Coach

There's a large billboard outside Stanford Stadium that advertises the football team's 1993 season. The home-game schedule, boldly painted on a background of leaping flames under the words Hottest ticket in town, is flanked by a 20-foot-high portrait of the coach who put the heat into this program just by showing up. It's a pretty good likeness as billboard art goes: white hair over tan face, a quiet smile that puts vivid parentheses around his mouth, crow's-feet at the corners of his deep-set eyes, thought lines across his forehead.

"My God," said Bill Walsh when he saw it for the first time as he and a friend drove by this spring. "Do I really look that old? If I do, they're probably going to try to make me retire early."

Sure they will, if you can picture Stanford's athletic director, Ted Leland, gathering the football team, the student body and the alums to tell them that the man who took the San Francisco 49ers to three championships, who was acclaimed as coach of the decade for the Eighties and who was inducted this year into the Pro Football Hall of Fame is looking just a little too wizened for the head coaching job at Stanford. Never mind that his stunning decision to return to college coaching was one of the biggest sports stories of 1992, that season ticket sales, alumni gifts and media attention have risen as a result, that in his first year back he led the Cardinal to its best overall season in 20 years, a national ranking of number nine and a postseason victory over Penn State in the Blockbuster Bowl. "Never mind," Leland would have to say, "that at 62 years old he may be the most creative football technician there ever was--I'm afraid we're going to have to ask him to retire early. Or else we'll have to repaint that billboard."

Which is exactly what happened. When the story of Walsh's joking reaction got back to those in charge, a sign painter was quickly sent to do a little cosmetic touch-up around the eyes, on the forehead. You get the feeling that they would have made him look like his 1955 San Jose State yearbook photo if they thought it would extend the five-year contract he'd signed.

In a way, of course, taking the lines out of Bill Walsh's face is a little like asking him to return his Super Bowl rings: They're a part of him, and he's earned every one. Still, it's hard to blame the university officials for doing whatever they think it will take to keep Walsh happy on the campus they call the Farm. As it is, they probably don't have to worry.

"I think I can say I've never been happier," Walsh said as the team's 1993 spring practice went into its last week. There was a small rhythm break on the word think, as if you can never be entirely sure of something like happiness, as if he didn't want to jinx the luck of having come through almost three decades in professional football without having lost his love for the game.

"There were some isolated exhilarating moments (continued on page 151)Bill Walsh(continued from page 122) in the NFL," he said, comparing those years to now. "Incredible moments. It was my whole life, and the last thing I want to do is demean it. But if you take the day-to-day quality of your existence, the diversity of life on this campus, the associations you have...if you just want to coach the game of football, this is the ideal circumstance."

Ideal indeed: spring on the lush Stanford campus, with the breeze dragging the smell of eucalyptus and freshly cut grass into the warm, sunny air, with more than 80 young men in football pads shouting like Marines, doing jumping jacks, stretching. After their warm-up they will split into squads for a couple hours of drills that have been scripted to the minute by Walsh, who is casually patrolling among them in red shorts and a white polo shirt, looking, if anything, younger than the image on the repainted billboard. He is the trim, bronze epitome of California handsome and he moves with an easygoing aspect that disguises his intensity and downplays his reputation in favor of the business at hand.

"Call me Bill," he told the Stanford squad when he met them for the first time last year. "Like the Pope saying, 'Just call me John Paul,'" said Scott Ostler, a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Not a bad analogy, except that Walsh has more big rings than the Pope, a fact that was not lost on his awestruck players. They had trouble responding to Walsh's wry sense of humor when they met him.

"He was like a comedian who kept bombing," says defensive coordinator Fred vonAppen of those early team meetings. "He couldn't understand it. He'd crack a joke with his Johnny Carson--style delivery and they were afraid even to smile. He kept saying, 'I've lost my touch.'"

VonAppen, a rough-looking man who reads poetry and listens to classical music, has coached with Walsh for nine years, including six seasons and two Super Bowls with the 49ers. He has seen the coach's touch through many moods.

"He's a complex man," VonAppen says, "somewhat of an enigma. I gave up trying to understand him a long time ago. In a way he has the kind of personality that creates a love-hate relationship. He's not always the distinguished, patriarchal guy television viewers are used to seeing on the sidelines. He's a very competitive guy, and he can be scathing, especially in the heat of battle. There have been times when I would have gladly split his skull with an ax. Then again, he's the greatest."

VonAppen, like his mentor, seems pleased to be back in college football after his years in the pros. "The unique thing about the collegiate experience," he says, "is that you make more money than the people you're accountable for. I got the feeling in the pros that I was more an assignment monitor than a teacher. And you're always having to cut somebody, end their careers, send them from $700,000 a year to an entry-level job. It's the nature of the business, no matter how good the player is, whether it's Joe Montana or whoever. You're always looking for somebody better. In the college game you see a guy come in with acne, shaving twice a week. He plays four years of football and goes out shaving every day, all his permanent teeth are in and he has an engineering degree. You feel as if you've had some developmental impact on the man. I think that's why this job is so satisfying for Bill. He's a teacher again."

VonAppen had signed a contract and been on his way to coach for the Green Bay Packers when Walsh offered him the job at Stanford.

"It was like the godfather calling," he says. "How do you say no?"

Others who got an offer they couldn't refuse include Doug Cosbie (ten seasons at tight end for Dallas), Tom Holmoe (seven years at safety with the 49ers), Keena Turner (11 seasons at linebacker for the 49ers), Mike Wilson (ten years at wide receiver for the 49ers) and Monte Clark (former Lions and 49ers head coach). Altogether the coaching staff owns a total of 21 Super Bowl rings, but Walsh didn't hire them for their jewelry. He has always picked his assistants out of a basic respect for their intelligence, he says. "All you need for chaos is a dull person who's aggressive."

Turner, who had never coached before, got a message on his answering machine that could have been from Johnny Carson. "There are two jobs open at Stanford University, and you're being considered for both of them," said the recorded voice. "One is president of the university and the other is assistant outside linebacker coach."

"By the time I got the message, they'd already found a new president," says Turner. "So I had to take the other job."

"You have to admire the risk he was taking, naming me and Keena and Tom Holmoe to his staff," says Wilson of his telephone call. "He took some criticism for hiring young guys who were not part of the coaching fraternity. He told me, 'Don't be intimidated. If there's anything you need to know, I can teach you.'" And if Wilson had needed proof of that, all he had to do was look around the NFL, where George Seifert of the 49ers, Sam Wyche of the Buccaneers, Mike Holmgren of the Packers, Bruce Coslet of the Jets and Dennis Green of the Vikings, all former Walsh assistants, are now head coaches. In fact, it was Green's departure from Stanford that opened the head coaching job. The events that followed Green's resignation were, from athletic director Leland's point of view, nearly miraculous.

"A mutual friend called to say that Bill was interested in Denny's job," says Leland. "From there, everything was very quick, very easy. Bill wanted to come so badly that he didn't negotiate very hard. I wanted him to take the job so badly that I was willing to give him Hoover Tower. We agreed on a salary close to what Green had been making [reportedly $350,000 a year] and finished negotiations about 11 in the morning. I was totally unprepared for the reaction. By three o'clock that afternoon the radio was broadcasting the rumor that he was coming back. All of a sudden we had a security problem: News helicopters appeared over the campus, the national media went into a frenzy."

When Walsh tells the story of his return to Stanford, he gets a hitch in his voice that betrays how unhappy he had become in the three years following his retirement as the 49ers coach. Not that he was without a job. NBC had already offered him a contract for a fourth year as their premiere color commentator, and George Seifert had invited him to return to the 49ers as some sort of senior advisor. For Walsh, who reads military history with a special fascination for the field commanders, both offers had a worm in them.

His career on television had not been a happy one. The critics had been tough on his professorial style, and he had grown strangely distant from football.

"I didn't even follow the game anymore," he says, "except for the game I was scheduled to broadcast. It just wasn't satisfying. TV broadcasting is a tenuous business, and I didn't like the kind of critique I was getting. They talked about my voice, or the mispronunciation of a name, rather than the substance of what I was trying to say. I don't blame anybody for it and I don't regret the experience, but I flew home on Monday mornings feeling hollow."

The 49er invitation to become vice president in charge of personnel was even less appealing. "I just didn't think it would be good for them or good for me," he says.

VonAppen's description of the San Francisco offer is less circumspect: "He didn't want to be the old man sitting around drinking coffee, dispensing advice that nobody was going to take."

"It was a Monday morning," says Walsh of the day he made his decision, "just about 24 hours after my last broadcast, the AFC championship game. I was driving south on 280, which runs through the Stanford hills, to meet George Seifert at the San Jose airport for a conversation about the 49er job. I knew Denny had left. In fact, I had been active in the search for his replacement. But when I looked over at the campus, I thought, Wait a minute: That job is open. I could do that job. I put the whole thing together in my mind in 15 or 20 minutes. It was very emotional to say to myself, and to tell my wife, Geri, 'I'm going to do it, start a new career, go right back into it all over again.' You take on so much more than football as a head coach: alumni relations, community relations, fund-raising. I knew if I succeeded everything would be fine. If I didn't, it would mean I had overreached, compromised myself."

Walsh's fear of overreaching may have its roots in his long, sometimes bitter apprenticeship. And looking back, he doesn't give himself high marks as a young coach. "I was too demanding, too authoritarian," he says of his early career, which he began as head coach at Washington Union High School in Fremont, California. He had just graduated from San Jose State with a degree in education and was full of the youthful sort of arrogance that has everything backward.

"I went in thinking the game was designed for me to coach it, that it would be my platform for greatness. In reality the game has evolved for the players to play it. They're not out there as puppets for you to manipulate. Your job is to teach them to function by themselves."

At 27 years of age Walsh left Washington Union with the ambition to have the top coaching job at a college somewhere by the time he was 30. As it turned out, he was to spend the next 18 years as an assistant. He started as defensive coordinator under Mary Levy at the University of California in 1960. Three years later he began his first tour at Stanford, where he spent three seasons coaching the defensive backfield for John Ralston. In 1966 he took his first job in the pros under Al Davis with the Raiders, where he made the switch from defense to offensive backfield coach. Two years later he was hired as quarterback and receiver coach by the man he regards as one of the great architects of the modern game, Paul Blown of the Bengals.

At the time, Walsh's tenure in Cincinnati turned out to be both the zenith and nadir of his career. Under Brown, he was given room to experiment with a sophisticated pass offense that relied heavily on the use of alternate short receivers when the long receiver was covered. Walsh called the passing game from the press box, and though some critics pejoratively dubbed it the "nickel-and-dime," quarterbacks Virgil Carter, Greg Cook and Ken Anderson all used it with great success.

By the time Paul Brown retired in 1976, Walsh had been in Cincinnati for eight years and was generally thought to be heir apparent to the Bengals head-coaching job. Instead, Brown named offensive-line coach Bill Johnson.

"It shattered me," says Walsh. "It was beginning to look as if I would never make it as a head coach. Nobody would take me seriously. I thought about getting out of the game. I had a good friend who owned an advertising agency and another who worked for Levi Strauss, and if either of them had offered me a job I would have taken it."

Instead, Tommy Prothro of the San Diego Chargers hired Walsh as offensive coordinator. A year later Stanford offered him the head coaching job he had thought would never come. He was 45 years old. Two years later the San Francisco 49ers, who had become the most pathetic team in professional football by winning seven and losing 23 in the previous two seasons, offered Walsh the helm of their sunken ship. Three years later he sailed them to the Super Bowl, and people began to call him a genius.

•

"The word genius gets thrown around because people don't have developed vocabularies," says Walsh. "I'm a technician, or a mechanic--those are better words."

"He's always resisted the genius label," says Von Appen. "He's cerebral, a master tactician with a great sense of timing, and some people might equate that with genius. One of his strengths, I think, is putting together personalities that work well together, particularly in stressful situations. He's high on skill development and knowledge of the game. If you're on his staff you had better know the game, and you had better be able to teach the skills necessary to execute his tactical plans. The bottom line is, he expects results, and if he gets them he gives you a lot of autonomy. It's a classy style."

Walsh's management style is by now as famous and celebrated as his theories of pass offense. In a typical week he receives ten requests to speak before business and civic groups, and last January the Harvard Business Review published an interview with him that has become one of the most requested reprints in the history of the magazine. In the interview he details a management credo--benevolence, commitment to people, egolessness, attention to detail--that makes him sound as if he'd spent time with a Zen master, then gone on to West Point.

"The coach has to drop or sidestep his ego barrier," he told the interviewer. "The head coach's system should never reduce the game to the point where he can blame his players for failure simply because they did not overwhelm the opponents. The real task is to help people through troubled times. There will be some suffering and there is no way to avoid it. You can't lose your nerve. Even in defeat you can make progress if you have confidence, patience, a plan and a timetable."

Walsh the master planner loves his timetables. And because he believes that no football skills can be taught in less than ten minutes or more than 20, practice is broken into short segments called situational drills, which emphasize simulated game problems.

At the sound of an air horn the team splits into squads and sprints to assigned places on one of the three practice fields. Walsh stays with the passing unit to work with his quarterback son the aerial attack that has forever been at the heart of his strategies. He stands behind the passer and watches as the same pass pattern is run over and over. Between plays he leans into the huddle to explain, with gestures, the details of his complicated system, which demands from his teams as much intellectual as physical ability. Within his tactical arsenal are hundreds off ormations for the players to learn, new plays for every opponent, even plays drafted at halftime in some games, all designed on the theory that the way to win is to confuse and outwit your opponent, to keep him off-balance enough that you can beat him to the punch.

"Football is a game of skill, not a game of brutal punishment. Let the other guy brutally punish," he says on the way to one of his favorite analogies. "It's like boxing, a fight between the champion and a challenger. For the first six rounds the challenger is standing toe-to-toe with the champ and it looks as if it might be an upset. But all through those six rounds the champ is beating the challenger to the punch by half an inch. His punches are a little quicker, a little sharper. At the end of the sixth round the challenger is starting to wobble, and when they have to stop it in the eighth, he doesn't even know what happened. It's the same in football. You have to beat the other guy to the punch. It may not show up till the third quarter, but eventually, the other team begins to fade. Then the game's over and he thinks he beat the hell out of you and you've just won 33 to 16."

Walsh did not pick that score out of the air. He's remembering it fondly from Stanford's 1992 defeat of Notre Dame at Notre Dame, in which his smaller, slower, underdog team was down 16 to nothing in the second quarter and came back to score 33 unanswered points.

"He told us not to panic," says senior quarterback Steve Stentrom of the half-time meeting at that game. "He was very calm, and we had actually prepared for a situation that had us down. He told us there was plenty of time, told us what we had to do. Then he told us to go out there and get it done."

The afternoon practice ends with the full offensive and defensive units lining up against each other in specific down and yardage situations in anticipation of the Saturday scrimmage.

"Watch the tricky shit," yells one of the linebackers as he looks across the line at Stenstrom, and ten yards behind him at Walsh, who is still in the middle of the field, arms crossed, right hand against his cheek in the pose television cameras caught so often over the ten season she spent on the sidelines with the 49ers.

As practice breaks, Walsh takes a slow, solitary walk toward the locker rooms: past the swimming pools, where, a campus joke has it, he jogs on the water to stay in shape; past the tennis courts, the real source of his fitness, where he plays fierce, hard-on-himself tennis nearly every day.

"There aren't many places he can walk without being bothered," says Leland, recalling a conversation in which Walsh enumerated the little things that are the hallmarks of his comfort with the Stanford job. "He's an extremely sensitive guy who stews on things, worries about them. He was successful in the tough, quasi-political, backstabbing world of pro football, but I'm not sure he liked it. This seems to fit him better."

•

Around ten o'clock in the morning on the first Saturday in May, 800 alumni and boosters stand to cheer as Walsh follows his team into Stanford Stadium for the Red and White scrimmage, a scripted series of plays designed to show the coaches what they will be starting with in the fall. Running back Roger Craig is there, along with three of the five graduated seniors who were drafted into the pros a few weeks earlier. And James Bond Stockdale, retired admiral, eight-year Vietnam prisoner of war, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, vice-presidential candidate under Ross Perot, fellow at Stanford's Hoover Research Institute, watches intently from the sidelines as his good friend Walsh directs the action.

The two of them met while Walsh was with San Francisco. He had been moved by Stockdale's book, In Love and War, and invited the former fighter pilot to travel with the 49ers and occasionally to speak to them the night before a game about courage, focus, and the ability to do your job while all Hell is in your face.

"He's a rare bird," says Stockdale. "Very brainy. He's a stalker, the guy who's walking through the forest always sizing up the situation. He knows how to get the best out of his people without curtailing their individuality. And, of course, the players respect him, which is essential to strong leadership. It's not like the military, where everybody stands up when the CO walks into the room. But in those team meetings you could tell the urge was there."

As the scrimmage ends, players and staff circle the coach, then kneel to listen as he stands at the center of the human anemone, turning slowly, speaking in his quietly emphatic style, pausing to smile as intermittent laughter testifies to the fact that the team is getting his jokes by now. He loves these impromptu moments with his young players, and he uses them to talk about much more than football.

"Virtually everything you say to a player at this age, they're going to recall," he says. "In many ways you can be a more effective teacher than if you had them in a classroom setting. I remember a practice during the Los Angeles riots when I talked to them about inner-city problems, about the importance of this country's facing up to these deep, long-neglected issues. And they listened. Earnestly listened. It gives you the feeling that you're having an impact on their lives, on the contribution they'll make after they quit playing football."

As the circle breaks, half a dozen local reporters move in with questions. A good spring overall, he tells them, several outstanding freshmen coming in to replace the graduates, some worry over the quality of the backup players. "It's a matter of getting these guys to believe in themselves individually," he says when asked what the key will be to a winning season.

Then, as he signs autographs, the public-address announcer reminds fans that tickets are now on sale for the first game of a long, hard Pac Ten schedule, "against a team," the announcer says without naming it, "coached by John Ralston." The team is San Jose State, and Ralston is the man who brought Walsh to Stanford 30 years ago.

•

"There is a symmetry to it," agrees Walsh after the scrimmage as we sit in his small office, surrounded by photos of friends and former players. "Stanford has been a special place for me. From the reception I'm getting these days, everywhere I go, I think people appreciate my decision to come back here. Especially men in their 50s, who can see that there are alternatives to grinding yourself down to nothing before you retire.

"I knew I was taking on a lot when I accepted this job, but it's different than it was in the pros. There's a certain innocence to college ball. The players play because they love the game. It's an adventure for them. They're committed to their school, they care for one another and, at least early on, they're not looking for mercenary reward."

He is, of course, still involved, at least personally, in the hard world of professional football. Just two weeks before we talked, the 49ers had suffered through an awkward series of events that led to the release of Joe Montana, who had made a deal with Kansas City. In the midst of the stumbling, on-again-off-again negotiations, all the key players--Eddie DeBartolo, George Seifert, Joe Montana, his wife, Jennifer, and his agent--called the Stanford coach to talk it over.

"It was an impossible situation," Walsh says, reflecting obvious pain over the way his protégé's glorious career with San Francisco ended. "I think everybody's heart was in the right place. Emotional decisions were made and the timing was bad." He still calls Montana the greatest quarterback who ever played the game and, in fact, offered him a job as assistant coach at Stanford.

"I expect Joe can have a great career in Kansas City," he says, "if he can avoid injuries. I think in all the emotion over his leaving, people lost sight of the fact that he's been out of football for two years and that his elbow could become inflamed again. It could happen in one play. He could be running left and try to throw back across the field and tear something, and that elbow would be history."

As for the future of pro football, Walsh thinks the game is on a course of rapid and profound change. "It's going to be a faster game, for one thing," he says. "There will be fewer huddles as a way of keeping defenses off-balance. Players will be forced into greater specialization. Skills will become more isolated, just as they are in society. You'll have a first-down running back and a third-down running back, for instance. And free agency is going to mean that players will spend fewer years with a coach. He's going to have to be able to adapt to abrupt change. He'll have to go from having a great player one year to having a rookie at the same position the next year. It's going to call for better coaching."

Whenever the conversation turns to what has become the Walsh legend, he reacts with a shy sort of irritation at the notoriety that paints you 20 feet high and ten years younger on roadside billboards, the hype that tends to leave out the failure and frustration that put the lines in your face.

Not that he doesn't have a sense of humor about it. On his way out of the Red and White scrimmage he had stopped briefly at a lawn tent that held yet another portrait of him. This one, an oil by LeRoy Neiman, had been commissioned by the athletic department and was on view for the first time to alumni and friends who were being offered limited-edition lithographs of the portrait for $2500 a copy. The original was mounted in an ornate golden frame and rendered in the slash-and-daub Neiman style, posing the coach, in heroic and youthful profile, against the background of a packed stadium.

"What do you think?" someone asked as Walsh stood considering the image.

The coach thought for a minute, then smiled. "Nice frame," he said.