Requiem for a Catch

The moment has replayed so many times in memory and in fact that every detail is hardwired into the brainpan now, every tiny incremental nuance.

Joe Montana rolling, rolling, rolling, running out of room, leaning away from the rush as the sideline looms.

The football leaving his hand, rotating in slow motion as it sails higher and higher -- too high, surely, the eye already tracking its imagined trajectory and seeing it ending well beyond the end zone, seeing it coming to rest impotently in the stands beyond.

The man in red and gold entering the frame suddenly from the right of the viewer, tiptoeing the endline, reaching higher, higher, grasping the football at the apex of a careful leap with the very end of clawed fingers.

Every time you see it, for a split second, you think the ball is too high and the fingers don't have enough purchase.

Every time you see it, No. 87 in red and gold pulls it down anyway.

This, of course, has gone down in NFL lore as The Catch, and it made the man who executed it famous. He was a 10th-round draft pick out of Clemson named Dwight Clark.  The Catch he made that day beat the Cowboys and sent the 49ers to their first Super Bowl, launching one of the great dynasties in NFL history.

Yesterday, too soon, Dwight Clark died of ALS at the age of 61.

Today and tomorrow and for any number of tomorrows beyond, he will remain an icon in the way icons are made -- by one defining moment in their lives that we all see, in memory and in fact, for as long as memory and videotape exist.

For Dwight Clark, that moment was The Catch, and it took him beyond simply a 10th-round draft pick who became Montana's favorite target. Just as Michael Jordan had The Shot over Craig Ehlo and Bobby Thomson had The Shot Heard 'Round The World and Bobby Orr had The Flying Goal and John Elway had The Drive, Clark had The Catch.

He'll live forever because of it.