His Letters Aren’t Just X’s and O’s

You look at Bill Walsh, and the last thing you expect him to be is a football coach. A concert pianist, perhaps. A Latin teacher, a priest. He looks like a guy who might go to the ballet. You figure Swinburne maybe looked like this. It’s lousy casting for a football coach. Any Hollywood producer would throw you out if you came back with a guy who looked like Walsh for the part. “This is a football picture, not a remake of ‘Camille,’ ” he would yell. “Take this guy back and bring me Bogart.” You know how football coaches are supposed to look. They got this broken nose, a blue beard and gaps in their teeth. Their hair, if they got any, is in a U-boat brush. They yell a lot, and spit. They come from Monongahela, Pa., or Red Dust, Ark., and they talk about gut checks. By character, they mean a guy who would kill for a living. Now, look at Walsh, by comparison. He has a face that looks out of place without a halo around it. He looks as if he should be feeding birds or reading his breviary. He’s so pale you can see through him, and he has this shock of fine white hair and wears sweaters and shoes to match. He looks like a bar of Ivory soap on the sidelines. When he talks, all the sentences have verbs in them. He never raises his voice or his fists. He seems bemused by what he sees, almost as if he were watching the opera. He should have a lorgnette and be wearing a tux. He doesn’t look as though he even sweats. He distances himself from the coaching fraternity by his very aloofness. Don Shula paces up and down the sideline on his crouched legs like a caged puma. Vince Lombardi used to rant and rave like the third act of “Carmen.” John Madden looked like a moving laundry bag. Walsh permits himself an occasional moue of annoyance now and then, a slight wrinkling of the brow, as if the fish hadn’t been boned properly, or the wrong wine came with the salad. As if what were going on in the field were distasteful but not worth making a scene over. He wasn’t raised in the coal-dust leagues of the anthracite country or the longhorn trails of Texas but in the quiche country of Northern California. Where most coaches drink beer from a bottle, Walsh prefers white wine in a goblet. He probably never ate a chicken-fried steak in his life. Most coaches play golf or bowl. He plays tennis. Genius is a word that is bandied about too much in sports. Genius is a word applied to a guy who has Ruth, Gehrig, Dickey, Lazzeri, Gomez and three 20-game winners in a lineup and beats the St. Louis Browns, 5-3. In coaching, it’s a guy who has recruited every All-State football player from three states around and goes 9-2-1 and wins the Liberty Bowl. Walsh has had genius applied to him more often than Albert Einstein. Typically, it embarrasses him. Probably because he’s one of the few guys in the league who knows who Einstein was. Walsh’s theory of football is a lot more comprehensible than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It must be. It’s understandable to pro football players, and Lord knows, there are very few college graduates among them. Walsh’s genius is certifiable in that he plots out a football game 25 moves in advance for the start of a game. Now, this smacks also of clairvoyance. Does it mean that, if play No. 12 calls for a punt and the team finds itself on play No. 12 on the other guys’ 1-yard line, first-and-goal, does it punt? No, but under Walsh’s system, neither does it try a line plunge. Walsh’s teams abhor the expected. They’re like a play by George Bernard Shaw. No one does what you think he will. Walsh would rather fail than bore. Walsh’s 49er teams are everything the game expected--except they are successful. The league figured they would be entertaining. They are. The league figured they would be competitive. They are. The league just didn’t figure they would be victorious. The league thought they would be flashy--but inconsistent. That they would look good losing. Instead, they look good winning. Everyone always knew Walsh knew something about attack football that nobody else knew. What they didn’t think he knew was how to win with it. He was like a fighter they call a crowd pleaser. Incapable of retreat. Disdainful of consequences. That’s why they left Walsh in the assistant coaches’ ranks for decades. He was all right in the engine room but not on the bridge. He developed all-time quarterbacks and passing attacks for the likes of Stanford, Cal, the Raiders, Cincinnati Bengals, San Diego Chargers, Stanford again and, finally, the 49ers. He looked good on the drawing board. The word was, with the football, Bill Walsh was a great coach. Without it, he was just another guy in a headset waiting for a turnover. The league figured the Peter Principle would work with Walsh. Like, all those pretty plays on the blackboard looked like French Impressionism--but if they promoted him, the league would draw mustaches on them. The stratagem of big business in this country is: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Leave it be. If a guy’s a good writer, you let him write. If he’s a good pilot, let him fly. If he’s a good accountant, let him add. If he’s a good assistant, let him assist. It was considered a gamble when the 49ers hired Walsh to do more than assist. It was like hiring St. Francis of Assisi to drive a truck. When he went 2-14 the first year, the wise guys said, “Ho!” But when he went to the Super Bowl two years later, they said, “Who?!” When he went to two Super Bowls in six years, they said: “We told you so. Genius.” Walsh is as unimpressed with the new as he is with the old assessments of him. If he wins Sunday, don’t look for him to be standing in any champagne shower. For the wine connoisseur, Bill Walsh, wouldn’t wash his dog in that cheap stuff, let alone his own hair.