Gwen Knapp

At the news conference to introduce Dennis Erickson as his (his!) new head coach Wednesday, two things prevented John York from breaking into a verse of "I Did It My Way."

One, he isn't Frank. And two, he isn't Eddie.

Eddie DeBartolo would have stolen this show somehow, with flamboyance and probably vulgarity.

As owner of the 49ers, his greatest hits included "You've Got to Bring Ass to Get Ass" (on how the team won its ballot measure for stadium funds) and "He's Gone" (Marc Trestman's pink slip).

York, Eddie's brother-in-law and heir-by-default to the 49ers, does not riff. He does not do crude sound bites. At the news conference, he spoke very carefully about the protracted decision to hire Erickson.

His theme: I tried to do things in a thoughtful way, as opposed to the rest of the league, which generally appears to operate in shocking haste.

Try setting that to music.

The overachiever in York -- owner of a medical degree as well as a football team -- probably pushes him to try to be too many things at once. He wants to be a thoughtful, progressive leader, and he wants to be as close to the trenches as possible. He wants to be a little bit egghead, and a little bit Eddie.

DeBartolo loved being part of the football world. He saw himself as an extension of the team, partying with the players, talking strategy with the coach.

Listen to what York said was one of the things about Erickson that impressed him when they talked for the first time: "Dennis was really interested in making sure that he had a relationship with ownership, and not that ownership had a relationship with him."

Being more specific, he said he expected to talk with Erickson before and after every game. "I realize that the amount of time I spend talking with the head coach isn't going to do a thing to help us win a game," York said, "but it's important that we have an ongoing relationship."

I'm not sure Eddie ever had to talk about building a relationship with a coach. I suspect he just showed up wherever he wanted and expected to be taken seriously because he was the person signing all the checks. York is more formal than his brother-in-law. He wants to do things properly.

Problem is, most football teams just do things. Formalities are for owners who don't hang around a lot. The other owners -- Al Davis and Jerry Jones, for example -- don't need to establish in advance that they will be heavily involved. It's understood.

A coach's hiring tends to work the same way. There are formal interviews, which occasionally determine who gets the job, or at least separate one favorite from another. And then there are the understandings. Team X has Coach Y in mind from the very beginning.

There are rules against that now. The league insists that minority candidates get a chance to apply. York and the 49ers followed those rules, partly because they didn't have any other guidelines. In the end, York had to yield to general manager Terry Donahue's football judgment, which led them to Erickson, as safe a choice as they could find.

They were newcomers to this business of picking a head coach, so what were the chances that they were going to take a chance? That they would hire Ted Cottrell or Greg Blache, black assistant coaches who would have been rookies in the top job?

"We were inclusive," York said. "We were for real."

Well, that's a good spin on the process, and this whole affair certainly needs to be viewed through a fresh prism.

York wanted to be a leader in diversity hiring. He didn't do things the good ol' boy way, and he hopes people see that instead of just the monthlong delay in replacing Steve Mariucci.

"That's what I never quite understood," York said of the criticism over the Niners' search. "It's clearly quite different with other teams. One (coach) is gone, and 30 minutes later, they're hiring someone else."

York might deserve credit for trying to make a difference, except that in the NFL, no one gets an A for effort.

Still, on the issue of diversity, he seems extraordinarily earnest. He understands the shortcomings in the system fairly well. For example, he said, the league invites assistant coaches to owners' meetings to schmooze, with the hope of expanding hiring pools. Yet York said that he had attended those meetings, but hadn't met Cottrell or Blache until the interviews.

He said he planned to look into more ways for the league to advance African- American coaching candidates, and he intends to ask both Cottrell and Blache for suggestions. Eddie would never have done that.

Of course, Eddie wouldn't have dawdled on finding a new coach and wouldn't have drained prestige out of the franchise by making the job seem impossible to fill. But Eddie is out, and the doctor is in, doing things his way. Some day, we may all know exactly what that is.

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