By Dr. Z
SI.com
Posted: Monday July 30, 2007 5:47PM; Updated: Tuesday July 31, 2007 12:39AM
Bill Walsh shares a laugh with Joe Montana in the closing moments of a playoff victory in 1989.
Best of all I remember the dinners with Bill Walsh, usually the night before a game. No, we wouldn't discuss the team the 49ers would play the next day. Game strategy? Absolutely not. Check that. Once before a Redskins game he casually said, "Watch the tight end tomorrow." I watched him. He caught his usual two or three passes. Maybe he meant the 'Skins' tight end.
I don't kid myself that I occupied a special place in coach Walsh's life. It was just that he liked to get away from the grind late in the week, swap generalities with someone who had, basically, the same frame of reference. I'm sure those occasions meant very little to the coach, but they formed an indelible part of my memory. Best of all were Walsh's general observations about the game itself, the philosophy of it.
"You know how I'll know I'm getting old?" he once said. "I won't be wearing a head set on the sideline. Watch the coaches on the sideline. If I see one who's not wearing a head set, I know he's not in the game."
He was 52 at the time, but he had seen what the aging process had done to coaches.
"At 60 you begin to slow, physically, especially in the Midwest, where there's a tough climate," he said. "It's not so bad out here on the West Coast. The key to professional growth is natural inquisitiveness. When you lose that, you're not going to grow at all.
"The energy is the critical area. This job or any other can become a bore if it's the same basic life routine. First you get rather bored with practice, with the film breakdowns, everything but the game itself. Before long you're not a detail man; you're just waiting for the game. And some of them are not even game coaches."
Nobody could put an idea or a concept in a capsule the way Walsh could. Once I asked him why he'd never hired an offensive coordinator.
"That's step four," he said. "Step five is out the door."
Once at a press conference, they were needling him because he never considered putting his quarterback in a shotgun formation. He held up his hand. "We're considering it," he said. "The way we'll handle it is to just put 'gun' after everything we call."
Walsh as the receivers coach for the Bengals in 1975.
He was not above pointing out to you when you appeared ridiculous. Once in his office we were having a pretty intense talk about the upcoming draft. I found that we were agreeing on a lot of things, especially the heart and desire players, the overachievers. Finally I got so carried away with my own astuteness that, in a burst of lunatic egotism, I asked him if I could ever, possibly, land a job on someone's personnel staff.
He frowned. How to break it gently to this idiot?
"The problem would be," he said slowly, "that you would fill a roster with players who'd look good chasing guys over the goal line."
But when you admitted to absolute, absent-minded helplessness, he could tune in. I told him that with the advance of age, I found the need to carry around a pocket-sized notebook and constantly record, "Things to remember," when I could remember where I put the notebook, that is.
"How about this one?" he said. "I've been out in a parking lot at 2 a.m. looking for a rental car, with absolutely no memory of what it looked like or where I'd left my luggage. And how's this? I stop at a coffee shop an hour before I have to be at a banquet. I tell myself, 'Now don't lock the keys in the car,' and as I'm saying it, I'm doing it. Slam! I have to call the police, call the banquet ... 'Sorry, but I'm going to be late.'"
"Tell him about the plays on my back," said his wife, Geri.
"I'll be out with her, and I'll be talking to someone about some pass play, and I'll have my arm around her back," he said, "you know, an affectionate gesture, but I'll be going like this with my fingers." He punched out a pass pattern.
"What will Geri do?" I asked him.
"She'll say, 'Did it work?'"
I never could figure out whether or not he liked the Genius tag people put on him. I know that when they started mislabeling Sid Gillman's West Coast offense a Walsh creation, he called me, quite upset. "My offense is the Cincinnati Offense," he said. "I wouldn't even mind if they called it the Walsh Offense. But the West Coast offense is that Sid Gillman, Don Coryell, Ernie Zampese thing. Why do they keep making that mistake?"
That was in the early days of the West Coast. As it gained in popularity, Walsh's complaints lessened noticeably. But to constantly being called the Genius, often with a sneer? I wondered how he really felt about that.
"Genius ... wouldn't you say that's term usually associated with some figment of crackpot?" he said.
But how many real football geniuses have there been? If you'd been around Marv Levy's 1962 University of California staff when Walsh was a 30-year-old defensive assistant, you'd have seen a mentality so high-powered, filled with ideas that poured out so fast that he could barely get them on the blackboard in time. It was like watching simultaneous board chess matches.
"We ran our coaches' meetings in a room with three blackboards," Levy once said. "Walsh would scribble a play, but before he'd finish, his mind would shift to another one. He'd move to the second board and begin writing while he was still talking about the first one. I'd follow him around with an eraser and rub out the play because the coaches were getting confused."
When Walsh's name first came up at the Hall of Fame selection meeting, he swept through in almost record time. The one phrase that stayed with me, a criterion I was once taught to serve as a guideline for evaluating coaches, was "How did he change the game?" With Walsh, the answer is in absolutes. He changed it in infinite ways. He changed it forever.
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