‘Superbowls excite us, not play-offs’
BRIAN MURPHY: “When the San Francisco Giants made a run in baseball last year I think it gripped the city more than the football team has this year, though in many ways the 49ers, our football team, are more important to the city than the Giants.
“The reason for that? The Giants came to San Francisco from New York in the fifties, where they already had almost a century of history and New Yorkers claimed them, while we were the city that ‘stole’ them. Willie Mays, their greatest player, was always associated with New York more than SF.
“But the 49ers were born here in 1946, have always been here, starting off in Kezar Stadium out near Haight-Ashbury, so you had NFL football for years in an ordinary neighbourhood. They’ve always been part of the city.
“As for this year, first of all there’s been a total lack of drama. The 49ers clinched the title with four games to go because the other teams aren’t that great. The Giants’ run, however, was only decided on the last day of the season, and the whole city was wrapped up in it.
“The other thing to remember about the 49ers is that the club has five Superbowl titles already, so people may be saying, ‘well, Superbowls excite us, not play-offs’.
“That said, people are talking about it a lot, though certainly the buzz has not swept the city. The coach, Jim Harbaugh, can be difficult to relate to, but the fever may still ignite here in January.”
MM: Of course, these 49ers don’t have Joe Montana...
BRIAN MURPHY: “Joe Montana was an icon. He had a grace when he played, he won games late on, he had the blond hair curling out under the helmet — even the name, Montana, the state with the big sky.
“He was also the first, bringing San Francisco its first Superbowl in 1981. He took us to the mountaintop, and there can never be another first – kind of like Clare hurling in 1995. The second time is sweet, but it’s never the same.”
MM: There’s another pro football team across in Oakland, the Raiders. Is the ‘San Francisco equals gentility versus blue-collar Oakland’ equation too trite?
BRIAN MURPHY: “There’s some truth to it. Since they were founded as cities, San Francisco was the place and Oakland wasn’t – it was always the city that wasn’t San Francisco.
“When the baseball team came to Oakland in 1968, the A’s, they won three World Series in-a-row, from 1972-’4, yet they couldn’t fill the stadium. The Raiders parlayed all of that into their image – mean, overlooked, ‘we don’t look elegant but we’ll knock your block off’. Al Davis marketed that image and the fan bases reflect that.
“You’ll find white-collar A’s and Raiders fans from affluent parts of the East Bay, but there are fewer of them. Certainly the Giants have gone after the affluent fans with their new ballpark, AT & T Park.”
MM: Just how important is it to a city in the US to have a pro franchise?
BRIAN MURPHY: “The obvious answer is yes because of the constant promotion it gives your city. I watched the Jacksonville Jaguars the other night – Jacksonville’s not a big city but we all know where it is because they’ve got an NFL team.
“What are cities willing to do to get a team? From the 1970s to the 1990s, you had Al Davis moving the Raiders to LA and Art Modell moving the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, back in the 1950s Horace Stoneham brought the Giants from New York to San Francisco and Walter O’Malley took the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles — these were all cases of preying upon cities which were willing to bend over backwards for them.
“San Francisco and Los Angeles didn’t have major league baseball until 1958, but that was when the west coast exploded. Soldiers coming out to fight in the Pacific didn’t want to leave the sunny west coast, and the growth in population and so forth made big league teams possible out here.
“Now, though, I think the brakes are coming on. Los Angeles, the second-biggest city in the country, doesn’t have an NFL team because California’s finances are very difficult now and the days of just asking a city to build a stadium for a team isn’t nearly as accepted as it was forty years ago.
“Back then it was ‘oh yes, let’s build it’, but now with the financial problems in US cities, you have politicians saying, ‘hey, we have problems funding our schools’. It’s harder for cities to demand a franchise, because there’s fierce resistance to using public funds for a ball club.
“The Giants built AT & T Park with private money; they have a twenty-year lease at twenty million dollars a year, a lease everyone thought would bankrupt the team. But they’ve been able to pay it. They gambled that the park itself would be an attraction, and it has been.
“It cost $400 million ten years ago, whereas the 49ers are trying to build a new stadium down in Santa Clara which will cost $1bn.
“The city of Santa Clara has said it will take on the project, and it’s planning a 30-year lease to the team, with a hotel tax helping to pay for it – but massive assurances had to be given to the city that it would be paid back. So times have changed.”
MM: Moneyball as concept, book and film – how is that now viewed here, in the neighbourhood which gave birth to it?
BRIAN MURPHY: “There’s a lot of ways to look at this and one thing that has to be factored in is the role of Michael Lewis. He’s a gifted writer, maybe the best in America, and a lot of us wouldn’t have seen what he saw in the A’s.
“His storytelling’s so persuasive that he almost misleads you – he can make you believe that the acquisition of certain players who had statistical value but who were generally undervalued was somehow revolutionary.
“And in some ways that’s true – it’s important to look beyond the traditional statistics and people do that now.
“The ultimate confirmation is that the Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in the majors last year went to Felix Hernandez of the Mariners, whose win total was 13; the usual win total for the Cy Young winner would be 20-plus but the appreciation of stats is now so sophisticated that people feel the ‘win’ is not something the pitcher has that much control over, so other stats are taken into account. Hence Hernandez winning the Cy Young Award because of the new attention to statistics.
“Circling back to Moneyball, we had Rick Peterson of the A’s on the radio show, and he had the best line – he said everything in the book was true, it just wasn’t the entire story.
“The acquisitions made according to the new stats were important, but the A’s won because of other players – Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder – who don’t appear in the movie and who were found using traditional scouting methods, not according to the Moneyball method.
“Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada were other key players for the A’s, but there’s nothing about those players in the book.
“Like everything, the answer’s usually in between. You’ve got to pay attention to statistics apart from the traditional figures, but scouts who can find you a guy are also important.”
MM: Are big name professional sportsmen remote from the public here?
BRIAN MURPHY: “Right now the biggest stars in San Francisco are the Giants, and a guy with a beard, Brian Wilson – who’s big into his Irish heritage and has Celtic tattoos, he’s been to Ireland many times – if he walked into this coffee shop right now there’d be a stir.
“Tim Lincecom, the superstar pitcher for the Giants, looks a bit like a hippie, with long hair, and if he walked in here there’d be a stir as well. But there are a few Giants who could walk in here and not be recognised.
“Basketball is such a physically different sport – 6’ 6” is an average height – that you’ll notice them. The football players don’t get recognised that much because they wear helmets. The 49ers just won their conference, and with 53 players on the roster, maybe four or five would be recognised if they walked in.
“Baseball players are more normal sized, the TV cameras are close in on them during games, you know their faces... they’re well known. And right now, they own the city.”
