Flashback: The Catch, and the Dynasty It Started

January 10, 1982. Candlestick Park. Fifty-one seconds left, the back of the end zone, and a fingertip grab that changed everything for the 49ers.

Before the five Super Bowls, before Jerry Rice and Steve Young, before the 49ers became the gold standard of an entire decade, there was one play that made all of it possible. It happened on January 10, 1982, in the NFC Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys at Candlestick Park, and Bay Area football fans have been reliving it ever since.

The 49ers trailed late and faced third down near the Dallas goal line with under a minute to go. Joe Montana rolled to his right, chased by the Cowboys' pass rush, and threw a high ball toward the back of the end zone that looked for all the world like it was sailing out of bounds. Then Dwight Clark rose up out of nowhere and pulled it down at his fingertips for the go-ahead touchdown. The 49ers won 28-27, and a dynasty was born on the spot.

What makes The Catch more than a highlight is what it ended and what it began. It ended the Cowboys' run as the class of the conference, the team that had bullied the NFC for years. And it began the Montana era in San Francisco, the first step of a franchise that would win Super Bowl XVI just two weeks later and four championships in the decade that followed. Every gold-and-red banner that hangs today traces back to that one throw and that one leap.

The play gets remembered on its own, which does the drive a disservice. San Francisco took over on their own 11-yard line with 4:54 on the clock, trailing 27-21, needing a touchdown against a Dallas defence that had spent the afternoon getting to Montana. What followed was fourteen plays and 89 yards of a young quarterback and a third-year head coach refusing to panic, short throws, Lenvil Elliott carrying on the ground, a sideline reverse, and a steady march that ate almost the entire four minutes without ever looking like a two-minute drill.

Third and three at the Dallas six, 58 seconds left. The call was Change Left Slot, Sprint Right Option, a Bill Walsh design that sends Montana rolling right with a progression and, if everything fails, a throw to the back corner where only his receiver can get it. Everything failed. Ed "Too Tall" Jones and the Dallas rush chased him to the sideline, Montana pump-faked, kept drifting, and threw the ball high and away, so high that broadcasters and half of Candlestick assumed he was throwing it out of the back of the end zone rather than take a sack. Everson Walls was in position on Dwight Clark. He was in position on a ball nobody could have caught. Clark went up anyway and got two hands on it at full stretch.

The game wasn't over. Dallas got the ball back with 51 seconds and Danny White immediately hit Drew Pearson on a crossing route that was gone, a touchdown, the season, all of it, until Eric Wright caught him by the collar at the 49ers' 44 and dragged him down. It's the single most underrated tackle in franchise history, and if Wright misses it there's no dynasty, no Super Bowl XVI, and no page like this one. On the next snap Lawrence Pillers hit White as he began to throw, the ball came loose, and Jim Stuckey fell on it. Then it was over.

Two weeks later the 49ers beat Cincinnati 26-21 in Super Bowl XVI, a franchise that had never won anything, and had gone 6-10 as recently as 1980, holding a trophy. Four more followed: 1984, 1988, 1989 and 1994. Five of the twenty-one championships this region has won come out of the decade that began on this play, and the team of the decade is the whole story of what Walls couldn't stop.

It also ended something. Dallas had been the class of the NFC for a decade and never really recovered its grip; the conference belonged to San Francisco for most of the eighties instead. And the Montana and Young argument that consumed this city a decade later only exists because of what Montana became on this drive.

The building it happened in is gone. Candlestick Park was cold, windy, badly sited and beloved, and it came down piece by piece in 2015, so the actual patch of ground where Clark landed is now part of a construction site in the southeast corner of San Francisco. Dwight Clark died in June 2018 of ALS. The play is fine. It's everything around it that keeps disappearing.

• Capped a 14-play, 89-yard game-winning drive engineered by Joe Montana
• Beat the Dallas Cowboys 28-27 for the NFC title
• Sent the 49ers to Super Bowl XVI, the first of five championships
• Widely regarded as one of the greatest plays in NFL history

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