What did the Forty Niners of the 1980s mean to the city of San Francisco?
The Forty Niners in effect rescued the Bay Area with their miraculous run to the Super Bowl in the 1981 season. Reeling from the assassination of San Francisco’s mayor and one of its Supervisors, from the Jonestown suicides by the Peoples’ Temple congregation that had been a prominent San Francisco religious institution, and from the devastating emergence of the AIDS epidemic, the Bay Area’s sense of itself had collapsed. Walsh’s team then reformulated that identity, winning games with imagination, intelligence, and vision—just the way most residents liked to think of themselves. They were both different and enormously successful and generated a newfound confidence that eventually emerged as the ethos fueling the emerging Silicon Valley based intelligence industry and underwrote the rebirth of the region’s artistic legend. At his funeral, Dianne Feinstein, now a U.S. Senator and then San Francisco’s new mayor, credited Walsh with having “saved the city.” It is impossible to think of th
