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| | | | | | | | Wednesday, August 30, 2000
Frozen Moment: Cheering Joe Cool into the Hall
By Chris Corbellini
ABC Sports Online
CANTON, Ohio -- They should have renamed the 2000 NFL Hall of Fame ceremony 1980's 49er Memorabilia Night.
Sure, if you looked long enough, you spotted the Raiders fans, resembling the gas pirates at the end of "The Road Warrior" in silver and black face paint, whooping it up for Oakland inductee Howie Long. There were also the requisite Steelers fans, waving their trademark yellow towels in unison, in honor of inductee Dan Rooney. But watching them for long on Saturday would be like staring at the fence that prevents you from going over the side of the Grand Canyon.
Steelers and Raiders fans were just trimmings for the main course: the most unabashedly biased group of fans to ever cheer on a class of inductees into the Hall of Fame. Saturday was 49ers day, don't let anybody tell you different. Three of their own -- Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana and Dave Wilcox -- were going into the Hall together. And of the three, naturally, shades-cool Joe received the loudest ovation while strolling to the podium mic like the Prom King he is.
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Former San Francisco 49ers great Joe Montana jokingly holds his "speech" during his enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. |
"I've been a 49er fan since 1965," Carl Albe, of Wilkes Barre, Pa., said, sporting a Niners cap signed by Charles Haley and others. "And I always said, when Joe Montana comes to Canton, I was going to be there."
"Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott were like fire and ice," said John McArdele, a longtime Niners fan who flew to Canton from San Francisco with his wife for the ceremony. "Joe made that team successful. I wanted to be here. This is my first time."
Such talk shouldn't come as a surprise. It seemed all of Canton woke up Saturday morning and decided to don that beautiful '80s No. 16. All those cheering in his old number -- complete with rips, grass stains, whatever -- proved to be a fitting thank you for The Catch, The Drive, four Super Bowl wins, and putting San Francisco on the map. They cheered him for his action off the field, too.
"That's a Hall of Fame wife," someone screamed while the ESPN cameras panned to Montana's wife, Jennifer. The crowd ushered around the large TV monitor chuckled in response.
Jennifer aside, the crowd admired other members of the Niners regime too. Wilcox -- the Niners great linebacker of the '60s -- received a standing ovation. Lott received two: one during his video introduction when he discussed hacking off part of his pinky (a story you've probably heard about 90 times in the last 90 minutes of reading the morning sports page), and then when his father, Roy, introduced him. Bill Walsh and Eddie DeBartolo Jr. received a near standing O at various moments of the ceremony and they weren't even being inducted.
Montana, introduced second-to-last before Rooney and after Lott, has got them all beat. He admitted to being more nervous than usual before the ceremony, and his legs did rock back and forth like a child's moments before his speech. Then Montana took four nervous strides, whispered thanks to DeBartolo, and looked out to the crowd and unleashed the grin. The rest you'll see in an NFL Films feature awhile from now -- the chant of "Joe," the long standing O, the jerseys -- which will undoubtedly be immortalized like the "John Candy" anecdote during Montana's game-winning drive in Super Bowl XXIII.
"What a team we have up here," Joe Montana said while looking at 111 members of the Hall who made it for the 2000 reunion. "Some of them are on the ugly side, but I can't help that."
"Simply put, Joe Montana was the greatest quarterback to have ever played the game," DeBartolo Jr. said moments before as he presented him to the masses.
There was no rebuttal from his Hall of Fame classmates, or the 111 members of the reunion. Only cheers. And a hell of a lot of old Niners jerseys.
Chris Corbellini is the editor of MondayNightFootball.com.
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NFL Hall of Fame inductee Joe Montana goes Up Close with Gary Miller.