What Jerry Rice is Really Like

Please excuse the shameless self promotion, but my dad published a book.

It’s called Gloves Off: 40 Years of Unfiltered Sports Writing. My dad is Lowell Cohn, and he was a Bay Area Sports columnist from 1979 to 2016. No one covered the 49ers as long or knows the team’s history as well as my dad. Not to brag.

Gloves Off is a series of short vignettes, many of them about former 49ers. I’m talking Bill Walsh, George Seifert, Jim Harbaugh, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Ronnie Lott, Dwight Clark and Jerry Rice. If you’re a 49ers fan, the book will appeal to you. If you’re not a 49ers fan but you love good writing, this book will appeal to you, too.

My dad and I do a weekly podcast called The Cohn Zohn. This week, we discussed the 49ers he wrote about in Gloves Off. Here’s an excerpt of my dad on Rice:

“Bill Walsh obviously admired Jerry Rice. And Bill and I, we would talk about, and one day we started talking about Jerry. And Bill said one of the pleasures he had prior to a game, he would sneak into the locker room and, without Jerry knowing, Bill would look at him putting on his uniform. And Bill said it was like a gladiator putting on the attire you’d wear for battle. Everything had to be perfect. The way his pants fit. The way his jersey fit into his pants. And then he would put a towel, and it would be perfectly folded. Bill would look at Rice and know this man was ready to play. And for Bill, Jerry was the ideal.

“The other thing was, remember, he tore his ACL. And he didn’t play for a long time. And at practice, I could see him on a far field. He would just be solitary, running back and forth and back and forth. And you knew, if anyone was going to come back, he would move heaven and earth to come back. So not only a great player, but a great competitor and, as an adult, he turned into just a lovely man.”

To watch the full podcast, click here.

To buy Gloves Off, click here.