In his song "American Pie," Don McLean pinpoints "the day the music died": Feb. 3, 1959, when four early rock and roll luminaries went down together in a plane crash. In my own low-profile journey writing about football, it became no longer possible to consume the sport without a core cringe subsequent to Oct. 22, 1989. That was the day I attended a game between the San Francisco 49ers and the New England Patriots at Stanford Stadium outside Palo Alto, California.
The backstory involves what I was doing there and why the game wasn't being played, per normal scheduling, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. I was following Joe Montana, the 49ers' quarterback, for a cover story for the New York Times Magazine. And the Loma Prieta earthquake, five days earlier, had forced Candlestick to be closed for repairs and the game to be relocated 30 miles south of its original planned site.
