Klein didn’t want to pay so Dean took act to 49ers

If you saw him play football, you remembered Fred Dean, a San Diego Chargers defensive end who won two Super Bowls after a pay dispute sent him to the San Francisco 49ers in a muchpublicized trade nearly 40 years ago.

Dean, at 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds, was small for the position but had 171⁄ sacks 2 in one NFL season. He joined the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2008.

“He had the strength of a 300-pound man, he had the speed of a sprinter, he had the athleticism of a running back,” Hank Bauer, a friend and former Chargers teammate, said Thursday after learning of Dean’s death Wednesday at age 68 following complications from COVID-19.

Years after knocking humans to the ground for a living, Dean lent folks a hand in his post-football life in Louisiana.

“The coolest thing about Fred was, he spent the second half of his life in his hometown as a minister,” Bauer said. “If you knew Fred, it wouldn’t surprise you, but it would probably surprise everybody else on this planet that didn’t know him.”

Dean’s career in the NFL shone a bright light on a divisive question that permeates professional sports:

How much should players be paid?

The respective owners of the Chargers and the 49ers in the early 1980s, Eugene Klein and Edward DeBartolo Jr., held vastly different views on player compensation.

Dean outperformed many players who had bigger salaries, and deep into his Chargers tenure that had begun in 1975, when the team drafted him in the second round out of Louisiana Tech, sought a comparable wage. Holding firm, Klein traded him to the Niners for a No. 2 pick five games into the 1981 season.

The Niners lost one more game — by three points to Cleveland — the rest of the season and earned their first Super Bowl victory. Dean recorded 12 sacks in 11 games and put the team over the top, 49ers Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh wrote in his book, “The Winning Edge.” In return, DeBartolo Jr. approved the 29-year-old end a large salary.

“I made it to the other