This week, as Talanoa Hufanga promised, he will go to old buddy Trent Williams and tell him he wants to start a fight.
Well, not really a promise. It was more of a joke.
Hufanga, for all his fearlessness, is a safety listed by the Broncos as 200 pounds. San Francisco tackle Williams is 6-foot-5 and 320, and has been manhandling NFL linemen since Hufanga was a boy running around his parents’ farm in Oregon.
“Probably the last person you guys want to fight,” Hufanga cracked in late July. “I’m gonna say that right now. Trent Williams is not the one.”
“Trent, if you see this,” Hufanga continued, “I’m so sorry.”
Five months into the next phase of their lives, the Broncos’ two defensive ceiling-raisers will stare directly at their past across the field this week when Denver heads to San Francisco for a Thursday joint practice and Saturday preseason game. Hufanga played four years as a one-time All-Pro for the 49ers. Linebacker Dre Greenlaw was a foundational piece of the franchise’s identity, going to two Super Bowls in his six-year career there.
Both signed with Denver in free agency — locker-mates in part emboldened by each other’s choice — to be part of another Super-Bowl-contending defense. It was a fist-pump for Sean Payton. It was a loss for Kyle Shanahan, who’d flown to Texas to try and convince Greenlaw to stay in San Francisco.
“I love seeing ’em,” 49ers head coach Shanahan told San Francisco reporters when asked about practicing against Greenlaw and Hufanga. “Don’t really like practicing or playing against guys that I really like, and have a lot of love for. But I’ll enjoy seeing ’em.”
The love is mutual. Hufanga said he was “blessed” to return to San Francisco, a long-haired safety who ingrained himself into the wider Bay Area community. The city felt like “home” to Greenlaw, his agent J.R. Carroll told The Denver Post shortly after his free-agent signing.
“The relationship that him and Coach Shanahan had was not your typical coach-player relationship,” Carroll said in March. “I think that he values Coach Shanahan’s opinion, and everything in life, and that applies to football. But I think he values Coach Shanahan’s opinion with regard to life — as much as most people regard Shanahan’s opinion with regard to football.
“It’s just really hard to break away from that.”
The linebacker’s return to the Bay, though, is slightly more complicated than Hufanga’s. The 49ers tried to bring Greenlaw back, yes. But the organization had “financial issues,” as Carroll put it in March.
And Greenlaw said himself last week that he signed with Denver because he felt truly wanted.
“When he was with the 49ers, I mean, he was all the way in,” former high school coach Darryl Paton said this spring. “And if they had come forward with a good offer, he would’ve probably taken it. Because he’s not one … to break that trust, or jump off the bandwagon.”
The bandwagon has now headed west to Denver, though. Greenlaw will be part of a new linebacker duo for the first time in his pro career. Fred Warner, his All-Pro running mate in San Francisco, didn’t want to see him go. They had “this connection,” Warner effused in March.
In late July, Greenlaw said he saw shades of Warner’s leadership in new ILB partner Alex Singleton.
“Just having somebody like that, I just knew that — somebody that’s going to go out there and that’s gon’ battle, that’s gon’ fight, that’s gon’ give it all they got every play,” Greenlaw said. “And I saw that in Alex, like I see it myself. So I was like, ‘Man, this is gon’ be a great little duo.’”
Greenlaw is a question mark to play Thursday and Saturday after a quad flare-up last week. He put on pads but did not participate in team work Tuesday. Payton, though, has made clear he’ll play his starters in the preseason if healthy, and Hufanga is likely to take the field.
Regardless, it’ll be an emotional return for both.
“I had a lot of great moments, a lot of moments of injuries,” Hufanga reflected on the Bay earlier in camp. “But for me, it was a special place in my heart.”
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