Culture
49ers' Christian McCaffrey looks to follow his father's Super Bowl-winning footsteps
LAS VEGAS — Lisa McCaffrey is nervous as Super Bowl LVIII approaches on Sunday.
“I’m trying to stay calm,” she said over coffee Monday in a hotel lobby on The Strip. “I’m trying to stay busy. I’m trying not to think about it until opening kickoff.”
It’s a familiar feeling for McCaffrey. Her husband, Ed McCaffrey, won three titles as a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos. And now her son, Christian McCaffrey, is set to play a central role when the 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs for all the marbles Sunday.
“I’m probably even more nervous this time because it’s one of my kids,” she said. “But I definitely was stressed out back then, too.”
That past was immortalized in magazine form 25 years ago, right after Ed McCaffrey won his final Super Bowl with the Broncos in January 1999.
Denver had beaten the Atlanta Falcons. That’s when a 2 1/2-year-old Christian McCaffrey, wearing Ed’s No. 87 jersey that was far too big for him, sprinted across layers of confetti on the field in Miami to produce an image that Sports Illustrated would feature as one of its full-spread lead photos.
Her husband had won another championship, so that stress was gone. But Lisa suddenly faced another worry as her young son was weaving in and out of traffic on a busy post-Super Bowl football field.
“I think I lost Christian at one point,” she said. “I remember being exasperated.”
Christian McCaffrey and his older brother Max run on the field in Miami after the Broncos’ Super Bowl win in 1999. (Robert Beck / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
The future NFL star was already a prodigious runner then.
“He started walking around seven months, which was unusually early,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “I know that sounds bizarre, you can not believe me — but I swear that’s the truth. Ask his pediatrician. He was doing things his mind was not ready to do. It was like, ‘Please, don’t hang on the chandelier.’
“Christian’s brain was moving at a normal rate, but his body was moving faster.”
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He was also ready to play tackle football at an exceptionally young age, and one such game featuring his older brother, Max McCaffrey, and several other players’ children broke out on the Super Bowl field in Miami that night.
Christian McCaffrey says he was too young to recall that night, but Kyle Shanahan remembers the postgame scenes of that era. The 49ers coach was a college freshman at the time and his dad, Mike Shanahan, was the Broncos coach who had just helped Denver to back-to-back Super Bowl titles.
“I always loved Ed and I knew that he had a bunch of crazy boys,” Kyle Shanahan said. “They all just played tackle football outside the games together and killed each other all the time.”
Two decades later, Ed and Christian McCaffrey have a chance to become just the second father-son duo to win a Super Bowl as players with the same team, joining Steve and Zak DeOssie for the New York Giants. And the chance to do so has the younger McCaffrey astounded by all the 49ers’ links to the past.
“It’s surreal, man,” he said. “Not just with Kyle and Mike Shanahan. My dad played with (49ers QB coach) Brian Griese. He played with (49ers co-running backs coach) Anthony Lynn. A lot of Kubiak connections. Bobby Turner was the running backs coach when my dad was in Denver.
“Even though I didn’t grow up in San Francisco, it feels like home to me. All the names that are in our building are the same names that I remember my dad would say, and it’s just the next generation of them. It is really cool to be able to go to work with all of those guys, knowing that we’re cut from the same cloth.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the current 49ers vividly remind the McCaffreys of the 1994 team that won the franchise’s most recent Super Bowl title.
After the New York Giants cut Ed McCaffrey in 1994, he signed with the star-studded 49ers.
“That’s when I really learned what great culture was all about,” McCaffrey said in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “We were welcomed by everyone on the team.”
McCaffrey was unsure about his chances of making the 49ers’ roster. Center Bart Oates and his wife, Michelle, welcomed Ed, Lisa and their newborn son Max — the first of four McCaffrey boys, born in May 1994 — into their home so that the young couple wouldn’t have to buy or rent a house amid all that uncertainty.
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McCaffrey ended up making the roster. He and Lisa experienced the entire season’s journey, from the early blowout loss to the Philadelphia Eagles to the monumental NFC Championship Game win over the Dallas Cowboys to Super Bowl XXIX, a blowout victory for the 49ers over the San Diego Chargers.
“I remember that team feeling like it was a family,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “Everyone liked each other. They were kind to each other. There were team dinners that included all the wives. Even us — Ed was low man on the totem pole behind Jerry Rice. He barely sniffed the field, but they treated everybody really, really well — like they do now. I had never been part of an NFL team that was as warm and kind and open.”
That openness carried forward into the decades ahead. Harris Barton, a fixture on the 49ers offensive line of that era, hosted many of those 1994 team dinners. Twenty years later, when Christian McCaffrey enrolled at Stanford, Barton and his wife, Megan — who still live in Palo Alto — opened their doors to the next generation.
“When Christian would get sick at Stanford, he’d go over there and they’d take care of him,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “They really took him under their wing.”
Said Ed McCaffrey: “From Steve Young right on down to every guy on the team, they welcomed us with open arms. It was a completely unselfish team where guys competed against each other, but rooted for each other at the same time and pushed each other to be the best. There was such a high standard and expectation as a player to perform well and live up to their standard.
“A lot of those players, even though I was only there for about seven months, are dear friends to this day. It felt like we were there 10 years.”
McCaffrey would follow Mike Shanahan, the offensive coordinator of that 49ers team, to Denver after Shanahan signed on to be the head coach of the Broncos in 1995. The era that followed saw Christian McCaffrey enter the world. It also saw the most important developmental years of Kyle Shanahan’s career as a player.
The future 49ers coach, a high school wide receiver at the time, began idolizing Ed McCaffrey.
“(Christian’s) dad was my hero,” Shanahan said. “I cut my shoes like him. I wore my shoulder pads like him.”
Shanahan said he even shook his head after making catches in a way that resembled McCaffrey. His jersey number in high school and at college in Texas, 87, was also an homage to Ed.
“I didn’t know that until after he had grown up,” Ed McCaffrey said, laughing. “I’m honored and flattered. If I had known he was emulating me, I would have behaved a little better.”
Ed McCaffrey won three Super Bowls as a player — and his No. 87 was later worn by Kyle Shanahan during his high school and college playing career. (Allen Kee / Getty Images)
Both Ed and Lisa McCaffrey were thrilled when the 49ers traded with the Carolina Panthers for their son last season.
“We knew he was going to an incredible organization,” Lisa said. “There was a winning atmosphere that we were familiar with all those years ago. And you don’t have that on every winning team. You just don’t.”
Christian McCaffrey, meanwhile, isn’t shy about expressing how much he’d enjoy sharing the title of Super Bowl champion with his father. He’s one win away from that.
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“It would definitely would be cool,” he said. “We were fortunate enough to have a dad who won three Super Bowls, had a lot of success, played 13 years, but also did it the right way and was a great father. He taught all of us how to play the game and do it the right way. To be able to share that moment with him would be awesome.”
It’s a moment that Kyle Shanahan would love to see, too. Like the McCaffreys, he’s been part of this 49ers fabric for a long time. And he therefore knows what a Super Bowl victory would mean, not just to the current team but also to the larger story of connection that underlies all of this.
“It’s really special to think about it now and the history we have with all that stuff,” Shanahan said. “We’re back, and nothing’s really changed.”
(Top photos: Cooper Neill / Getty Images and Robert Beck / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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