When the Preps Wouldn’t Hire Wyche, Walsh Did

Sam Wyche was down.

Real down.

Here he was, a former quarterback in the National Football League, and he couldn’t get a job in the sport at the high school level.

The year was 1979. Wyche had played 9 years in the league with the Cincinnati Bengals, the Washington Redskins, the Detroit Lions, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Buffalo Bills, mostly as a backup. He had been to a Super Bowl.

When his career ended, he opened a sporting goods store, Sam Wyche Sports World, in Greenville, S.C.

But he couldn’t shake the bug. He wanted to get back into football. Any kind of football.

So he had applied to two area high schools, figuring his NFL credentials would be more than enough to get him in.

“I enjoyed teaching,” he said. “I liked being around kids. So I thought I’d like to be a high school coach.

“I even remember going to one of the schools for an interview. I looked out at the field where the mountains made a beautiful backdrop and thought about how much I was going to enjoy kicking back there.”

For Wyche, it proved to be a mirage.

Although he had a master’s degree in business administration management, he did not have a teaching credential and that disqualified him.

He was at his store when he received word he had been turned down for the high school job. Suddenly, he was looking at a lifetime of waxing skis and pumping up basketballs.

Now it was his ego that needed pumping up.

Wyche’s deflation lasted just 1 hour. Then a phone in the store rang. It was an old friend, Bill Walsh, the coach at Stanford.

“He had just been appointed head coach of the 49ers,” Wyche said. “He wanted to know if I could come help him as an assistant. The timing was right.”

The call was the result of a conversation between Walsh and Wyche 3 years earlier in Japan. Wyche was there with the Cardinals, Walsh as an assistant with the San Diego Chargers. The teams were playing an exhibition game in Tokyo.

Walsh, who had been Wyche’s quarterback coach at Cincinnati, went out to dinner with his former quarterback. During the meal, Walsh said that if he ever became a pro head coach, he’d like Wyche on his staff.

It couldn’t have been a better training round. Wyche’s job was to work with the quarterbacks and the passing game. On the 49ers that season were rookies named Joe Montana and Dwight Clark.

But that didn’t ease the anxiety Wyche felt about his new job. He was determined to do well on his first day of work at the 49er training camp.

The starting quarterback for San Francisco that season was Steve DeBerg. Wyche walked up to him, introduced himself and immediately launched into a clinic on how to play the position.

“This is how you spread your feet,” Wyche said. “And this is how you should hold the ball.”

DeBerg, already an NFL veteran, looked up as if to say: Who is this guy?

At that instant, Walsh intervened.

“Why don’t you just let him warm up a little bit first,” Walsh told Wyche.

It all worked out, of course. Wyche was on Walsh’s staff when the 49ers beat the Bengals in Super Bowl XVI in 1982. And they’ll be opposing coaches in Sunday’s Super Bowl.

Win or lose, it’s a great life for Wyche. He gets to live his dream. And somebody else pumps up the balls.