Well, I'm not really missing it. It's a horrible stadium. Grim, bleak, ugly. Hard to get to. No matter where you sit, you're too far from the field. Cold, wet, and windy all summer long. The wind used to screw up baseball games and the boggy field mucked up football games. Not enough restrooms, terrible food. The Giants almost moved to Florida just to get away from the place, and it took a new stadium to keep them in town. The 49ers have been pushing for a new stadium for twenty years, and now they're finally getting one—but not in San Francisco.
And it's not like the 49ers playing 50 miles further away makes any difference to me. I haven't gone to Candlestick in fifteen years and I haven't felt much desire to. Frankly, I'm more likely to want to spend the time and money to check out the team's spiffy new home in Santa Clara than I ever would have been to go back to Candlestick.
I do have some memories around the place. In the first half of the '80s, when I was fairly new in S.F., working part time, with some baseball-crazy friends, I became a passionate Giants fan and spent a lot of chilly days and frigid nights in the bleachers. It was a pretty forgettable team I was following—Jeff Leonard, Chili Davis, Bill Laskey—but the ritual was fun. My time got shorter after that, but I still managed to get to several Giants games over the next few years, when they were actually good. I was there for an All-Star Game and one playoff; I still remember Joe Price pitching great innings of long relief and Jose Uribe putting the Giants ahead with a clutch single down the line.
Football games were a bigger deal. I took my brother a few times, my father once, with a sense of doing something meaningful, a sort of offering to the family cult of 49ers fandom. They all had happy endings except one, one that that was by far, to my mind, the unhappiest 49er game of all: their 15-13 loss to New York in the NFC Championship after the 1990 season, when they fumbled away a trip to their third Super Bowl in a row and Joe Montana broke his hand. Miserable as it was, I still take a certain pride in having been there that day. (If nothing else, it was a chance to watch 68,000 people vacate a building so quickly it was as if a gale had blown us all away.)
And, of course, there are the memories of the things that happened there, that I watched on TV but will always associate with the place. I remember how alive I felt, how electric everything seemed to be, after that Dallas game in January, 1982. I remember the glow I felt for days, even though my real life was pretty crappy at the time, after they beat the Bears to reach their second Super Bowl. I remember the pizza-and-TV parties Jennie and I would throw for every playoff game, baseball and football both. I remember my friend Joe coming up from San Diego to watch Will Clark put the Giants in the World Series with an eighth-inning single up the middle. And even though the teams will continue to play inside my television set the way they always have, knowing that the place is different—that I'll never again see those shots of the Goodyear blimp over San Francisco Bay on an autumn afternoon—is a loss of some kind.
None of that is what I'm really missing, though. As I've been writing this, I've realized that I'm mourning something that isn't the place and it isn't even the memories. What I'm missing is just how much it all used to matter to me.
I started to pull away from baseball sometime in the early '90s. I had a baby son, I had a lot of interesting work to do (and a lot of deadlines), and it just became impossible to follow a team for 162 games a year. I got in the habit of tuning in for pennant races and playoffs but not really engaging with the rest of the year, and inevitably the passion faded. I still follow the 49ers, but they stay in a much smaller compartment in my heart. After Nicky was old enough to go out and do things, I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoons with my family, and so I start watching football games on my VCR. Gradually I started fast-forwarding through more and more plays. Then the players I'd been so in love with started moving on, and I just didn't connect as well with the new ones. I still watch most 49er games, but fast-forwarding; I still arrange either to host or visit friends for playoffs, but I spend more time sitting and talking and eating, and less time standing and pacing and staring and screaming and jumping and dropping to my knees.
Which is healthy, really. After the last Super Bowl I felt downhearted for about fifteen minutes, and I thought ruefully about that final, dreadful set of downs at the goal line maybe a dozen times during the next few days. In decades past, I would be depressed about a playoff loss for weeks. I would wake up thinking about that Roger Craig fumble or go to bed writhing over that ball Candy Maldonado lost in the lights. All over games that didn't really affect anything, played by a bunch of guys who didn't know I existed.
Of course, that coin had another side. There was an ecstasy, a feeling of everything being right with the world, that that same bunch of guys could give me with a victory, and it could last for days, for weeks. I enjoy watching Colin Kaepernick and Vernon Davis and Justin Smith, and sometimes they even make me vocalize suddenly and loudly, but I don't feel that exquisite, world-transforming joy I used to. No matter what happens in the end zone at Candlestick Park, I remain solidly, happily, healthily in my real life.
I would never want the whole emotional package of sports mania back again, with all the lost time, the vast brain space given to statistics, the pointless funks. But I do miss that ecstasy, a little bit. And even that strangely sweet agony that made the ecstasy possible. I miss the feeling I used to be able to get driving past Candlestick on Highway 101, even on a Tuesday in February, long past the Super Bowl and well before Opening Day, when the stadium just sat there slumbering, ugly as hell—a feeling almost as if I were passing some boyhood home, all longing and joy and almost painfully rich memory. I'll miss that, at least a little, when I drive past the place next time and know that its life as a stadium is over. And I'll miss it when I drive by, sometime in the next year or two, and realize that it's gone.
For now, though, it's still here, and Frank Gore just ground out ten yards on the spongy turf, and I'm going to watch it.
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