end they never pushed him out of the circle. A team was a sacred thing. Joe's an only child -- an essential detail to understand, former teammate Ronnie Lott says, because he lived so much of his early life in his own head -- and his teammates became his family. All the old Niners knew Joe's parents.
as seriously as you might expect from a warrior monk. He knows Joe inherited his values and impulses from his dad but any deeper understanding remains out of reach. Montana is as much a messy tangle of pride, longing and striving as you or me or Ronnie Lott. That's part of Montana's inheritance, too.
cutting horse events. Neither of those made him feel valuable again. A business he owned with Ronnie Lott and fellow teammate Harris Barton failed. He'd been retired for 20 years, a long gap between successes, before he got into the venture capital world and rediscovered any kind of a familiar rush.