LINCOLN — The man who made the most famous tackle in 49ers history still takes pride in his work. So when Liz Bunz questioned her husband’s sewing skills, the linebacker did the same thing he once did to a Cincinnati Bengals drive in Super Bowl XVI.

He put a stop to it.

“You did not teach me how to sew!” Dan Bunz growled, playfully. “I took home economics in high school! I had some experience.”

The debate takes place here in the frilly headquarters of the Bywater Hollow Lavender Farm, where the shelves are lined with flowers and sachets and body lotion and lip balm and goat’s milk soap. It smells like heaven and not one bit like the old locker room at Candlestick Park.

Bunz, 60, can indeed sew the daylights out of lavender-scented eye pillows — Liz says they can’t keep them in stock — but he remains better known for his previous employment history. Back in the early 1980s, Bunz put his muscled stamp on an NFL dynasty.

His open-field tackle of Cincinnati running back Charles Alexander highlighted the goal-line stand in a 26-21 victory on Jan. 24, 1982. Bunz had a role in all four tackles, but his third-down stonewalling of Alexander remains one of the most enduring images of San Francisco’s first championship.

“Danny made one hell of a play,” said Ray Wersching, the former 49ers kicker who made four field goals that day. “If Alexander had gotten any momentum at all going up the field, he would have scored. But the way Danny hit him made for one of the great plays in Super Bowl history.”

The triumph at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, marked the first worldwide showcase for Bill Walsh, Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott and the other names that continue to echo as Super Bowl 50 arrives at Levi’s Stadium next month.

It also gave a future lavender farmer his day in the sun, even if it took decades before Bunz could stop and smell the flowers. He retired prematurely at age 30, over a contract dispute, and returned home to find himself in financial straits due to a bad business partnership.

As he rebuilt his life, the Super Bowl hero wound up living with his family in a trailer in Placer County, where on the worst winter nights it got so cold that Dan, his wife, Elizabeth, and young daughters, Ashley and Courtney, would huddle in one bed for warmth.

“We were like the ‘Beverly Hillbillies,’ starting from scratch,” Bunz says now. “And I felt like the worst dad in the world.”

But their journey led to this: a 13.5-acre slice of purple heaven where tourists visit the grounds during bloom season (May through June), pick fresh lavender and enjoy an afternoon tea.

Bunz’s old football friends can hardly believe his new life. Keena Turner, a fellow linebacker on that ’81 team, said he used to envision the no-nonsense Bunz as a fiery coach. “But lavender? That’s a long way from where I saw him,” Turner said with a laugh. “But there is this softer version inside of all of us. I think that’s what we’re seeing with Bunz.”

Bunz finds it as amusing anyone.

“Hey, I have two daughters and a wife,” he said. “I’ve been marinating in estrogen for 30 years.”

***

Dan Bunz used to fight. He used to fight a lot.

Bunz did not always pick his sparring partners wisely. On the set of “North Dallas Forty,” the 1979 football movie starring Nick Nolte, a few real-life football players were given roles to give the movie some NFL authenticity.

One of them was John Matuszak, a fearsome Raiders defensive end who stood 6-foot-8 and weighed about 300 pounds.

Matuszak suggested to Bunz that the 49ers were a poor football squad. Bunz told Matuszak to kindly hush up. The actual phrasing was less delicate, and the beer-fueled exchange set off a tense confrontation.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. I just made a giant mad!’ ” recalled Bunz, a chiseled 6-4, 226 during his playing days. “But I can’t back down. So I figured, ‘I’ll hit him twice. If he doesn’t go down, I’m going to run for my life. Pretty soon, everybody broke it up and I’m thinking, ‘Whew!’ “

Such feistiness is why the 49ers drafted Bunz in the first place. They took the Roseville native in the first round of the 1978 draft (24th overall) and he quickly established himself as a leading tackler and vocal leader.

The middle linebacker was an unlikely tough guy. Growing up in Roseville, he was cut from his first Pop Warner team. He made it the next year only after sneaking enough weights in his pockets to reach the minimum requirement.

Even when the 49ers drafted him out of Long Beach State, he still felt like an underdog. At his first news conference, Bunz said he was going to do everything he could to make the team. “The media actually laughed at me,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Son, you’re a first-round draft pick.’ “

He arrived at the onset of the dynasty. In his second year, 1979, the 49ers hired Walsh away from Stanford and over the next few years drafted Montana and Dwight Clark to boost the offense and defensive backs Lott, Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson to strengthen the defense.

By the time they reached the Super Bowl, the Bengals barely knew what hit them.

***

The Bywater Hollow Lavender Farm, like the baseball diamond in “Field of Dreams,” began with ruining a farm.

“I want to plow your corn under,” Liz Bunz told her husband. “I want to do lavender.”

“Let’s go for it,” Dan replied.

While on vacation in France in 2011, they noticed that the lush lavender fields of Provence were thriving on land that looked a lot like home. On their own land, located along the Placer County Wine Trail about 40 miles from Sacramento, they’d tried breeding horses and raising corn over the years.

But the lavender idea quickly took root.

“It was just so beautiful (in France) that my wife was stealing buds,” Bunz recalled. “I told her, ‘We’re going to get caught by customs!’ But she already had the bug.”

They made every mistake imaginable in their rookie planting season of 2012. Wrong location on the property. Wrong drainage. Wrong irrigation. Had this been lavender training camp, they wouldn’t have survived the first round of cuts.

But they stuck with it, and their thumbs proved pretty green, after all. Bunz enjoyed the hard labor, and Liz, who had been a popular dentist in Roseville — when she was Dr. Elizabeth Roullier-Bunz, DDS — wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet in the lavender fields. Dan once bought her an electric jackhammer as a Valentine’s Day present. She loved it.

The only nagging issue these days: gophers. Not long ago, the critters destroyed 30 percent of their plants.

“I’ve turned into the reincarnation of Bill Murray,” Liz said, referring to the actor’s varmint-obsessed character in “Caddyshack.”

“I’ve got the hat and I walk around muttering to myself about gophers.”

***

There is not much 49ers memorabilia inside the Bunz home, save for the study, where photographs, lithographs and artists’ renderings document the turning point of Super Bowl XVI.

The 49ers led 20-7 late in the third quarter when the Bengals threatened to turn the game upside down. Quarterback Ken Anderson, the regular-season MVP, brought Cincinnati to a first-and-goal from the 3-yard line.

That gave the NFL’s second-ranked offense four shots from point-blank range to get back into the game.

On first down, 260-pound fullback Pete Johnson plowed ahead for 2 yards.

On second down, Johnson was stuffed for no gain.

On third down, Dan Bunz made a tackle for the ages.

Anderson flicked a short pass to Alexander, who caught the ball inside the 1-yard line. With one more half-step, he would have scored a touchdown. Heck, by simply falling forward, he would have scored a touchdown.

Instead, Bunz raced up and grabbed Alexander by the waist before the runner could square his body toward the goal line. You know those knockout hits that make you go, “Oooooh.” This wasn’t that kind of hit. This was a textbook tackling drill, with Bunz securing his leverage on the ball carrier and stopping him cold.

“History tends to put everything in its appropriate context as time passes,” said Turner, the fellow linebacker, who was also on the field at the time. “As you look back at that goal-line stand, you could break down each one of the plays, but that (third-down) play was extremely significant. Because it was in the open field. Because there was no real room for error. Because it had to be a hit that took away the momentum of the player to even to give us a chance.”

Inside his study, Bunz points to the photos that bring the play back to life. He’d been expecting Alexander to catch the pass because he spotted the running back lining up wider than usual before the snap. That was a tipoff: The 49ers had seen that play on film.

Moreover, Bunz had blown the coverage when the 49ers practiced defending that exact pass in the flat earlier in the week. He’d gone for the interception that time, but only tipped the ball and Bill Ring caught the ball on his back for a fluky touchdown.

“So I didn’t want that to happen again,” Bunz said, pointing again to the photographs. “So right here, even as I’m running, I’m thinking, ‘Should I get the ball? Nah, I’d better hit him.’ “

Bunz tackled Alexander with the picture-perfect technique that makes coaches weep.

On fourth down, the Bengals balled up their fist and swung hard with Johnson diving over the top behind Alexander’s lead block. Bunz was there to greet him, as were Lott, Hacksaw Reynolds and Archie Reese. In fact, the official stat sheet from that game credits the tackle to the “entire middle of the line.”

***

Bunz played with the 49ers through 1984, long enough to win a second ring as the starting outside linebacker for a team that beat the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX at Stanford Stadium.

He played one more NFL season, in Detroit, but walked away when the Lions offered him a one-year contract for $210,000. At the time, the going rate for a veteran linebacker was $320,000.

Even when Bunz threatened to retire, the Lions didn’t budge. So he called their bluff and headed home. He was 30.

“It was the hardest thing to do,” Bunz said. “Football gave me an education. Football gave me a job. Football gave me my identity. I loved it. There was nothing else like it.”

He owned a restaurant in Roseville, and also an indoor batting cage, but he soon came to find each was in serious difficulty. To make ends meet, Bunz worked 16-hour days busing tables and cleaning out batting cages. Sometimes, he tended bar at his restaurant, where patrons figured there was no need to tip a Super Bowl hero.

“But I’m looking over at a tip jar with five bucks in it and wondering if it would buy enough gas to get me home,” Bunz said.

He got his teaching credential and worked at Sierra College in Rocklin, Sacramento State and Hiram Johnson High before finding his niche at Sutter Middle School in Sacramento. He has been a teacher there for 20 years.

As he rebuilt his life, living conditions were sometimes a challenge. For years, the family lived in a 12-by-56-foot trailer parked on the land that is now their Bywater Hollow Lavender Farm. On the scorching hot summer days, Bunz would have to put a sprinkler on the roof to cool things down.

“It was a hillbilly mansion,” Liz said. “We added a front porch to it, and we had dogs and cats and chickens, and they all slept in a pile on the front porch. We are a very close family, which is obvious, and I think a lot of it is because of that. We grew up close — physically, we were living in a small space.”

Now, there is plenty of room for everyone. Ashley and Courtney, who have grown up and married, bought the 26 acres across the street and visit frequently. Dan and Liz live in a stately farmhouse with all the modern amenities, including a gorgeous view of the lavender field.

Their estate is so beautiful that young couples come here to take their engagement photos. Not everyone can see the beauty right way. More than one grumpy, dragged-along husband has perked up only upon learning that there is a Super Bowl hero in the house.

Bunz sometimes gets them in touch with their inner flower child. To demonstrate, he takes one of his lavender sachets and inhales deeply.

“I love the smell,” he said. “Some guys come out here and you can see that they’re a little nervous. But once they see Dan Bunz do it, it makes them feel like it’s OK.”