What It Takes for a Team to "Stick" Around

4. What turned you into a fan of the team you'd like to cover?     

At the tender age of five many of us were seeing how high we can get on the swing, concentrating on staying inside of the coloring lines, or sneaking our newest pet frog into the living room.

I was busy room decorating.

Standing in the center of my new room with my hands on my hips, I flashed a grin of missing teeth eager to tackle my new task. I wanted to create the perfect room. Little did I know that this very room would shape me into who I am today.

I expressed to my mother that I wanted to self-paint my room. "How about we go to the wallpaper store?" she asked in an animated, optimistic voice. I of course, not recognizing her sly approach to avoiding the headache of letting a five-year-old paint a room, screamed "YES!" and ran to the car. 

The wallpaper salesman asked me what I liked and what my favorite color was. I thought about it for a minute yet quickly responded by saying red and football. He smiled and pulled out an NFL display book that was worn as if it had participated in a few football games itself.

I didn't realize it at the time but I was in the process of taking a natural course we all take called fate. I also didn't realize that I had narrowed my possible favorite teams based on the colors in their logos.

After sifting through the non-red teams it came down to the Chiefs, Cardinals, Falcons, and 49ers (the Bills and Pats had too much blue and the Bucs were orange at the time).

I had a decision to make.

If my memory serves me correct, I didn't pick the Falcons because they didn't have enough red in them and I wasn't a huge black fan. I had pretty bad asthma and the Chiefs logo reminded me of needles, which I despised.  After a couple eliminations, the Drew Smith Superbowl came down to the Phoenix Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers.

I liked birds, but my last name obviously starts with an S, and this proved to be the determining factor. My mom bought the wallpaper, and for the next few years I looked at that SF logo wrapped around my room without knowing much about it.

As I got older, I began doing research on the 49ers and came to find out that they won the Superbowl (on January 20, 1985) just 13 days after I was born.  It was that moment in which I realized I could not have made a better decision in that wallpaper store.

The rest, as they say, is history.