The Score Takes Care of Itself (37 page)

He was surprised, but delighted, when over five hundred thousand people lined Market Street in downtown San Francisco to wildly cheer their newly beloved 49ers. Nevertheless, he could never fully comprehend what all the excitement was about.
His
excitement was drawn from a completely different source than the average fan’s.

However, after the rallying point of that first San Francisco 49er Super Bowl victory, my father realized what a dramatic role the team had played in bringing the city back together as one following the public trauma of the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the Jonestown massacre a few years earlier. The “Niners” had become the common ground for the entire city of San Francisco and much of the Bay Area—a wildly diverse group of people. Dad took immense pride in this.

In a sense, Bill Walsh introduced twenty-first-century playmaking and management in the NFL two decades before the new century arrived—starting in 1979 when he was appointed president, general manager, and head coach of a lowly franchise in San Francisco, a distant outpost in the eyes of many throughout the league.

While most observers focus on his “genius” when it came to figuring out how a football team gains ground and scores touchdowns, few understand the complex psychological make-up of this remarkable man, whose need to prove himself, while almost self-destructive, was the fuel in the engine that helped catapult him to the top.

I’ve come to understand that, in some ways, my father’s life was almost Shakespearean, because what got him to the top professionally was his downfall personally; in spite of his incomparable achievements, he had trouble ever feeling fulfilled on a continuing basis. While he learned from each loss and every win, my dad increasingly took something away from a defeat that he couldn’t shake. Driven by a desire to gain the stamp of approval from his peers (but not necessarily the public), he was consumed by work and winning, increasingly haunted by losing. When you achieve what he achieved, the inability or unwillingness to grant yourself happiness and satisfaction is perhaps tragic.

By the sixth and seventh year of his decade as head coach with the 49ers, he was showing the price being paid emotionally. After a home game I would sometimes stop by and join him for a Jacuzzi in the backyard of his house on Valparaiso Street in Menlo Park, California. Although by then he had won Super Bowl XVI and was on his way to more championships, his mind-set was not what you’d expect.

Late at night, we would sit there in that hot tub, father and son. If the 49ers had won their game that afternoon at Candlestick Park, he would have a sort of blank look on his face; if they had lost the game that afternoon, he’d have the same blank look. I kidded him about it once. He said ruefully, “This is what happens to a man, Craig.” He wasn’t talking about fatigue from that day’s work. I felt bad for him.

It happened in part because one manifestation of his creative abilities—the West Coast Offense (a name he didn’t like)—was such a paradigm shift that most of the NFL elite, including other head coaches, were reluctant to acknowledge him as a true equal or admit that his system was a dramatic improvement, a giant step into the future. “Backyard football” Dallas rival and head coach Tom Landry called Dad’s radical but successful offense. Others were similarly dismissive and sometimes explained a loss to the 49ers with some version of the following: “We just had a bad day. We were off our game.” Rarely did they like to mention that the cause of their “bad day” was the great football team they had faced across the line of scrimmage. In fact, as the 49ers gained dominance in the NFL, he would sometimes motivate his players when, for example, Dallas was next on the schedule by telling them, “According to Landry, we’ve never beaten the ‘real’ Dallas Cowboys. They’ve always got some goddamn excuse: ‘We had an off day, somebody was injured, the sun was shining.’ Always some excuse for us beating the hell out of them.” His speech was meant to motivate but was based on his own perception of being discounted.

For some, perhaps, dismissive comments and excuses for losing to their team would mean nothing. It was different for my father; it was personal.

As a young athlete, my father moved around a lot. Going to three different high schools, he never felt as if he fit in with the teams he played on; his friends were always changing. With average grades, he fell to the wayside. He grew up tough and had a left hook to prove it. Dad was an outsider; he wanted to be an insider.

What he found along the way professionally, starting in his days as an assistant coach, was an unwillingness by others to “let him in.” He didn’t have the pedigree—the athletic résumé from a big-name school or assistant coaching credentials from a big college program.

He told me this story about a dinner he attended with my mother while he was a quarterbacks coach for the Cincinnati Bengals way back when. Some of the other assistant coaches talked about where they had played football—Duke, Ohio State, Alabama, and other big-name schools were mentioned, as he recalled it. When it came his turn, he said, “I played at San Jose State.” A woman at the table asked, “Is that in Mexico?”

Most of the head coaches at the major colleges and all but a very few NFL coaches had had stellar playing careers; many were already household names. In their eyes, he felt, Bill Walsh was the runt of the litter.

This is the reason that he hid from view—never included on his professional résumé—a brief but successful tenure as head coach of the San Jose Apaches, a semipro football team that he coached very early in his career. Dad feared that others would view it as a step down, “slumming” as a coach, furthering the image that he was not big-league material.

He gradually recognized that the old boys’ network that defined the NFL management and ownership in those days considered him junior grade, not up to head coach potential, in part because of his lack of a pedigree, but also because his style was not traditional, not heavy-handed. It was more professorial or corporate in style than the shouting and screaming, intimidation and punishment that were the usual tools of old-school head coaches in the league.

Here’s a very small example: In those days, one method of “toughening up” players was to prohibit them from drinking any water while they were on the field during practice. Bill Walsh allowed it, because he saw no gain in the policy. In fact, he felt depriving players of water during practice was counterproductive; it lowered performance. The “toughening up” approach, however, was the one owners felt comfortable with because it had been around since the start. In this and many other ways big and small, nobody had ever done it like Bill Walsh did it. His unorthodoxy put off owners who subsequently held him at arm’s length.

My father found evidence of their bias at Cincinnati, where he consistently worked wonders with the Bengals’ offense but didn’t receive a single inquiry from any NFL owner in those many years about becoming a head coach. Even the Bengals’ Paul Brown, the man for whom he was working the wonders, didn’t hire him as his replacement when he retired. Brown chose another assistant, Bill “Tiger” Johnson, who fit the conventional mold of what a head coach should do.

Dad felt snubbed by the NFL, and his feelings didn’t change much as he emerged as one of football’s greatest coaches.

As San Francisco became the dominant team in the NFL, he recognized another kind of prejudice on the part of critics elsewhere—not just against San Francisco but against other teams from “way out west.” The media, especially in the eastern media capitals, were loath to admit that the center of gravity for professional football had moved to the other coast; that “backyard football” had replaced brute force coupled with the occasional long bomb pass; that a guy who looked like he belonged in a board-room or lecture hall was the top dog in coaching.

The other West Coast team that won Super Bowl championships during this era, Al Davis’s Raiders, was given short shrift because Al was viewed by the league as a troublemaker, a renegade. Even though the Raiders had a more traditionally NFL style of football, they, too, were considered interlopers because they were on the “wrong” coast.

My father’s irritation continued when the radical offense he created was dubbed the “West Coast Offense” by the media. The slight may have been unintentional, but perhaps not.
He
had been the sole creator of the brand-new offense that turned football on its head, and he hadn’t created it on the West Coast but in Ohio with the Bengals. No writer, not one, felt it appropriate to call it the Bill Walsh Offense. Even now, after all these years, that seems either intentional or uninformed.

All of this bothered my father a great deal. Regardless of what he did, it seemed the powers that be would not accord him equal status, would not recognize the legitimacy of his approach and his leadership skills. Thus, he increasingly became driven by a simple but almost obsessive goal: to prove them all wrong. And he did.

This feeling of being discriminated against was part of the reason he created the Minority Coaches Fellowship Program while he was at San Francisco. He knew that smart, skilled black college coaches were not even being considered for head coaching jobs in the NFL because of race. He understood their plight because of his own experience of being kept at arm’s length when it came to a head coaching position. He hated it and was the first head coach in the NFL to establish a formal program to address the problem by inviting talented minority coaches to observe how he did things at San Francisco. He showed them what they needed to know to operate successfully at the top level. Later, the league followed his lead with a fellowship program that expanded on what he had done.

In Super Bowl XLI, the Chicago Bears faced the Indianapolis Colts. Lovie Smith was head coach of the Bears; Tony Dungy was head coach of the Colts. Both are black. Dad enjoyed seeing those two great coaches running the show. (In fact, Tony had played briefly for Dad as a 49er.) In 2009, two years later, the Pittsburgh Steelers won Super Bowl XLIII. Their young coach was Mike Tomlin. By now, the fact that a black head coach was in the Super Bowl wasn’t even a big deal. Times had changed so much. My father didn’t live long enough to see that game, but somewhere, he had to be smiling.

You might think all assistant coaches in the NFL have the same level of desire to become a head coach that Bill Walsh had, but the magnitude of his aspiration is impossible to overstate. He was a perfectionist, and he saw perfection as being most likely achieved
only
if his ideas and decisions weren’t filtered through and inevitably—in his opinion—misconstrued and misapplied by others. He had to be the one in charge.

Oddly enough, he came to this conclusion as head coach at a little high school near San Francisco in Fremont, California, during his first two years of coaching—the Washington High Huskies. In short order, he turned a perpetual loser into a big winner. My father saw what happened when he did everything himself (including driving the team bus to away games). As you’ve read in his own words, this desire to “do it all myself ” eventually became an Achilles’ heel for him.

From high school coaching he moved up by moving down: “up” to the college and NFL level, “down” as an assistant coach (i.e., secondary) position.

Subsequently, he often saw his well-thought-out and often unconventional ideas ignored, modified, or, on occasion, screwed up by others above him. This drove him to distraction and created a smoldering desire to be in charge of everything once again—just as he was at Washington High School. Now, however, he wanted to do it at the highest level of football, where the quality of talent offered him the possibility of achieving perfection: the NFL.

There were lots of guys in the motor pool of assistant coaches around the league, but not many developed Dad’s all-consuming passion to run the show. It finally paid off when, after many years of working for and learning from Paul Brown at Cincinnati, one of the NFL’s acknowledged great minds, Dad was put in charge of virtually everything by Eddie DeBartolo, San Francisco’s young owner, the man who must be given all the credit for seeing something special in Bill Walsh.

Eddie was too young—thirty years old—to be part of the NFL’s good-old-boy network (the DeBartolo family had only recently purchased the San Francisco 49ers) and thus wasn’t concerned about Dad’s lack of “pedigree” or put off by the intellectual disposition of his new head coach—he liked it, in fact. Eddie was rewarded for both his perspective and his perceptive choice: Three years later, his team achieved one of the greatest turnarounds in sports history when San Francisco went from worst to best and won a Super Bowl.

Bill Walsh loved military history, including the Civil War. He had read all of the books he could find about it, and when Dad took the family to Gettysburg one year, he conducted a tour of the battlefield for us that was detailed to such a degree a paid tour guide could have learned something. He used his knowledge of military history to motivate teams and often invoked battles when, against all odds, the troops—i.e., his team—had overcome the enemy.

He was a PhD-level motivator with a powerful ability to get people’s attention and point them in the right direction. Military analogies were useful occasionally, but he had a full bag of other options. Some are amusing. As head coach of the San Jose Apaches, a group of cast-offs and wan nabes who all felt they deserved to be playing at a higher level (specifically, the NFL), Dad made the following statement in his first meeting with the team: “Fellas, I want you to think about something: There’s a reason you’re all in this room today.” He paused as his implied message—“Nobody out there thinks you’re any good”—sank in. Then he continued with a solemn warning: “This is your last chance to prove you don’t belong here.”

And regardless of the approach he used, Bill Walsh would not degrade individuals. While he was very careful in handing out compliments (that is, he was a master of withholding praise), he constantly focused attention on the next level of commitment and sacrifice and performance. One of his tactics occurred during the team meeting the night before a game. He didn’t give a big rah-rah speech but incited players with his own method: One by one, selectively, he called players out for commitment: “Keith Fahnhorst, if I call 90-O tomorrow, can we count on you to hold your block?” Fahnhorst was a tackle; 90-O was a play that needed him to block. “Can you promise you’ll knock somebody on his ass if I call 90-O, Keith?”