Tom Holmoe twice moved to the Bay Area on missions to win football games, and he won four Super Bowls.
Now he’s heading back home to invite people to turn to Jesus Christ as a mission president for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Holmoe and his wife, Lori, were announced Friday as leaders of the California Oakland/San Francisco Mission.
“He’s my only hope,” Holmoe said. “None of life’s joys and thrills and dreams are possible without his grace and merits.”
Holmoe won three Super Bowls as a defensive back for the San Francisco 49ers and a fourth as a 49er coach. He also coached at Stanford and Cal. He recently retired at 65 after 20 years as BYU’s athletic director.
The Bay Area played a major role in his own conversion. He was baptized a Latter-day Saint in 1988 while playing for the 49ers.
Another Northern California product, football champion and Latter-day Saint convert, Roseville’s Robbie Bosco, has been called to serve as president of the church’s Ohio Columbus Mission.
The church announced new leaders for 188 missions. The callings begin July 1.
As a convert, Holmoe did not serve a mission as a young man, though his two sons and a daughter did. During their missions, he and Lori determined they would serve a couple’s mission when he retired.
He could have continued in sports. His very close friend, Kyle Whittingham, who is 66, just signed a five-year deal to be Michigan’s coach. But Holmoe said he was ready to serve differently.
“To be a missionary and serve with missionaries every day and share the message that you can come unto Christ is what I want to do,” he said.
Holmoe will lead 170 to 190 missionaries who are mostly between the ages of 18 and 21. While that’s far smaller than the 600 young people in the BYU athletic department, he said he’s been told he can’t go into it thinking he can lead a mission the same way.
“The people I’ve talked to say you just have to trust in the Lord,” he said. “You have to have the Spirit every day and all day long.”
Holmoe has known about the calling for a while. He said it has already changed the way he studies the Bible and Book of Mormon.
“The scriptures are already different,” he told the Deseret News. “Now I’m reading them in terms of being a missionary rather than as an athlete or a coach or an AD. They’re alive in a different way.”
It won’t be the first time Holmoe has done missionary work or been in the mission home the church maintains across the street from its Oakland California Temple.
The mission president in the mid-1990s regularly hosted missionary events at the home that he dubbed “Steve Young and friends.”
Young, a Latter-day Saint and College and Pro Football Hall of Famer, was the headliner.
Holmoe was one of the friends along with whatever other Latter-day Saints were playing in the area at the time, like College Football Hall of Famer Ty Detmer, BYU Hall of Famer Bart Oates and Jeff Kent, who will be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame this summer.
Holmoe spoke with Young about his calling Thursday night.
Holmoe said he has loved the Bay Area and its diversity since he grew up in Los Angeles and made regular trips north to see uncles and cousins who were 49ers fans.
“When the 49ers drafted me, they went wild,” Holmoe said.
BYU was an unlikely destination for Holmoe, a high school quarterback with eyes for UCLA, where his older brother had played. But after he broke his hand his senior year, BYU coach LaVell Edwards and assistants Fred Whittingham and Dick Felt continue to recruit him while other offers evaporated.
He chose BYU for the same reasons his coaches shared with potential recruits while he was athletic director — strong academics, good teams and fewer distractions.
Holmoe converted to defensive back and became a star, intercepting 13 passes, including seven in one season.
At BYU, Holmoe attended a Lutheran church all four years but met and fell in love with his wife, Lori, a Latter-day Saint.
Then he began a pattern — BYU to the Bay Area — that he will now repeat a third time.
He played safety on Super Bowl championship teams in 1984, 1988 and 1989 while living in Foster City, California.
The Foster City Ward will be in his mission boundaries. It’s where his family attended Latter-day Saint worship services before he joined the church and after, and where he raised his children for much of their lives.
He returned to BYU when he retired from the NFL to launch a coaching career that quickly landed him at Stanford. Then he rejoined the 49ers, who won the Super Bowl after the 1994 season with him coaching the defensive backs, including Deion Sanders.
During that time, the 49ers were loaded with Latter-day Saints. A local bishop gave permission for Holmoe, Young, Oates, Jamal Willis and Tim Hanshaw to hold their sacrament services at the team hotel on Saturday nights before their Sunday games.
“That was a very amazing moment to gather as Latter-day Saints the day before a game and partake of the sacrament,” he said.
They took turns each week saying prayers, administering the sacrament and giving the devotional thought, Holmoe said.
The Holmoes remained in Foster City while he spent four years as Cal’s head coach before he moved back to Provo to join BYU’s athletic department.
Now it’s back to the city by the Bay once more.
“I know my Savior loves me,” Holmoe said.
It’s a truth he’s felt since he was a little boy scared of the dark in a neighborhood with a lot of burglaries.
“I prayed every night I’d be OK and survive,” he said. “I’d pray till I fell asleep. I’d wake up and thank God I was alive.”
At BYU, he learned the Latter-day Saint doctrine that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost love him.
“He gave his life for my individual sins,” Holmoe said. “I look back now and see that was the same love I felt when I was a little boy.”