Like Him or Not, We Need Him

Of all the weekend football scores, the saddest for me was Arizona State 36, Stanford 35. Not that I have anything against Arizona State. And I didn’t go to Stanford. But I worry about the Cardinal.

Man and boy, I guess I’ve known Bill Walsh for--what?--20 years? It’s funny, but when I first heard about him, he was an assistant at Cincinnati. Under Paul Brown, no less.

This was an awful lot of genius for one staff. And the word on Walsh was that he was exactly that--a genius.

But he was the kind of guy, it was said here, who has to be kept in an ivory tower with a playbook and a box of chalk. He set policy, he didn’t implement it. He drew these great fancy stratagems. But it was up to someone else to get them in the game plan.

That was the book on Walsh. Brilliant but aloof. A thinker, not a leader. A part of the general staff concerned with the big picture, the great offensive. Someone else led the troops. A dreamer, almost. A guy who should have had a von in his name, Field Marshal Wilhelm Von Walsh.

Well, Walsh went from Paul Brown to Al Davis, to Tommy Prothro and Sid Gillman. Every one of them kept him back at the drawing board. He was also Bob Cratchit.

Then, a funny thing happened. He went, of all places, to Stanford. Now, Stanford was a member of the Pacific 10 football conference, but not really, if you know what I mean. It considered itself Harvard and not, let’s say, Oklahoma or Florida State, to drop a name or two.

It had a proud tradition in West Coast football. After all, Pop Warner had coached there. He invented the single wing. In 1940, Clark Shaughnessy, a kind of early day Bill Walsh, brought the T-formation to football there. Another guy with a reputation as an X’s and O’s guy, not a hands-on coach. But he went 10-0 and won the Rose Bowl and national championship.

Stanford had the “Vow Boys,” a squad that, after a series of humiliating defeats by the USC Trojans, vowed never to lose to them again. And didn’t.

Stanford was Walsh’s first head coaching stop. And he confuted his image as a purely theoretical or laboratory scientist by producing 9-3 and 8-4 seasons and going to two bowl games in a row.

Stanford was almost embarrassed. I mean, would Harvard go to the Bluebonnet Bowl?

Then the Cardinal turned back into a pumpkin again. Walsh left to take over the San Francisco 49ers, a bunch of chronic underachievers who had never really won anything.

He went 2-14 his first season, 6-10 his second. “Ah, now!” said the wise guys, “Walsh has finally gotten in under his head. He should be up in the attic, drawing diagrams and letting them down by rope to the staff.” He was miscast as a battlefield commander.

Walsh always managed to convey the sense that he was slumming on a football sideline, that he belonged in a box at the opera. Even though he had spent part of his youth as a prize fighter, I always had the sense he was listening to Bach on his headset, not the assistant coaches. You figured him to be the only coach in the league who would know Prokofiev was not a linebacker from Washington State. He could probably hum him. The movies he watched didn’t always have football players in them.

But his teams became the scourge of the pros. They went from 2-14 to 15-1 at length. Not since Vince Lombardi had a coach put a team on the field as immaculately prepared.

Walsh scripted the first 20 plays of every game--and most of the rest. Never had a team seemed to have a key receiver open on every play the way the 49ers did. You could deliver the pass by mail.

Three Super Bowls later, Walsh felt he had made his point. He took his football and left. He was a Hall of Fame coach by now, mentioned in the same breath as Warner, Rockne, Yost and Lombardi. No longer was he the ethereal figure who, like Moses, went up the mount and got his game plan every week.

But when he went back to Stanford, the football world was stunned. Here was a guy going back to knocking on high school athletes’ doors, hoping to persuade them to join a football program that in no way resembled that of Miami, or even Penn State.

It’s easier for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven than for a football player to get into Stanford. For one thing, you have to be able to spell.

Stanford got good football players. But they didn’t get 90 of them--15 or 20, maybe.

It’s no secret how some schools are beating good teams around the country this fall, 62-14. There are about nine of them and they have all the certified arm breakers and head crackers in the country on their squads.

You are always afraid Stanford will cop out of all this and go into Division II football and actually start to play Yale, Harvard and Brown. Coast football would be poorer without the Cardinal.

For Walsh, it’s a Sisyphean job. He’s 62. But Pop Warner coached long after that. And Walsh’s teams are not deep but they’re smart, resourceful. Some are even students.

Rooting for Stanford is not a civic duty. And it’s not exactly like rooting for David. But we need more Stanfords.

Stanford players don’t call their signals in logarithms. They don’t play Handel’s “Messiah” in the locker rooms. They’re not the Vow Boys or the Wow Boys. They are not America’s Team. But what would West Coast football be without them? What would college football be without them? NFL II?