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San Francisco:
Posted: Tuesday August 17, 1999 01:31 PM
This is the 12th in a series of postcards Sports Illustrated's Peter King will e-mail from his annual NFL training-camp tour. Monday, Aug. 16 TEAM: San Francisco 49ers SITE: University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., a better-than-most campsite with a good campus feel. (Good bookstore, too, for a medium-sized college in the Central Valley of California. Excellent T-shirt selection.) There are supportive fans -- too many of them on the sidelines, competing for a good view with media riffraff like me -- who appreciate the fact they're watching a legendary team wind down. PLAYER I SAW WHOM I REALLY LIKED: In the morning practice, safety Lance Schulters had one of the prettiest interceptions I've ever seen in the morning practice. The second-year man from Hofstra (How'd you let him get away from your training site, Bill Parcells ?) leaped three feet into the air and plucked a Steve Young laser out of the air by his fingertips. Schulters is still Tim McDonald 's understudy, but the 49ers shouldn't fall too far when McDonald leaves. THE FOOD: Before I get to that, I must tell you of a startling discovery I made over the weekend: At 3Com, during a Giants game, a vendor straps a backpack on, puts a large urn of Starbucks house blend on his back, runs a hose from the urn to his right hand, and walks from aisle to aisle yelling, "Starbucks Coffee! Get yer Starbucks Coffee!" I'm especially hopeful that my brother-in-law, Bob Whiteley , of Somers, Conn., is reading this postcard from camp, because I got him addicted to the Starbucks drug on a vacation four or five years ago, and I know this news will cause him to suggest the next family vacation should be a Giants' series in the new baseball park downtown next year. OK, now to the serious business of food evaluation. "Come on, grab something!" coach Steve Mariucci yelled at me as he made himself a sandwich outside the coaches' meeting room just before noon. And so I spoiled my lunch with half of a thin roast beef sandwich on white, with a 12-ounce Black Mountain water, which I threw down while interviewing Mariucci. Now, I'd been warned that Ken Norton had ripped the grub here. I've had worse. I had fried rice, an egg roll with duck sauce, a corn and tomato medley, four tater tots pilfered from PR man Kirk Reynolds ' plate, and a kiwi-strawberry drink. I passed on the made-to-order burgers and the pasta bar, but liked the fruit area -- with baskets of apples, peaches, nectarines et al. Overall, though, the lunch-and-a-half left me too full. Dear NFL Junkie: And what do I see when I walk out onto the practice fields at UOP? Offensive line coach Bobb McKittrick , sweat pouring off him, holding a six-foot rectangular blocking bag as offensive lineman dive-block into it. "Hit it! Hit it!" McKittrick yells. For two hours the man Jon Gruden says is the most influential coach in his life coaches like he has always coached. You might know that McKittrick was diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct seven months ago, and he underwent chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation for it. Doctors hoped to do a liver transplant, but exploratory surgery in May found the cancer had spread and the doctors thought a transplant would be too dangerous. And so they sewed him back up and, uhh, wished him the best. Cards and letters poured in, from fans and coaches and even an owner -- Jim Irsay of Indianapolis, whom McKittrick had never met. A funny thing happened on the way to McKittrick's demise. Last Friday, a scan discovered his bile-duct tumor hadn't grown. McKittrick is gaining weight. He takes two naps a day so he can coach both two-a-day practices. He doesn't know what this means to his long-term life plans, but he knows he feels better than he has in a long time. "I've got a great doctor, George Fisher of Stanford," McKittrick told me after the morning practice, sitting in his golf cart. "And he told me this isn't like prostate cancer or breast cancer. Basically, there's no book on cancer of the bile duct. He'd had some patients who had it and he treated them aggressively and they died within six months. He'd had some who he didn't treat as aggressively and they were still alive after five years and doing fine. He said, 'Whatever plans you have, don't change them. Don't try to take that one last life's voyage.' So I'm trying to do everything like I always do it. I love coaching, so here I am." I asked him if the thought of dying weighed on him. "The thought of dying has never weighed on me," he said, shrugging. "I'd like to have all my affairs in order. I'd like not to suffer. But I'll take whatever comes." More postcards: Cleveland | Detroit | Tampa Bay | Minnesota | Green Bay | Chicago | New Orleans | Kansas City | Dallas | Washington | Oakland
Check back soon for more Postcards from Camp. To send a question to
Peter King's King's NFL Mailbag, click
here.
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