Your football career is well-documented. What does Cool Under Pressure add to your story? There’s a lot more when I was young—the trials and tribulations I had to go through, starting in high school, the ups and downs of my career, the whys and how I got to where I am. Then there are things that took place later on that I don’t think anyone knew about, except for the people closest to me. Do you have a proudest career moment? We played Philadelphia in Philadelphia, and that [1989] game I’ll never forget. They were a big, physical team, and everyone kept saying, “You guys can’t handle them.” We were down by three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, and we ended up coming back to win. The struggle that we went through, and the leap—I’ll never forget. You’ve won four Super Bowls, which means four rings. Do you ever wear them? No, they’re in the safe. They’re more trophy and memorabilia-type things than jewelry for me. I know I have them; I know I’ve won them. Every now and then I take a look at them. But in most cases, they’re just there, like everything else that’s hanging on the wall. You mentioned there are things that people didn’t know at the time they happened, but were there any surprises for you in the making of Cool Under Pressure? There’s a lot of interview footage from your former teammates and coaches. Were you surprised about anything someone said? Yeah, there were some things, like coach Dan Devine’s view of what took place from his side of the coin, so to speak. Also, hearing PaulTimko, the guy I competed with in high school, talk, and FrankAllocco, who I played with at Notre Dame, and hearing some of the things that he said were interesting, things that he hadn’t told me before. The funny part is I don’t look backward very often, so it was fun to take a deeper dive into the things that took place. Getting hit in the head so many times, hopefully my memory was correct. The title Cool Under Pressure is your rep, especially early in your career with your coming in at the last minute and saving the game. Are you naturally cool under pressure or is that something that you learned? I think part of it was natural. I think having had success in that situation early on in my career probably helped to ease that pressure. It’s always there. It’s not like it doesn’t exist at all. You’re just not afraid to be in the moment because you’ve been there, you understand what it takes, and a lot of times it just makes you concentrate more. Not that you shouldn’t be concentrating anyway, but for some reason, I don’t know, when it came down to that last few seconds or minutes or whatever, and the ball is in your hand, you play a huge part in it, and I don’t mind. If you watched the Cotton Bowl game that’s in the show at the end, I made tons of mistakes. Tons. But yet we just kept going and eventually they turn around. You do enough good things that overshadow the five turnovers I think I had, and then people forget, and you go on. You’ve been retired since 1994. Is there something you still miss about suiting up on Sundays or Monday nights? Was it great to be part of a team, or just the thrill of playing football? I think it’s all of the above. I think the excitement of the locker room, the camaraderie with your teammates. Everybody says, “Well, why is that guy playing so long?” And I go, “If everyone could only play one Sunday, win or lose, just to feel the excitement and the adrenaline that takes place, and the ups and downs and swings in the games, then you would totally get it.” It took me forever to find anything that gave me the adrenaline rush after I retired that that game did. I got into cutting horses. Once you cross the line, you have two and a half minutes to do your thing. So you feel that same kind of adrenaline. There’s nothing that you can do that brings that kind of headbutt, that kind of excitement to me. I watch my boys surf, and now my wife’s starting to try to get back into surfing too. I can imagine that, but I can’t stand up fast enough on the board. Plus, I would need a small redwood tree to float me. You said in a USA Today interview, “Unfortunately most of us leave this game with things that linger.” Is that the physical stuff? You have arthritis, and you’ve had knee surgeries and neck surgery. There are few guys that escape this game without having some kind of surgery. JerryRice had a major surgery, but he’s back running around. RogerCraig just blows me away. As a running back, he stayed in phenomenal shape, but he’d just get pounded, and he’s running marathons. I told him he’s nuts. But I’ve had my share of surgery, 25 or -6 or -7. New knee, new shoulder, 5-level neck fusions. Those are the things I didn’t expect to happen post-career. I thought maybe something would happen during my career, but I never got a really serious injury during that time period. It all seemed to happen post-career. Everything kind of led up to the other. I did have six scopes on my knee, which probably led to me having to getting a knee. But I just never pictured myself doing that. We were at an anniversary, and I can’t remember which one it was of the 49ers, while I was still playing. They were calling up some of the older guys and they walked up like three steps onto the stage, and [my wife] Jennifer turned to me and said, “That’s going to be you some day.” They were struggling to get up the steps and I’m like, “There’s no way.” Sure enough, that’s where it ended up. That’s kind of why I retired. I could have played another year or two maybe. But I looked at my life for the rest of it, the kids that I’d somewhat missed growing up as I was playing, and now one of our granddaughters is here today. But being able to get with them and spend the time, it’s almost like I’m looking back on, I just didn’t have enough time with mine growing up and I don’t want to miss with these ones as they get here. What does retirement look like? I started a venture fund several years ago. There are four of us, and my older son [Nate] came to work for us a few years ago. Now, my younger daughter [Elizabeth] is helping out on the office side. We invest in early-stage startups across all sectors. We just closed our third fund and are getting ready to raise another one. Was having the Notre Dame college education helpful? Yes, but [venture funds] was a whole other learning. We got really lucky, because RonConway, he’s probably one of the top angel investors out here in the [Silicon] Valley, if not the top one, took me and my older son under his wing at the time. My younger son was still in college, but he took us through the Y Combinator, which is a big incubator out here. We started following him and his SV angel guys around to see what their secret sauce was and what they look for. So they kind of walked us through the steps and we just started doing a couple of little investments just for the family. And then Ron talked me into starting a fund and off we went. We found a couple other guys; one guy started a company, he went and sold his company to Google. My other partner started his company, and it was what they call data storage. They were bought by IBM. They basically started IBM’s cloud service. He has a Ph.D. in applied particle physics. We’re pretty diverse as a group, so we invest across all the sectors. We have fun. It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun seeing all the new stuff coming out. You mentioned working with your son, but both your boys—Nate and Nick—played football at some point. Why were sports an important part of their lives? I think sports for everybody is a fun way or an easier way for parents to have somebody teach lessons to kids. The thing I always had trouble with is trophies for everybody. I go, “That’s not the real world. You’re not teaching them.” And I think the thing that sports does naturally is, “Hey, if you want to play, you’ve got to get better.” It’s the same way in the classroom. If you want to get to the better school, you’ve got to study and you’ve got to make better grades. It’s the same thing with sports. Sports does that naturally, teaches you how to get along with people. Especially teams like football where there’s 11 guys out there at once. You have to learn how to deal with situations with other people and their problems. And so, I think it was a big part of that. The fact that the younger one [Nick], when we talk about work, he’s working for a venture firm in Israel right now, so he’s having a blast. Speaking of learning, things turned around for you when you really started studying the game tapes and prepping. It became a mental game more than a physical game for you, it seemed. For most quarterbacks it is. Before it used to be like 75-25, now they don’t get hit as much in the NFL, so it becomes more of an 85-15 kind of breakdown. I really learned that preparation from BillWalsh [who coached the San Francisco 49ers and at Stanford University]. You find out that when you get in situations, if you’re prepared, they’re a little bit easier to deal with and handle, and you’re ready for them. I think the sad part is I didn’t really learn exactly what it took until I ran into Bill Walsh. That’s when it really got serious for me. I knew you had to study it, but to what degree, I wasn’t even close to where I thought I should be. It’s just like I tell kids today, “It’s like taking a test. When you go in to take a test, you know whether you studied or not, and you know how nervous you are if you haven’t studied. You’re just taking chances.” And it’s the same thing in the NFL for a quarterback. There’s so much that goes on and it happens so fast, that if you haven’t done that work off the field there’s no way you can participate and be successful. Rudy Ruettiger was at Notre Dame the same time as you, and during that segment, you talk about being a prankster. What kind of pranks did you like to pull? I was always messing with people’s stuff in the locker room. Whether it’s putting stuff in somebody’s helmet when they don’t know and then he’ll put it on. When we were in training camp with the 49ers, everybody used to rent these bikes. We always got a break somewhere in there, and so, [49ers wide receiver] DwightClark and I went out during the day, and we bought a big, long chain. And during our break in the meeting, we ran out, we put all the bicycles in a line and we ran the chain through them all. And then [49ers cornerback] TimMcKyer had a little moped, and so we chained it to Tim’s moped and we locked them. We begged our coach to let us out early because I let him in on what we did, so we could get back and lock ourselves in the room. Yeah, just the little things. Next, Is the Peacock Premium Streaming Service Worth It?
