By the time Quarterback Joe Montana had led San Francisco to its heart-stopping victory over the Dallas Cowboys and to the National Football Conference championship last week, TIME Sport Writer Tom Callahan had already completed much of his reporting for this week's cover story on the 49ers and their crackerjack young star. Callahan had flown to the West Coast the week before to watch San Francisco defeat the New York Giants, and spent the intervening days interviewing the team. Washed out of San Francisco by torrential rains, the 49ers retreated south to dryer practice fields at Anaheim, and Callahan pursued them there. "I was very lucky," he says. "Coach Bill Walsh is an old friend, and even in the tense days before the championship, with packs of reporters besieging the players, he made sure I had access to them and time with him. And Montana, a guy who doesn't like to chat about himself, came and knocked on my hotel-room door a couple of evenings to talk." Callahan was assisted by Sport Reporter-Researcher Jamie Murphy, who traveled to Montana's home town of Monongahela, Pa., to interview Joe's mother Theresa and Joe Montana Sr., formidable influences on their son's career. Chicago Correspondent Ken Banta talked with Montana's college football mentor, former Notre Dame Head Coach Dan Devine, and spoke with several of his undergraduate teammates both in and out of professional football. What if the 49ers had lost last week? "I'm a bad prognosticator," admits Callahan. "I went all the way to Africa to pick Foreman over Ali in 1974, and I picked the canyon over Evel Knievel the same year. Even so, this seemed like a worthy gamble."

Callahan, 36, has been covering athletes since 1967, when he was offered a job on the sports staff of the Baltimore Evening Sun. A graduate of Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Md., he had no previous experience as a sportswriter, but he became so proficient that by 1971 he was writing a sports column for the Cincinnati Enquirer. After seven years there, he switched to the Washington Star, then joined TIME last summer. He likes writing about sports precisely because it doesn't deal with the monumental: "It isn't nuclear physics. When I was in California, floods and mud slides were killing people. On the football field, catastrophe is a fumble." On the other hand, Callahan thinks, sporting events do give fans a lift. "I try not to get involved emotionally," he says, "but the feelings can sneak up on you. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about horse racing, but when I watched Secretariat come down the stretch at Belmont Park in 1973 to become the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, even I had chills down my spine."

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