Feinstein’s enthusiasm. Talbot said he doesn’t believe Breed knows the team, and he doesn’t believe she’s “with” it.
“She doesn’t seem like someone who goes to games, hangs out with the players and knows how to talk to them,” he said. “I can’t imagine her having any kind of persuasiveness, or, you know, believability with the team and saying, ‘We need you.’”
In an emailed statement to SFGATE, Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokeswoman for Breed, said the mayor is lifelong San Franciscan and 49ers fan.
“The Mayor, like fans across the Bay Area and the country, are very excited for the game on Sunday and hopeful for a 49er victory over the Chiefs,” Safarzadeh said. “San Francisco continues to make significant strides in our economic recovery and is doing well, and a Super Bowl win would help build on the momentum and excitement we’re already seeing in the City.”
When the 49ers take the field Sunday in Las Vegas, Talbot will be watching from his Bernal Heights home. Like in 1981, he knows the 49ers are facing a country that likes to kick San Francisco when it’s down and ridicule it “as the city of gays, the city of homeless people, that beautiful city that doesn’t work.” He wants a championship for everyone, not just his sons, who are tired of hearing his stories of the Niners’ fading 1980s glory, but also the city and every 49ers fan.
“I would love to bring home a championship for all people,” he said. “Because I do think [the team] unifies and excites the city like nothing else can.”
Feb 8, 2024
By Kent German
Kent German is a News Editor at SFGATE. A California native, he’s a USF graduate and a veteran of CNET where he wrote the review of the first iPhone. He’s also a dog person and a proud aviation geek with a healthy knowledge of airport codes. Email him at kent.german@sfgate.com.
