Bruce Farrell Rosen: The SF 49ers Showed the Heart of a Champion

For some football fans, like Bruce Farrell Rosen, the implications of the big game are personal and emotional.

The San Francisco 49ers lost Super Bowl 58 on February 11, 2024 to the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs.

I plumb the depths to try and understand why losing this Super Bowl hurts more intensely than any loss I have ever experienced as a lifelong sports fan.

I love this team, their red uniforms and gold helmets a bridge to another time when the red and gold brought such joy and euphoria to a city that had been in deep despair.

In the 1979 NFL draft, the brilliant new coach, Bill Walsh, selected two players that would change the fortunes of the San Francisco 49ers–indeed all of professional football for a generation. He selected Joe Montana and Dwight Clark.

The two would combine to reach immortality on January 10, 1982, in what would become known as “the Catch.” Dwight Clark made an astonishing, leaping catch thrown by Joe Montana in the final seconds to defeat the Dallas Cowboys and send the 49ers to their first Super Bowl!

It had only been a couple of years before the joy and rapture brought by the 49ers that the City was in despair.

On November 18, 1978, Jim Jones, the preacher of San Francisco’s Peoples Temple murdered 909 people in Guyana. And on November 27, 1978, Supervisor Dan White assassinated mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

This 2024 Forty Niner team also brought great pride and joy to a City that needed it. San Francisco has been ridiculed and criticized mercilessly, often for political reasons.

What joy winning this Super bowl would have brought to the City, lifting its morale. The celebration would have been spectacular.

I have had the joy of watching the 49ers win Super Bowls. My sons and their generation have not. I so wanted this for them and their generation even more than for myself. But despite losing we witnessed a championship caliber performance that had this Forty Niner Faithful profoundly proud.

With a Perspective, I’m Bruce Farrell Rosen.

Bruce Farrell Rosen is an author and a retired investment portfolio manager. He lives in San Francisco.