He won four Super Bowls and retired as the undisputed greatest. What came next was turning a legacy into a life.
MY LATE FATHER bought me a Joe Montana jersey when I was a boy. Home red with white stripes. I don't remember when he gave it to me, or why, but I'll never forget the way the mesh sleeves felt against my arms. The last time I visited my mom, I looked for it in her closets. She said it'd been put away somewhere. On trips home I half expect to still see my dad sitting at the head of the long dining room table, papers strewn, working on a brief or a closing argument. He was an ambitious man who had played quarterback in high school and loved what that detail told people about him -- here, friends, was a leader, a winner, a person his peers trusted most in moments when they needed something extraordinary. Lots of young men like my father play high school quarterback, roughly 16,000 starters in America each year. Only 746 men have ever played the position in the modern NFL and just 35 of them are in the Hall of Fame. What my father knew when he gave me that jersey was that only one of them was Joe Montana.
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