They Won’t Let Go of Success : George Seifert: First-year coach has a looser approach than Bill Walsh, but the 49ers haven’t lost their winning touch.

Under first-year Coach George Seifert, the San Francisco 49ers were allowed to become as loose as tackle Bubba Paris’ waistline. Ever hear a franchise exhale? Remember the relief when the smartest kid in class transferred?

Maybe that best explains a remarkable 49er season and how a man in an otherwise impossible position, Seifert, could walk into the offices of a three-time Super Bowl champion, replace a legendary coach, Bill Walsh; rearrange some pictures, and keep a mighty football ship on course. The 49ers go for back-to-back Super Bowl titles here Sunday against Denver in Super Bowl XXIV.

Phil Bengtson once took over for a legendary coach at Green Bay, Vince Lombardi, and it wasn’t long before the Packers sent him packing.

The Seifert-for-Walsh succession offered a similar comparison, although Walsh didn’t leave the 49er cupboard quite as bare as Lombardi had left the Packers’.

Seifert, a career assistant under Walsh, first at Stanford, was handed football’s crown jewels this season and asked only not to lose them. Walsh had built the 49ers, drafted the players, masterminded the trades, scripted the plays and made sure everyone knew who was in charge.

Walsh retired to the broadcasting booth after wrapping up coach-of-the-decade honors with his third championship in Super Bowl XXIII.

Seifert, a nine-year 49er assistant and the team’s defensive coordinator since 1983, was headed for a job interview with the Cleveland Browns when he was called home between plane connections in Dallas last January. Seifert’s mind was on Cleveland, but his heart remained in San Francisco, where he was born and raised on sourdough bread and 49er football.

Seifert grew up in the city’s Mission District. In high school, he ushered 49er games at Kezar Stadium in the 1950s. “We didn’t get paid at all,” he said. “It was the privilege of getting into the ballgame free, basically.”

If grown men thumb-tacked posters to their bedroom doors, halfback Hugh McElhenny’s would still hang on Seifert’s.

So, Mr. 49er, would you consider coaching the team of your childhood dreams? We’ll even pay this time around.

“I can’t really say I’ve truly had time to appreciate it,” Seifert said of a rare opportunity. “Every now and then I’ll visit with my wife about it and we’ll just smile at each other. Then, you’re cast back into the job at hand. When the season’s over, I imagine we’ll have some time to reflect.”

So just how has Seifert been able to hit the ground running? If pointing raw talent to the field were the only challenge, the Minnesota Vikings would be here.

It seems that Seifert, a longtime Walsh confidant, was smart enough to leave great enough alone when it came to tinkering with the 49ers’ system.

As a personality, though, Seifert could distance himself from Walsh, viewed by some 49ers as too cerebral and cold. Walsh had his share of glories and problems, particularly with Joe Montana, sometimes subjecting his great quarterback to various mind games, motivational ploys and controversies.

Seifert, instead, made small but significant inroads. First, he threw his full support to Montana’s corner, ending speculation about another controversy with backup Steve Young in 1989.

Seifert also reviewed Montana’s career on film and noticed that he threw most of his interceptions on the same pass pattern. Seifert eliminated the pattern from the playbook and Montana had a career-low eight passes intercepted in 1989.

Seifert has maintained the 49er machine with a screwdriver, not a hammer.

He was also confronted with weighty issues such as his tackle, Paris, whose poundage has been a running joke in San Francisco for years. Walsh’s answer was to overload Paris with a series of diets and ultimatums. Paris said Walsh’s leaving was like having “200 pounds of genius” lifted from his shoulders.

“I was 6-5, 264 pounds when I was 16,” Paris said this week. “So it ain’t like something that just happened overnight. I’ve been used to functioning at this size to where I don’t even know the difference.”

Walsh insisted that Paris keep his weight below 300 pounds. Seifert switched tactics and told Paris he didn’t care about the extra weight so long as he could still throw it around on the field.

“Coach Seifert has simply said, ‘I will allow you to compete,’ ” Paris said. “He said, ‘As long as you can compete, you will have the opportunity to do so. If you ever get to the point where you’re too big to do that, no one will have to tell me; it’ll be obvious to everyone around you.’ He’s been more result conscious. He looks at the results. ‘Does he get the job done? Is he blocking?’ ”

Paris is. In between snacks, he has started every game for the 49ers at left tackle. Paris loosening his belt serves as perhaps the best metaphor in distinguishing Seifert from Walsh.

Montana has called the transition to Seifert a breath of fresh air, but it’s not as though Seifert is a pushover.

“Oh, I have my moments,” he said.

And he does. Seifert is the same coach who broke his toe after kicking a chalkboard during a halftime outburst in 1987, a game the 49ers eventually won, 41-0.

You want stubborn? Two summers ago, Seifert and two buddies were saltwater fishing near Pacifica when their boat capsized in rough waters, leaving them 300 feet from shore.

Seifert, fighting for his life, refused to let go of the fish he had just reeled in.

“That was one of the biggest striped bass I had ever caught,” he says. “It was about a 27-pound fish.”

The problem was, Seifert was about to join the bass on ocean’s bottom.

“It wasn’t all that long before my pants were filling up with water and taking me down,” Seifert said.

Confronted with the question of fish vs. life, Seifert saved his own gills. Tough call, though.

Still, it was a nice story to have on file when 49er owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. was looking for a purposeful coach to replace Walsh. Hmmm, here was a guy who would risk his own life for the right causes, none more important than saving prized fish and football organizations.

So the 49ers had their man in Seifert, who had worked so quietly and diligently behind the scenes that most people still wouldn’t know his defense ranked first overall in 1987. The 49ers have a defense, too? Through the 1980s, Seifert has done it basically with one star, safety Ronnie Lott, and an intricate mix of talented players and effective schemes.

Finesse is an ugly word in the macho world of big-time defenses, but Seifert says his units have largely mirrored Walsh’s philosophies on offense. How else could Seifert stop Walsh in practice?

“It got to be a game of our defense vs. Bill’s offense,” Seifert said. “You learn to develop different ideas, but the way he would utilize all his personnel was creative, and some of that rubbed off.”

Becoming a head coach, though, didn’t seem to be in the stars for Seifert. In his youth, the 49ers were mostly mediocre teams led by mediocre coaches such as Frankie Albert and Red Hickey.

“I grew up dreaming of being a player,” Seifert said, “I’d go to the playgrounds and emulate being McElhenny, or people like Billy Wilson and R. C. Owens, who I have to mention because they’re working for us. But as far as being a head coach, no. I didn’t think about becoming a coach at all until I was in graduate school at college.”

That notion developed at the University of Utah, where Seifert had gone to play some offensive guard and study zoology. It was teammate and roommate Lynn Stiles, now the 49ers’ special teams coach, who recommended Seifert for the graduate assistant’s spot at Utah after Stiles was promoted to full time.

In 1965, Seifert coached at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, then moved on to assistant positions at Iowa, then Oregon, where he teamed with another aspiring young coach, John Robinson, before joining Stanford’s staff in 1972.

Seifert was almost knocked out of the business in 1975, when he became head coach at Cornell University. He “resigned” after 1-8 and 2-9 seasons. It turns out the Cornell alumni had been pushing Tom Matte, former Baltimore Colt fullback, for the job. When Seifert was chosen instead, alums pulled the financial plug and left Seifert holding the cord.

Dick Schultz, Cornell’s athletic director at the time and now the NCAA’s executive director, told Seifert he was fired for his own good, that his gaining alumni support was next to impossible.

“There was a period after I left Cornell where I really didn’t care to be a head coach,” Seifert said. “After the ’84 Super Bowl, I realized there might be a possibility of becoming a head coach again. Once people start talking to you about it, your self-confidence develops again and you start to feel as though you can handle the job.”

Seifert’s big mistake at Cornell, he learned, was trying to do too much. He coached, licked stamps, and answered every letter that crossed his desk.

“I had the idea I had to do everything,” he said. “I think over the years, working with Bill Walsh, you get a feel for the need to rely on other people. . . . It wasn’t like I felt my life was over when that (Cornell) was over. I was still young enough to come back.”

After a brief mourning period, Seifert joined Walsh’s staff at Stanford in 1977, and the two began making beautiful football together.

More than a decade later, Seifert is two days from winning it all. Think the Cornell alumni are coming? Maybe Seifert can usher them to their seats, just like the old days at Kezar.