Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  The interesting thing is that Montana, who has been called extremely coachable by whoever has worked with him, has had three major coaches in his life — Abramski at Ringgold, Devine at Notre Dame and Walsh with the 49ers — and at one time he has held bitter feelings toward each one. And for the same reason: Why won’t he play me?

  “Yeah, I guess it’s true … I never thought of it,” Montana says, “although with Bill it wasn’t a major problem; it only lasted a few games. With Abramski I guess it was because no player had ever challenged him like I did. The Devine situation was a mystery to me. I mean, I’d been demoted to third string the year after I got hurt. Other guys had gotten their positions back. I couldn’t understand it. It hurt me.”

  Montana carried a B- over C+ average and eventually graduated with a degree in business administration and marketing. Dave Huffman, Montana’s center at Notre Dame and currently a guard with the Vikings, remembers him as “just a regular guy who wanted to play hoops, go drink a beer. We called him Joe Montanalow because he was the spitting image of Barry Manilow. In his senior year, he moved into an apartment above a bar. When the bar closed down, we’d go upstairs to Joe’s place. It was our after-hours joint.”

  There is a stat sheet compiled by the Notre Dame sports information department entitled “Joe Montana’s Comeback Statistics,” which lists six games. The Irish won five of those games in the fourth quarter, and they almost won the sixth — the 1978 game at Southern Cal in which Montana brought the Irish back from a 24-6 deficit to a 25-24 lead before USC pulled it out with a field goal at the end. At the top of the list is a game at North Carolina in his sophomore season. The Irish were down 14-6 with 5:11 to play, when Montana came off the bench and pulled out a 21-14 win with 129 yards passing in his minute and two seconds on the field. That’s the kind of list it is, and there probably isn’t another one like it.

  “(Athletic director) Moose Krause grabbed my hand in the locker room after the North Carolina game,” Devine says, “and said, ‘Fantastic. Greatest comeback I’ve ever seen. Better than the Ohio State game in ’35.’ Then Joe does it again next week against Air Force; comes off the bench and brings us back from 30-10 down in the fourth quarter to a 31-30 win. In the locker room, Moose said, ‘This one’s better than last week.’”

  The legend was born; Montana was the Comeback Kid. Then, kaboom! The big slide. Montana was hurt before his junior season, and when he returned a year later it was as the third-string quarterback, behind Lisch and Forystek.

  “When we lost to Mississippi (20-13 in the second game of the season) with Joe on the bench, I thought, ‘What a weird deal,’” says Ken MacAfee, an All-America tight end at Notre Dame who went on to play for the 49ers. “I mean, we all knew he could do it, he knew he could do it, but he wasn’t playing. He was really down. I remember going to his apartment one night and he said, ‘I’m just sick of this crap, sick of the whole thing.’”

  Devine says, “Joe probably doesn’t remember this, but he hadn’t been given medical clearance to play in those first two games.” Montana says it’s news to him. Devine says that on the following Wednesday he told him to be ready to play at Purdue. Lisch started, then he was yanked for Forystek. When Forystek tried to scramble on one play, Purdue linebacker Fred Arrington met him with a ferocious blow. Forystek went down with a broken vertebra, a broken collarbone and a severe concussion. His football career was over.

  Devine came back with Lisch (“I didn’t want to bring Joe in until he had the wind at his back”), and then finally Montana trotted onto the field. The Notre Dame players began waving their fists and cheering. The fans went crazy.

  In the press box, Purdue sports information director Tom Shupe turned to Notre Dame’s S.I.D., Roger Valdiserri, and said, “What’s everybody yelling for?”

  “Because Joe Montana’s in the game,” Valdiserri said, “and you’re in trouble.”

  It became comeback No. 3 on the list. Down 24-14 with 11 minutes to go, Montana threw for 154 yards and a touchdown, and the Irish won 31-24. The following year there were comebacks against Pitt and Southern Cal (“I have nightmares about Montana in that game,” says L.A. Rams coach John Robinson, who coached the Trojans. “I remember thinking, Isn’t this guy ever gonna miss on one?”), and the famous Cotton Bowl win over Houston on Jan. 1, 1979.

  But the game Devine has special memories of is the one at Clemson in 1977, one that didn’t make the list. “I remember Joe driving us down the field to win it in the fourth quarter,” he says, “and I remember him having something like a second-and-52 at one point and getting a first down out of it. But best of all, I remember him taking off down the sidelines with two linebackers closing in on him, and I was yelling, ‘Go out of bounds, Joe! Go out of bounds!’ And there was this tremendous collision, and they went down in a heap, and only one guy got up, and it was Joe. I said, ‘My God, he’s taking on the whole Clemson team.’”

  It’s strange, and maybe it’s partly because of guilt feelings, but Devine has become one of Montana’s biggest boosters. Montana still resents the fact that Devine didn’t give him what he feels was his rightfully earned playing time, but the resentment has softened, and they have gotten together socially since their Notre Dame days. Devine says he handled Montana the best way he knew how, right or wrong, but he adds that there’s no question in his mind that Montana is the greatest ever to play the game. Devine describes a scene in the 1989 Super Bowl, during which he was in the stands, when Cincinnati kicked a field goal to make the score 16-13 with 3:20 to go. Devine turned to the man next to him and said, “I’d have thought twice about kicking it. They’ve given Joe a shot.”

  The 1979 Cotton Bowl against Houston, the famous Chicken Soup game, was, of course, the one that put the capper on the Comeback Kid’s collegiate career. A freak ice storm had hit Dallas, and “all you heard as you came in was, bam, bam, bam, people knocking ice off the seats,” Waymer says. By the fourth quarter, Montana was in the locker room with hypothermia, his temperature down to 96 degrees, and the medical staff was pumping bouillon into him (no, not chicken soup, bouillon; the team kept it on hand for cold-weather emergencies) to warm him up. Houston was building a 34-12 lead, while Montana lay in the locker room covered with blankets. Oh, yes, it’s a story, all right.

  “Rick Slager was in law school then, and he was a graduate assistant coach on the sidelines with me,” Devine says. “His job was to run into the locker room every five minutes to see what Joe’s temperature was. He’d come back and say, ‘It’s up to 97 degrees,’ and five minutes later I’d tell him to run in and find out again.”

  With 7:37 to go, Montana came running onto the field, and a mighty roar went up. “Uh, no, not exactly a mighty roar,” recalls Huffman, the Notre Dame center. “More like a feeble, frozen roar, since there were only a few people left in the stands, and ice was falling out of their mouths. Actually, I didn’t even know Joe was out there until I felt his hands taking the snap. I thought, Wait a minute, these are different hands.”

  With six seconds left, the Irish were down by six points. “I told Joe to run a 91, a quick out,” Devine says, “and if it wasn’t there, to throw it away. Kris Haines, our wideout, slipped, and Joe threw it away. Now there were two seconds left. I turned my back on the field. That meant Joe could call his own play. He called the 91 again, the noseguard came through, Haines broke to the flag, and with the noseguard staring him in the face, Joe threw a perfect pass, low and outside, a bullet — under all that pressure, with terrible conditions. He was so calm. I swear to God he was no different than he would have been in practice.”

  Final score, 35-34, and six months later Notre Dame was marketing a promotional film called Seven and a Half Minutes to Destiny, “which,” Devine says, “was really a Joe Montana film.”

  So you look for hints, for clues to help you understand Montana’s ability to bring his team back from the brink. It would become his trademark in the NFL, t
oo. Montana says that right until the end of his Notre Dame career he was filled with doubts about his ability. Even after the Houston game, he says, “I remained a skeptic, maybe because of the mind games Devine had been playing with me.” Did any of his Notre Dame teammates have a feeling that Montana’s career would take off the way it did, that they were in the presence of royalty?

  “If I’d have known how famous he’d get, I’d have stayed in closer contact with him,” Huffman says. “To us, he was just Joe Montanalow, a regular guy. If he wasn’t so skinny, we’d have made him a lineman.”

  “Well, I knew he was going to be good, but I never knew he’d be that good,” says MacAfee, now a dentist in the Philadelphia area. “The thing is, I don’t think the guy ever feels pressure. The people around him feel it more than he does. I don’t think he knows what it is. When he walks onto the field, he could be throwing to Dwight Clark or Jerry Rice or Kris Haines. He could be playing Navy, or the Jets in September, or Denver in the Super Bowl. I don’t think there’s any difference in his mind. To him it’s just football. He doesn’t change, it’s just the aura that changes. At Notre Dame, I can’t remember Joe ever missing a read. Even watching him on TV now, he knows the system so perfectly, he knows so well where everything’s going to go. He could call everything himself, call it on the line. I don’t even know why they send in plays for him.”

  When the 1979 draft was approaching and the Cotton Bowl glow had worn off, the NFL scouts got together and started putting down numbers for Montana. One combine gave him a grade of 6½ with 9 being the top of the scale and 1 the bottom. Washington State’s Jack Thompson got the highest grade among the quarterbacks — 8. Montana’s arm was rated a 6, or average. “He can thread the needle,” the report said, “but usually goes with his primary receiver and forces the ball to him even when he’s in a crowd. He’s a gutty, gambling, cocky type. Doesn’t have great tools but could eventually start.”

  The dumb teams believed the report. The smart one has won four Super Bowls.

  11. Wine

  When my divorce was heading into its final stages, I made a resolution. I will not be a cliché older bachelor, chasing around after young women, making a fool of himself, working out, pulling my belly in, pretending. The resolution lasted until I met my divorce lawyer’s legal secretary. Her name was Jana. She was 29.

  I was waiting for my appointment with the lawyer in her reception area. I asked to use her copier and I set up a pile of work to get through. I always tried to find something useful to do while I was burning off waiting time. OK, it wasn’t real work, actually. It was copying wine tasting notes. I still wrote a wine column, but I wasn’t what you’d call making a living at it. All of a sudden, I was aware of someone looking over my shoulder. She was big, and blonde, and young.

  “Wine, huh?” she said. Now I was in an ugly mood in those days and normally I’d have said without thinking, “Congratulations, you pass the test.” But something told me to keep it buttoned up and see what happened. Maybe it was the smell of her perfume. Or the look of her, that attractive, tough look you’d see in actresses of the 1940s, the kind of women who always seemed to have a cigarette hanging out of their mouth, except that she had the added dimension of size. I always was a sucker for big women, and she was about 5-10 and a solid 175 or so.

  So I told her I was working on my wine tasting notes and I think that got her, the idea of a guy turning such a frivolous pastime into actual work, and when she asked me how I judged wines, I went into this matter of fact explanation about how you first looked at the color, then you entered a note for the bouquet, which you listed under “nose,” and then the taste. And then you arrived at a final grade. And moved on to the next wine.

  “Fascinating,” she said, and before I knew it, I took the fatal step. I knew this would be the one to sink me and would blow my resolution all to hell, but I did it anyway.

  “Would you like to go to a wine tasting sometime?” I asked her.

  “I’d love to,” she said, and I was off on the idiot, old bachelor merry-go-round. A big, brawley Jersey chick, rough around the edges … she’d pronounce all right as “aright,” and straight as “shtraight.” But smart, too, and acute in her judgments, particularly about people.

  And we met them, boy did we. Waiters in restaurants, sommeliers, fellow wine writers, fellow judges in the tasting competitions, all areas in which I felt I had a little bit of an edge, where my age wouldn’t be an embarrassment. We became a twosome. She lived with her parents. Nice people, who never gave me the narrow-eyed treatment, not even when I was first introduced to them. One night, when her mother said goodbye as we were walking out the door, she added, “Have fun, kids.” Kids! I had her by about five years.

  I thought about that, and it almost broke it, between Jana and me, but I just liked the idea too much, the idea of what was happening. It was flattering, and then there was that, how can I say it better? That animal magnetism, at least on my part. I really don’t know what she felt. I was in a kind of dippy whirl. I was acting stupid. Hard edges were being replaced by Jell-O. I didn’t know what I really was anymore.

  Pretty soon she began telling me about her life, or at least one aspect of it, and it was something I didn’t want to hear. He was one of the chefs at Le Cirque in New York. He promised to marry her. He strung her along. He had four kids. She’d go over to his house and they’d take care of the kids together, for a day. She’d devote day after to day to this. You’d think that he’d be so grateful that he’d make good on his promise and he’d divorce his wife, now estranged … uh, she thought, maybe, hopefully. Confusing was what it was. Also repetitive.

  “He ruined my life,” she’d say, staring out a misty window, if one were available. “Just ruined it.”

  “All right already,” I’d tell her. “It’s enough. I’ve got it. Bad deal all around. Time to move on.”

  “Just ruined it.”

  I was sick of it.

  Coming up was the big wine event, A View from the Vineyards, the grand California wine tasting at the Hotel Pierre on 5th Ave., next to the park. A hundred or so vineyards bring some of their best entries. The wines are paired with original creations from a dozen or so specially chosen restaurants. I checked the list when I got the invitation. Le Cirque was one of the restaurants mentioned. I was beginning to get menacing feelings. I wasn’t sure how much wine I’d taste that night.

  I got there early, as I usually do at these affairs. Before I tasted a single wine, I checked out the Le Cirque table. I saw an old friend, Bernard, a Swiss waiter I’d known for years, a gossip, a person who knew everything. We said hello. “Who’s the chef who was going with Jana?” I asked him.

  “Daniel,” he said. “Daniel Boulud.” The name didn’t mean anything then, but now it’s a big name in culinary matters. He has his own restaurant. It always gets multiple stars, etc.

  “Is he here tonight?” I asked Bernard.

  “He’s in charge of our display,” he said.

  I was feeling my brain beginning to cloud over. When I was young, I’d had a maniac temper, helpful when channeled in the right direction, such as the ring or the football field or the buffet line, harmful most of the other times. I could feel things coming back, little buttons popping inside my head.

  “Where is he now?” I said, straining to keep my tone level.

  “In the kitchen, I think.”

  I went in the kitchen. Some guy in a white apron approached and said, “No one allowed in here.”

  “Well, YOU’RE in here!” He faded. I guess I must have looked a little crazy. I looked around. I didn’t really know what I’d do when I found him, but it would be something, I knew that. I saw two guys in purple uniforms heading toward me. Hotel security. I got out of the kitchen. It was a wine tasting. I’d taste some wine. I tried a little Grgich Hills chardonnay. The wine tasted like ashes. Once I had been a judge at Craig Goldwyn’s Cha
mpagne Shootout, and a fellow judge was Bill, a veteran wine writer. He brought some notes in with him, but he went to the bathroom at the beginning of the event, and while he was there, one of Goldwyn’s assistants threw the notes out. Clifford never found them. He walked out of the judging, quit.

  “You can never taste wines when you’re mad,” he told me a few weeks later. “The anger sends strange enzymes through your taste buds, and the wine tastes bitter.”

  I’d never believed him until I tried to taste that Grgich chardonnay. I checked a couple of other tables, said hello to a few people. The evening was moving on. I was a rudderless ship, lurching aimlessly. Then I saw a guy at the Le Cirque table and I knew it was my man. I walked over, slowly so as not to attract attention. He had his back turned. He was bending over the table, messing with some crepes or something. I stood there and waited. The Le Cirque table was getting a lot of action, but finally he saw me.

  “Yes?” he said. He wasn’t what I thought he’d be. I expected some Romeo type, darkly good looking in a continental way. This guy was kind of zany looking, with glasses. But what the hell. He was the guy who had stiffed her, who had ruined her life. My bete noire.

  “I know Jana,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “I’m going with her,” I said. I imagine my voice must have come out in some kind of a snarl.

  “You’ll excuse me, please. I’m very busy,” he said, turning back to his table. That broke it.

  “Why you cool-assed mother …” and I was about to go over the table, but now I saw a little posse of security forces headed my way, and one of them was pointing at me. I melted into the crowd and made for an adjoining room. My brain was buzzing. What to do? What to do? I couldn’t think of anything. I took off my jacket, headed over to the Ridge Vineyards table, swiped a glass and a bottle of their Montebello Cabernet, draped my jacket over it, walked out of the hotel, over to Central Park. I found a bench in a secluded spot, drank the bottle of Ridge, got into my car and drove home.