DeBartolo brought human touch to NFL
Owner behind 49ers’ dynasty to be inducted in Pro Football Hall of Fame
If there were a Hall of Fame for worrying, Eddie DeBartolo would be enshrined there, too.
Popcorn so terrified him when his three daughters were young that he would go through the bowl piece by piece to remove the unpopped kernels. He was worried they might choke.
“Our mouths would be salivating,” recalled Tiffanie DeBartolo, now 45. “Are you kidding me? We can’t have one yet?”
Hard candy? Lightsaber toys? Roller coasters? No, no and heck no.
DeBartolo, who will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday in Canton, Ohio, even frets over the sport that made him famous.
The owner behind the 49ers’ five Super Bowls won’t let his own grandson play football.
“Ever,” laughed Nikki DeBartolo, 41, whose son, Asher, is 12. “My dad was adamant from Day One. … He saw so many guys get hurt and said, ‘I just can’t. That’s one thing I’m asking you: Just please don’t let him play football.’
“So I said, ‘OK, you know what? You don’t ask me for anything, ever, so I can give you that.’ ”
But as DeBartolo prepares for his long-awaited induction, he is entrusting one of his children with the moment of his lifetime. With a stable of 49ers statesmen at his disposal — Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Steve Young — DeBartolo instead chose his eldest daughter, Lisa, to present him during the Hall of Fame ceremony.
Bill Walsh had been his first pick to handle the honors, as Lisa knows, but after the legendary 49ers coach died in 2007, she began hearing whispers that she, as his firstborn, was next on the depth chart.
“I always kind of brushed it off,” Lisa, 46, said by phone from Tampa, Florida, where she oversees the DeBartolo’s charitable foundation. “I always figured he would have Joe Montana or somebody else who actually played the game of football.
“So it really wasn’t until his news conference, when he said my name out loud, that it kind of hit me: ‘Oh, my God, this is real.’ ”
Her introduction, like those of the other presenters, is taped. That’s the Hall of Fame’s way of making sure the ceremony doesn’t go too long. Mercifully, it will also save Lisa DeBartolo from unraveling before a national television audience.
“Especially at the end, when I had to say the words, ‘And now I’m honored to induct Edward DeBartolo Jr. into the Hall of Fame,’ ” she said. “I think I had to do it 25 times because I couldn’t get it out.”
Lisa, who was 7 when her father bought the 49ers in 1977 and grew up alongside the budding dynasty, is in a position to talk about a dominant theme of DeBartolo’s ownership. Namely, that he treated the 49ers like family, too.
She spent her early life watching how he worried over players, fought for them, cried with them, spoiled them, challenged them and loved them as if they were his own (popcorn aside).
“I think he really changed the way that people treated other people in the NFL,” Lisa said. “My dad didn’t just look at these people like they were his employees or his players.
“I think that probably didn’t sit well with a lot of the other owners at the time. I think they wanted to run their organization as a business, and my dad didn’t want to do that.”
Two harrowing incidents in October 1989 illustrate DeBartolo’s broad definition of family. The first involved his own flesh and blood: Lisa and Tiffanie were at Candlestick Park on Oct. 17, when the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the World Series between the Giants and A’s.
It took hours before the girls could call home to Youngstown, Ohio. And by the time they got through, a mere phone call would no longer suffice. Eddie and his wife, Candy, insisted that the girls fly home, pronto, if only so they could hug.
“At first, it was, ‘Dad, we’re fine!’ ” Lisa said. “But when something like that happens, I think you not only want to talk to your kids, but you want to touch them and you want to hold them and you want to make sure that they really are physically OK.”
Five days later, on Oct. 22, 1989, they were all back in the Bay Area to watch the 49ers play the New England Patriots at Stanford Stadium. Lisa was sitting by her father’s side when 49ers safety Jeff Fuller sustained a helmet-to-helmet collision that left him with two fractured vertebrae and torn nerves near his shoulder.
DeBartolo bolted from his seat, followed the ambulance to the hospital and was the first one to Fuller’s bedside.
“My dad looked at his players like they were his kids. Jeff Fuller was like a son to him,” Lisa said. “That’s how my dad felt about any of those guys, but in particular that game and Jeff Fuller because he did get so horribly injured.”
Fuller was left partially paralyzed, his career over at age 27. So DeBartolo paid his 1990 contract in full and also set up an annuity that would pay Fuller about $100,000 a year. At the time, the NFL had no provision for handling such devastating injuries.
At a time when pennypinching was the norm among NFL owners, DeBartolo spent lavishly on accommodations, air travel, training facilities and even team Christmas parties, where he would personally hand out gifts at the door.
Gary Plummer, a linebacker who began his career with the San Diego Chargers, recalled how the 49ers of that era, such as Brent Jones and Jesse Sapolu, tried to recruit him — during games! — by bragging about DeBartolo’s land of luxury.
“They would start talking, ‘Hey, I hear you guys have roommates on the road. We don’t have roommates!’ ” Plummer recalled. “Or, ‘Hey, I hear you guys sit three in a row on the plane. We get a row to ourselves!’ I listened to that for four or five years.”
But being treated like royalty meant the 49ers had to play like kings. This was during a 49ers era when anything less than a Super Bowl was a crushing disappointment.
Montana, the Hall of Fame quarterback, likes to tell the story of how the players used winning as a leverage chip in getting those spacious charter flights to begin with.
When Montana first broke into the NFL, the 49ers’ team plane was a DC8. “It was like a long pencil with wings. And there wasn’t a lot of room inside,” the quarterback recalled at an event last fall.
But before the first road game one year, the 49ers’ plane broke down. And in their scramble for a tem- porary replacement, they wound up with a much roomier DC-10.
“So Dwight Clark and I are loving it because we have five seats between us — plenty of room to store the beer in front without having to worry about our feet getting cold,” Montana cracked.
“So we go and we win that game, and Eddie D. comes into the locker room and everybody is excited and starts chanting ‘ DC-10! DC-10!’
“Eddie says, ‘I’ll make you a deal: You keep winning and you can have the DC-10.’ ” Montana smiled. “We went undefeated on the road that year.”
The 49ers kept on winning. The team averaged 13 victories a year, including playoffs, from 1981-98. During DeBartolo’s ownership, the 49ers won 13 division titles, made 16 postseason appearances and advanced to the NFC championship game 10 times.
That helps explain why strangers still go wide-eyed whenever they see Tiffanie DeBartolo’s last name. Unlike her two sisters, Tiffanie still lives in the Bay Area (Mill Valley) where the family name remains magical.
“A UPS guy comes to my door and looks at my name and says, ‘Are you related to Eddie? Please tell him we want him back,’ ” she said. “I get that probably three times a week, whether it’s making a dinner reservation or going to the post office or what have you. It’s just constant.
“People really do miss him. Nobody is really happy with what’s going on (with the 49ers) now. Not the fans, anyway.”
Tiffanie says she grew up with two sisters — and a 53-man roster of uncles. As kids, the girls hung out all the time with Montana, Clark and Lott, including Friday nights at the hotel video game arcade.
“I always say that my biggest claim to fame is beating Joe Montana at ‘Space Invaders,’” Tiffanie said.
DeBartolo’s nephew, Jed York, currently runs the team. Uncle Eddie was forced to relinquish control of the 49ers to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York, in 2000, after pleading guilty in 1998 to a felony charge of failing to report an extortion attempt in Louisiana.
But this weekend in Canton, Ohio, will serve as a reminder of happier times. Hundreds of former 49ers players and employees are flying in for the event. On the eve of Saturday’s induction, DeBartolo will host a lavish private party where Huey Lewis and Boyz II Men are scheduled to perform.
What’s this weekend going to be like after all these years of waiting?
“Even just hearing that question, I’m already starting to cry,” Nikki DeBartolo said. “So I know for a fact now that I won’t be able to make it through one second of my dad’s speech.”
She went silent for several seconds.
“It’s going to feel like a family reunion,” she added.