49ers' Christian McCaffrey looks to follow in his Super Bowl-winning father's footsteps

LAS VEGAS – Lisa McCaffrey is nervous as Super Bowl LVIII approaches Sunday.

“I'm trying to stay calm,” she said Monday over coffee in a hotel lobby on The Strip. “I try to stay busy. I try not to think about it until the 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, will play a pivotal role when the 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday.

“I'm probably even more nervous this time because it's one of my kids,” she said. “But I was certainly stressed at the time.”

That past was immortalized in magazine form 25 years ago, shortly after Ed McCaffrey won his last Super Bowl with the Broncos in January 1999.

Denver had defeated the Atlanta Falcons. That's the moment a 2.5-year-old Christian McCaffrey, wearing Ed's No. 87 jersey that was way too big for him, sprinted over layers of confetti on the field in Miami to produce an image that Sports Illustrated as would see one of the photos. the full main photos.

Her husband had won another championship, so that stress was gone. But Lisa suddenly faced another concern when her young son found himself in traffic on a busy football field after the Super Bowl.

“I think I lost Christian at some point,” she said. “I remember being annoyed.”

The future NFL star was already a prodigious runner back then.

“He started walking about seven months, which was unusually early,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “I know that sounds bizarre, you can't believe me, but I swear it's the truth. Ask his pediatrician. He did things his mind wasn't ready for. It was like, 'Please don't hang from the chandelier.'

“Christian's brain was moving at a normal speed, but his body was moving faster.”

He was also ready to play tackle football at an exceptionally young age, and that evening such a game broke out with his older brother, Max McCaffrey, and the children of several other players on the Super Bowl field in Miami.

Christian McCaffrey says he was too young to remember that night, but Kyle Shanahan remembers the postgame scenes from that time. The 49ers coach was a freshman at the time and his father, 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 he had a bunch of crazy guys,” Kyle Shanahan said. “They all just played football together outside of games and killed each other all the time.”

Two decades later, Ed and Christian McCaffrey have the opportunity to become only the second father-son duo to win a Super Bowl as players on the same team, joining Steve and Zak DeOssie for the New York Giants. And the opportunity to do so has the younger McCaffrey in awe of all the 49ers' ties 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. Lots 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 in our building are the same names I remember my dad would say, and it's just the next generation. It's really cool to be able to work with all those guys, knowing that we're cut from the same cloth.”

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that today's 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 is all about,” McCaffrey said Tuesday in Las Vegas. “We were welcomed into the team by everyone.”

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 the young couple didn't have to buy or rent a house amid the crisis . all that uncertainty.

McCaffrey ultimately made the selection. He and Lisa lived through the entire season, from the early loss to the Philadelphia Eagles to the monumental NFC Championship Game victory over the Dallas Cowboys to Super Bowl XXIX, a huge victory for the 49ers over the San Diego Chargers.

“I remember the team feeling like it was a family,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “Everyone liked each other. They were kind to each other. There were team dinners where all women were present. Even us – Ed was a low man on the totem pole behind Jerry Rice. He barely sniffed the field, but they treated everyone very, very well – as they do now. I had never been part of an NFL team that was so warm, friendly and open.

This openness continued in the coming decades. Harris Barton, a fixture on the 49ers offensive line of that era, hosted many of those team dinners in 1994. Twenty years later, when Christian McCaffrey enrolled at Stanford, Barton and his wife Megan – who is still in Palo Alto living – their doors for the next generation.

“When Christian got sick at Stanford, he would go there and they would take care of him,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “They really took him under their wing.”

Ed McCaffrey said: “From Steve Young to every man on the team, they welcomed us with open arms. It was a completely unselfish team where guys competed against each other, but at the same time supported each other and pushed each other to be the best. There was such a high standard and expectation that a player would perform well and meet his standard.

“Many of those players, even though I was only there for seven months, are still dear friends to this day. It felt like we had been there for ten years.”

McCaffrey would follow Mike Shanahan, the offensive coordinator of that 49ers team, to Denver after Shanahan signed on as the Broncos' head coach in 1995. In the era that followed, Christian McCaffrey entered the world. They were also the most important developmental years of Kyle Shanahan's playing career.

The future 49ers coach, then a receiver in high school, came to idolize Ed McCaffrey.

“(Christian's) dad was my hero,” Shanahan said. “I cut my shoes like him. I wore my shoulder pads, just like him.”

Shanahan said he even shook his head after making catches in a manner similar to McCaffrey. His high school and college jersey number at Texas, 87, was also a tribute to Ed.

“I didn't know that until he was an adult,” Ed McCaffrey said, laughing. “I am honored and flattered. If I had known he was following me, I would have behaved a little better.”

Both Ed and Lisa McCaffrey were thrilled when the 49ers traded to 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 knew all those years ago. And you don't have that with every winning team. You just don't do that.”

Christian McCaffrey, meanwhile, isn't shy about expressing how much he would love to share the title of Super Bowl champion with his father. He is one win away from that.

“It would definitely be cool,” he said. “We were fortunate 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 dad. He taught us all how to play the game and do it the right way. It would be great to share that moment with him.”

It's a moment Kyle Shanahan would love to see, too. Like the McCaffreys, he has been a part of this 49ers fabric for a long time. And so he knows what a Super Bowl win would mean, not just for the current team, but for the larger story of belonging that underpins it all.

“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 has really changed.”

(Top Photos: Cooper Neill/Getty Images and Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)