Dear 49ers: See you in 5 years
I never thought I’d stop watching sports. Then my daughter was born.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, I’ve been a lifelong fan of the 49ers, Warriors, and Giants. My brother was born in 1982 (the year the Niners won their 1st Super Bowl) and I was born in 1985 (the year they won their 2nd title). I wrote my 6th grade class report on their first championship season. That was way before the internet, do you know how hard it was to find enough information to fill an entire report on a single season?
The 1994 Niners (the first Super Bowl team I was old enough to fully remember) were an all-time juggernaut led by Steve Young and Jerry Rice in top form and a bunch of ringers (highlighted by Deion Sanders) brought in for the sole purpose of winning a ring that year. And those throwback uniforms they wore that season were legit:
I was such a fan that I even bought Prime Time’s Nike shoe that year and his god-awful CD. If you recall, he was besties with MC Hammer and published this all-time classic:
Suffice to say, I’ve been a pretty big 49ers fan my entire life. My wife could care less.
It was no small point of contention when we were expecting Maya how we would resolve this issue. Prior to getting married, I made it pretty clear that I needed Sundays during football season to myself (and that I would not be available to go to the mall with her on those days). Having a baby had huge potential to disrupt this. Boy or girl, I wanted my child to develop an interest in sports, so my argument was that she could just watch the games with me (which is a likely subject of a future blog post). As you can imagine, that didn’t go down smoothly.
Well, greater powers intervened because the 49ers were terrible in 2016 (2–14 record).
The silver lining in their atrociousness was that it significantly reduced my desire/need to watch these games. Because the 49ers were hopeless from the beginning, there was absolutely no reason to waste time on them. In the past, I would watch the games and read Matt Maiocco, Matt Barrows, and Tim Kawakami even when they were terrible because I wanted to see what the future might hold — is Alex Smith the savior? Is VD (not venereal disease, Vernon Davis) going to revolutionize the TE position? Is Manny Lawson our next Lawrence Taylor? Except for Frank Gore (beast) and Patrick Willis (beast), the answer to most questions during the post-Mariucci/pre-Harbaugh years was usually a depressing no. But last year, I instead spent time being a dad while preserving some relationship capital and it was totally worth it.
Early indications from the new 49ers regime (John Lynch/Kyle Shanahan) are positive. I think they spent more in the first week of free agency than Trent Baalke did during his entire tenure, but this team is still a long way from being competitive. They are at least 3 years away from being playoff caliber and at least 5 from being a serious contender, assuming a lot of things break their way. During this time, I’ll stay less invested in the team and by the time they are competitive again, Maya will be (somewhat) old enough to begin enjoying the experience with and I’ll probably jump back in.
Does it suck not being able to watch as much sports as I used to? Yes. March Madness is going on right now and it’s hands down the best, craziest sporting event of all. So far, I’ve watched the last 4 minutes of the Michigan-Louisville game and that’s it.
I love sports and would sit around watching or playing all day if I could. But you know what — wasting 4 hours every week to watch your football favorite team be atrocious doesn’t really seem like “die-hard” loyalty to me anymore, it seems more like stupidity. So I’ll take my baby to the park on Sundays…and secretly steal glances at ESPN on my phone :).
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