Vernon Davis (Reuters)
LESSON LEARNED: Once considered an NFL brat after a run-in with former coach Mike Singletary, 49ers tight end Vernon Davis has become, at age 28, a selfless team leader as well as a fearsome pass-catching threat. (EPA; Reuters)
NEW ORLEANS — The epiphany arrived for Vernon Davis a little sooner than it does for others, which is a good thing. It’s funny: Across the room from Davis yesterday, Randy Moss was spending a second consecutive day charming wave after wave of people with tape recorders and notebooks.
“I’ve learned,” Moss said, “to be grateful for all I’ve been given.”
For Moss, those realizations only came at the end of a career that probably wasn’t as immortal as he would describe it, but certainly will land him in a future Saturday-afternoon conversation for the Hall of Fame. It comes after too many Sundays taken off, too many seasons choked by indifference.
What is it that De Niro says in “A Bronx Tale”?
“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”
You can multiply that by a thousand when it comes to the fleeting time an athlete has upon the stage, the window barely open before it slams shut.
That’s where Vernon Davis seemed headed not so long ago. You remember the scene, right? It was Oct. 26, 2008, the first game Mike Singletary ever coached for the 49ers. The Niners were awful then, and Singletary turned out to be not much of a head coach. But he was an old-school guy, and when Davis drew an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty, Singletary went as old-school as you can get.
He exiled his tight end to the locker room.
And then verbally clobbered him afterward.
“I would rather play with 10 people and get penalized all the way rather than play with 11 when right now that person is not sold out to be a part of this team,” Singletary fumed. “I told him he would do a better job for us to take a shower and watch the game on the sidelines rather than take the field.”
You get called out like that by a genuine NFL icon? That stays with you. It stayed with Davis even as he grew into one of the NFL’s most ridiculously talented tight ends, a 250-pound marvel who has run a 4.38 40, a guy who has caught as many as 78 balls in a season, as many as 13 touchdowns.
A guy who memorably cried, uncontrollably, after catching a scoring pass that beat the Saints in the playoffs last year, burying his head in Jim Harbaugh’s chest, and maybe that alone would have told Davis’ story of redemption, detailed the construction of his character.
Only, there was more.
Everyone cheers the emergence of Colin Kaepernick now, and it is a story worth celebrating, a quarterback who’s fun to watch, who can beat you with his arm, can beat you with his legs, has unlimited upside …
“And,” Kaepernick has admitted, sheepishly, “it’s taken me a while to be able to click with one of my most dangerous weapons.”
That is Davis. And these were Davis’ number of catches for the final six games of the regular season: 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1. He caught one ball in the playoff opener against Green Bay (though it covered 44 yards).
Davis had been Alex Smith’s favorite target. He was an invisible man once Kaepernick took over.
And this is what he had to say about that: nothing.
“I want to be a leader,” he said, so he kept quiet, kept working hard, kept encouraging Kaepernick to discover himself as a quarterback, not worry about his touches. And all the while, the lessons learned when he was 23 kept manifesting at age 28. He didn’t wait until it was time to say goodbye to learn how to say hello.
“I had to go through some things first to figure this thing out, find out who I really was as a player,” Davis said. “Singletary helped me channel my emotions and really find out the best route to go. Things started to happen for me. It wasn’t about me anymore, it was more about my team.”
And patience can be virtuous: In the NFC Championship Game, with the world at large and the Falcons specifically keying on Kaepernick, Davis exploded for five catches, 106 yards, a touchdown and a reminder that the quarterback isn’t the only freaky talent on the 49ers’ offense.
“Vernon,” Kaepernick said, “is a matchup nightmare for linebackers and safeties.”
Nightmare matchup, dream teammate, from banished to beloved, all of this before he turned 30. The epiphany arrived, it turns out, perfectly in time.