49ers Training Camp Then and Now

These days, I pull up to training camp and a dog sniffs my computer bag for explosives.

Then a security guard checks my temperature. Then I walk through a gate to the practice field and stand in the media’s designated area along the sideline and watch football for an hour and a half. Sometimes the action is so far away I use binoculars.

Then practice ends and I walk back through the gate, go to my car, turn on the air conditioning and write from the passenger’s seat while players do press conferences via zoom. I never have a real face-to-face interaction with anyone on the team.

In the ‘80s, when my dad, Lowell Cohn, was a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, media access during training camp was different.

Here’s a story my dad told about training camp on the ‘80s on the latest episode of our podcast, the Cohn Zohn:

“Maybe young people don’t remember tight end Charley Young. He was a Super Bowl winner with the 49ers, and eventually Russ Francis took over for him. They had brought in Francis to training camp, and Young knew his days were limited there.

“So he said to me after a day’s practice, ‘Lowell, why don’t we take a walk? There’s a little stream out by the end of the campus. Why don’t we just sit in the shade and talk?'

"Could you imagine this happening now?

“He told me on the record that, nothing against Russ who is a great guy, but they’re going to see they made a mistake. I believe Charley was wrong. But in any event, he was angry and he didn’t care what Bill Walsh thought.

“So at one point, it was a really hot day, it was 4:00 in the afternoon, we’re by this creek and I see this craw fish crawl out. And I said to Charley, ‘Look at the little craw fish.’ And he said, ‘Oh Lowell, that’s not a craw fish -- that’s a lobster.’ So I said, ‘Charley, lobsters are in the ocean. This is a fresh-water animal. It’s a craw fish.’ And he said, ‘Lowell, I know what I’m talking about. That’s a lobster.’

"And we went back and forth on that. And I ended up writing my column about sitting with him at the creek and debating if it was a lobster or a craw fish. Because that’s how he was. He was quite a personality, one of my favorite all time guys. He was from Fresno and he went to USC, and a brilliant, warm, captivating man.

“He moved to Seattle after he retired. I went up for a 49ers-Seahawks game, I was sitting in the press box, and he was in the press box watching. We hadn’t talked in a long time. He sat down next to me when the game was going on and said, ‘It was a crawfish, I was just messing with you.”

Click here to listen to the full podcast.