Walsh's Vision Led To NFL We Now See

It was the first game of the 1989 season, if my memory is any good. Bill Walsh, newly retired as coach of the San Francisco 49ers, was making his debut in the broadcast booth, calling the season opener for NBC on a Sunday afternoon in Chicago. The game was Bears vs. Bengals with the Bears driving, at or about the 20-yard-line.Whatever the Bengals were doing defensively, Walsh spotted something he didn't like. He told the viewers that if Chicago was smart enough to call a draw play, Neal Anderson could run up the middle untouched for a touchdown.

The Bears called a draw play and handed off to Anderson, who went right up the middle untouched for a touchdown. The Bears coach who called the play couldn't have known it would work as well as Walsh knew it would work.

Of course, Walsh could see the play work, see Anderson go up the middle untouched. Walsh could see everything, and usually envisioned the action and the result before anybody else. He could see short, precise passes replacing the old-fashioned running game. He could see the horizontal passing game being even more effective than the vertical passing game. He could see the value of scripted plays to begin the ballgame.

Walsh could see past the limited arm strength of a third-round draft pick named Joe Montana. He could see what the Tampa Bay Buccaneers couldn't see in Steve Young. Walsh could see that Jerry Rice, a kid who played his college ball at Mississippi Valley State, had the goods to become the greatest wide receiver ever.

He could see, while other NFL coaches and executives couldn't, that black assistants in off-road places had the, uh, necessities to cut it in the NFL.

To quote the aforementioned Young, Walsh could "see potential. . . . He could see what somebody could be even if the player himself couldn't see it. He could see it in fluid motion and see it tactically. He saw something in me I don't think I knew was there."

Walsh invented the game we see today, even the defense, because today's defenses are created specifically and necessarily to stop, by whatever name, some permutation of the West Coast offense that is Walsh's baby, pro football's Mona Lisa. Lombardi, Shula, Landry and Gibbs were innovators. Bill Walsh was a visionary, even a genius in the context of sport. Walsh saw the field the way Magic saw the court, the way Gretzky saw the ice.

And what makes Walsh perhaps more important than either of them is that Walsh could choreograph the action without playing; he could teach his players to carry out all he envisioned.

I loved watching Walsh work because he wasn't a stereotypical football coach. He was literate and stylish, looking as if he could have coached while smoking a pipe. I loved listening to Walsh because he didn't compare football to war. His practices weren't violent and he didn't believe in wasting much time on tackling, yet the 49ers often were great on defense and his were some of the toughest players to ever play the game, most notably Ronnie Lott. I loved Walsh's perspective and restraint because he didn't invoke religion. I never could imagine him dropping to his knees in prayer as Joe Gibbs once did at the end of a playoff game. Walsh pray? On Sundays between Labor Day and the end of January, Walsh was God.

He earned every word of praise sycophants like me are blathering in the wake of his death Monday after a long bout with leukemia. Everybody who played for Walsh or against Walsh or covered pro football in the 1980s has a story. My friend Mark Purdy, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote about Walsh quitting his assistant gig with the Oakland Raiders in 1967 to become general manager of a semipro outfit called the San Jose Apaches, a team playing with hand-me-down uniforms. Walsh didn't much like the personnel he saw during training camp, so he cut 25 of his 35 players, fashioned a team on the fly out of guys who had been cut from NFL camps and went 8-4.

Seahawks Coach Mike Holmgren, one of Walsh's most prominent disciples, told the NFL Network, "I always said that he was an artist and all the rest of us were blacksmiths, pounding the anvil while he was painting the picture."

I was fortunate enough to have the NFL beat for this newspaper from 1986 to 1990, which included the final third of Walsh's incomparable run as coach in San Francisco and which meant I made, oh, a couple dozen trips to Northern California to cover the Niners. Lots of locker rooms had smart players, notably the championship Washington Redskins teams of that same decade.

But Walsh's teams were disarmingly intelligent and curious, from Hall of Famers such as Young and Lott to lesser-knowns such as guard Guy McIntyre and tight end Jamie Williams. The Niners surely had a dope here and knucklehead there, but they were obscured by the scores of players who reflected their coach's intellect and reason. Intelligence characterized every single thing the 49ers did, especially on offense, to the point that it was intimidating.

I don't remember asking Walsh a ton of questions during the times I was around the team. Listening was too fascinating. The best sessions were when he'd sit with a couple of reporters discussing how and why he developed certain philosophies. He talked of how the West Coast offense sprouted from the desperation of playing superior teams when he was an assistant in San Diego. In his book "Building a Champion," Walsh wrote: "It was born of an expansion franchise that just didn't have the talent to compete. The best possible way to compete would be to make as many first downs as possible in a contest and control the football. We couldn't control the football with the run; teams were just too strong. So it had to be with the forward pass, and obviously it had to be a high-percentage, short, controlled passing game. So, through a series of formation-changing and timed passes -- using all eligible receivers, especially the fullback -- we were able to put together an offense and develop it over a period of time."

Steve Young told ESPN on Monday night that the other teams in the NFL didn't begin to say, "Okay, I can see that," until the mid-1990s.

As a result of winning three Super Bowl championships as a coach, of setting up the two championships won by his former lieutenant George Seifert and of authoring modern offensive football, Walsh sits in a class of coaches for which it doesn't take long to call roll, alongside Auerbach and Wooden, perhaps Paul Brown and Sid Gillman. The NFL, without Walsh having passed its way, surely wouldn't be as popular, as artistic or as compelling.