LAS VEGAS — Lisa McCaffrey is anxious as Super Bowl LVIII approaches on Sunday. “I’m trying to stay calm,” she said over coffee Monday in a hotel lobby on The Strip. “I’m trying to stay busy. I’m trying not to think about it until 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, is set to play a central role when the 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs for all the marbles Sunday.
“I’m probably even more nervous this time because it’s one of my kids,” she said. “But I definitely was stressed out back then, too.”
Her husband had won another championship, so that stress was gone. But Lisa suddenly faced another worry as her young son was weaving in and out of traffic on a busy post-Super Bowl football field.
“I think I lost Christian at one point,” she said. “I remember being exasperated.”
The future NFL star was already a prodigious runner then.
“He started walking around seven months, which was unusually early,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “I know that sounds bizarre, you can not believe me — but I swear that’s the truth. Ask his pediatrician. He was doing things his mind was not ready to do. It was like, ‘Please, don’t hang on the chandelier.’
The current 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 was all about,” McCaffrey said in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “We were welcomed by everyone on the team.”
The openness carried forward into the decades ahead. Harris Barton, a fixture on the 49ers offensive line of that era, hosted many of those 1994 team dinners. Twenty years later, when Christian McCaffrey enrolled at Stanford, Barton and his wife, Megan — who still live in Palo Alto — opened their doors to the next generation.