Bill Mifsud always emphasized the importance of having the courage to ask – an attitude that led to 13 seasons traveling with the San Francisco 49ers, much of it during the team’s Super Bowl run of the 1980s, as a Free Lance columnist.
Mifsud, as fanatic as they came about Bay Area sports, had been a Free Lance columnist for a couple of years when he was attending a 49ers game in the late 1970s, seated near the press box, and asked someone about the possibility of gaining credentials. It led him to write a letter to the 49ers. The franchise, struggling at the time, granted his request. From 1979 to 1992, Mifsud traveled with the team up to a few trips a season, said his daughter, Catherine. He covered the 49ers first Super Bowl, the January 1982 victory over Cincinnati in Pontiac, Mich., but didn’t attend the three subsequent championship games in the Joe Montana era.
“It didn’t really matter after that to him,” his daughter said. “As far as getting to that place and seeing the transformation happen was pretty magical for him.”
Mifsud passed on his love of sports and Bay Area teams to his family and worked with his son to establish the long-running Bill’s Bullpen store in downtown Hollister. On Dec. 20, Mifsud died at age 74.
Mifsud was born in San Francisco in November 1938 and later graduated from the University of San Francisco. He met his wife Pauline while on a blind date, with another woman, at a Santa Clara football game. They went on to have four children, two sons and two daughters.
Mifsud’s passion for sports became the family’s foundation for bonding, said his son, Bill Jr., who recalled many years of season tickets to 49ers, Sharks and Giants games.
It was his attachment to the 49ers, though, that Mifsud Sr. shared with the Hollister community in his many sports columns under the title “From the Bleachers.” As his daughter described, those humor-infused columns weren’t necessarily always about the games, especially in the earlier years when the team wasn’t so successful.
His daughter said he shared one of his columns about his 1979 trip to New Orleans, where she now lives.
“The whole thing was about his experience, about being a Californian in the South, not about the game,” she said.
Mifsud’s colorful personality was on display outside of his Free Lance columns, too. He shared his storytelling prowess while manager at Dabo Liquors – his wife’s family owned the business – for several years until 1979, when he began working in the roofing industry. For three years, he took weekly calls from a San Francisco radio station – which would try to stump him with sports trivia questions, earning him the title of “World’s Greatest Sports Mind.”
He was immersed in sports, enough so that the Giants’ schedule played into considerations for family vacations to Disneyland, his son said.
“Everything we did was sports related,” said Bill Jr., who owns the downtown store celebrating 25 years in business. “Going to Giants games was a ritual. We’d get to games and watch batting practice.”
He said the family never left a Giants game early.
“My dad always said, ‘You never know what’s going to happen.’”
That “you never know” mentality played a role throughout Mifsud’s life. His daughter remembered him telling a story about a plane trip and being seated next to a San Francisco newspaper reporter, who scoffed at Mifsud when he told him the Free Lance’s circulation.
“My dad got in because he asked,” she said.
