MIAMI -- San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice remembers the time he lined up to start a game against the Atlanta Falcons, focusing on his duel with cornerback Deion Sanders.
It doesn't get much better in pro football than Rice vs. Sanders: the best wide receiver against the best cover corner in the game.
Rice, who is so intense that he often doesn't sleep much the night before games, was concentrating on the play.
That's why he was startled when Sanders reached out to shake his hand.
"Right before the play, he's trying to shake my hand and I'm like, 'No, not right now. Wait till we get started.' He's funny," Rice said.
"He said Jerry Rice didn't want to shake his hand. It wasn't like that," Rice said. "What would it look like right before the snap of the ball and we're shaking hands?"
The thought didn't bother Sanders.
"I try to shake all my opponents' hands," he said. "I wish the best of luck for the guys across from me. I want you to have a great game and I want to have a great game, so I always pretty much shake the guy's hand, or, after the first play, tell him to have a great game. I want to see everybody enjoy the game."
Sanders and Rice aren't dueling these days. Since Sanders signed a one-year deal with the 49ers this season, they're on the same team.
They are two of the main reasons the 49ers are 18-point favorites to win their fifth Super Bowl title today against the San Diego Chargers at Joe Robbie Stadium.
Rice is Steve Young's favorite target, and Sanders has "taken a good secondary and made it what other people call the best secondary," said 49ers free safety Merton Hanks.
The two men clearly respect each other's talents. Rice even gave up $170,000 in bonus money to help the 49ers squeeze Sanders' $1.134 million salary under the cap.
The last time they played against each other, in December 1993, Sanders had two interceptions and Rice caught six passes for 105 yards.
The 49ers took a 24-7 lead before the Falcons rallied to win, 27-24.
Call it a draw. Neither man would declare victory.
"I think Deion won most of those battles," Rice said. "The last time we played, he had two or three interceptions. It left a bad taste in my mouth."
Said Sanders: "Jerry's a great player. He had a hundred-and-some yards, a great game. This is not about me and Jerry. I think we're playing the Chargers, aren't we?"
The Chargers are the opponents, but these two men are really playing against the standards they have set.
"What links these two guys is their drive to be the best," Hanks said. "That's what stands out more so than anything else."
That's about the only thing that links them. It's hard to imagine two more different individuals.
"Jerry is a tightly wound, focused individual," 49ers defensive back Toi Cook said. "Deion's a little bit more loose. The end results are the same."
Said 49ers defensive lineman Charles Mann: "Deion's not the kind of person you see on camera on the football field. Rice is basically what you see on the football field. Sanders is 'Prime Time' when he's on the field. Off the field, he's Deion."
Sanders acknowledges that he set out to cultivate his "Prime Time" image with the dancing, the jewelry and the showboating on the field.
"I manipulated the press," Sanders said. "I created something larger than a football player."
Said Cook: "Deion has a star mentality. He recognizes the power of the media and the power of marketing. I think that's brilliant."
Sanders was successful in turning himself into a celebrity, but he may have overdone it a bit.
"Being a blue-collar throwback, I hated the guy before he got here," said first-year 49ers linebacker Gary Plummer. "But I told him one day my 8-year-old was a huge Deion Sanders fan. The next day in my locker, I found a Deion Sanders baseball glove. Never in a million years did I think I would say this, but Deion Sanders has become my friend."
Most of the 49ers say Sanders is a hard-working, dedicated player when the camera's not on him.
He seems to have gotten all the personal glory he needs.
"I don't care about awards personally," said Sanders, who today will become the only man to play in a World Series and a Super Bowl. "I think about team-wide goals now. That's why I came here."
On his image, he said: "When I'm between the white lines, I may come off cocky, I may come off arrogant. Between the white lines, I'm convinced that I'm a bad boy. You can take me any way you want. Outside the white lines, I like to have a good time and have fun. I don't do anything mean to people."
Living up to the image has become a burden.
"I'm 27 years old and I feel like I'm at least 34," he said. "Maybe because the two sports are really tearing my body down."
Sanders is quiet off the field. He doesn't even drink and was upset when fans in San Diego threw alcohol on him this season.
"I try to be nice to fans," Sanders said. "I try to have a good time. It frustrated me not so much because they threw things on me. I don't care about that. But alcohol, that's one thing I truly don't believe in, and to have that smell on me ticked me off."
Of course, this is the same Sanders who once doused broadcaster Tim McCarver with Gatorade in the Atlanta Braves' locker room, so it's tough to figure out who Sanders really is.
Rice also is a person of many dimensions who seems uncomfortable in the spotlight.
"He's more of a loner," 49ers cornerback Eric Davis said.
Yet Rice seems to want more attention.
His declaration that he might retire after the Super Bowl was widely seen as an attempt to get into the spotlight.
He was named the MVP after Super Bowl XXIII, in which he caught 11 passes for a Super Bowl-record 215 yards and one touchdown. That game, after the 1988 season, was the last time the Super Bowl was played in Miami. The 49ers beat the Cincinnati Bengals, 20-16.
Despite gaining the MVP honor, Rice said in a TV interview a few days afterward that he was being overlooked. Bill Walsh had retired, Joe Montana was Montana (he got the Disney commercial) and John Taylor caught the winning touchdown pass. Rice even suggested racism might be the problem.
"Right now," Rice said in the interview, "you read the newspapers and there's nothing about Jerry Rice being the MVP. If it was Joe Montana or Dwight Clark, it would be headlines all over. I'm not the type that wants all the recognition, but I felt like I deserved to get some of it.
"I would say it's the media's fault because they're not getting my name out there. I'm not saying it's racism or nothing like that. I'm really just speaking from the heart."
Rice has since mellowed on the subject. "It was about respect," he said. "That was the MVP, but it was like Bill Walsh retiring, with Joe Montana. . . . I didn't get the recognition of being the MVP."
He doesn't worry about it now, or at least says he doesn't.
"There's only so much you can control," Rice said. "With me, what I try to do is go out and play hard and let everything else take care of itself."
Rice, though, unlike Sanders, doesn't understand how members of the media work.
For example, a CNN reporter who had never met Rice, Vince Cellini, came up to him last week and wanted to do a camera skit.
The idea, as Cellini explains it, was to pretend he didn't recognize Rice and then ask him a question about Deion Sanders.
OK, the idea was silly, but this was TV. And CNN means nationwide coverage. It's the kind of thing Sanders thrives on.
Rice wouldn't do it, and he blew up at the reporter, then stormed away, before coming back and shouting: "I can't believe how stupid you are to ask me such a question!"
The whole incident was much ado about nothing, but it illustrated the difference between Rice and Sanders. Rice is too serious to play to the cameras the way Sanders does.
"Rice is a technician, a true professional," said Mann, a former Washington Redskin. "He reminds me a lot of Art Monk. He's very businesslike."
Another difference is that Rice is likely to spend his entire career with San Francisco.
He says he'll play again next season "if the fire is still inside of me."
Sanders, meanwhile, is likely to move on. He'll return to baseball if the strike ends and will become a part-time football player. Assuming he gets his Super Bowl ring, he has made it clear he won't take less money to stay with the 49ers the way he did this season.
That could mean Sanders and Rice will be dueling each other again.
Since the 49ers' first-string offense and defense practice mostly against the second-stringers, they rarely face each other in practice except in one-on-one drills.
"When they do match up, everybody pays special attention to it," said 49ers offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan.
Shanahan said both Rice and Sanders win their share, then ducked the question of whether Rice is a better receiver than Sanders is a cornerback.
The answer is easy, though. This is one area where Sanders can't touch Rice. Nobody suggests Sanders is the best cornerback ever. Rice is often called the best receiver ever, although he says he has no intention of calling himself the best.
But it's not hard to find people who will do it.
Shanahan, who declined to compare Rice and Sanders, later said: "Jerry Rice is the best football player who ever lived."
Football player or receiver?
Shanahan answered: "Football player."