'The Catch' Will Live Forever

Everybody with any kind of enduring connection and affection to the 49ers knows exactly where they were and exactly what they were doing on Jan. 10, 1982, when Dwight Clark climbed into a colorless sky at Candlestick Park to encounter fate in the form of a falling football.

- Craig Massei

Particularly everybody who was actually there to live it.

Like the football world watching intently around them, the 1981 49ers will forever remember in their hearts and minds that frozen moment in time when Clark’s cleats returned to earth to catapult San Francisco toward greatness and set in motion the birth of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of professional sports.

How could anybody possibly forget? “We have a signature moment together that kicked Dallas’ ass and sent us to the Super Bowl,” Clark said in October after he was honored by the organization with “Dwight Clark Day” at Levi’s Stadium during a Week 7 encounter with the Cowboys. “There’s a lot of stories that come from that play.”

Is there ever. More than 35 years later, the characters that were there to experience it and take part in it could relive it like it happened yesterday.

As some three dozen of Clark’s teammates from that day gathered back in the Bay Area for the tribute to their ailing friend and comrade, Carlton Williamson — a Pro Bowl safety on that team — looked back on that January afternoon decades ago and put simply into words the significance of one of the seminal moments in NFL history.

“The Catch,” Williamson said, “was miraculous.”

Those are two words that need no other introduction to most football fans, particularly those who follow the 49ers. There have been hundreds of thousands of catches in NFL games since the inception of the league, but only one of them is known as “The Catch.”

There will never be another catch quite like it. When Clark landed in the end zone clutching the winning touchdown of the 1982 NFC Championship Game, it became the pivotal and epoch-making event in the 72-year history of 49ers football.