IT IS HARD TO imagine Bill Walsh fitting in as a football coach anywhere but San Francisco. Walsh and The City are perfectly matched. Both are distinctive, attractive, literate, eccentric, arrogant and self-absorbed, yet both are fun to be around.
Wandering through Walsh’s imagination is a lot like wandering up and down San Francisco’s hills. There is a delight over every horizon, and even if you get lost, the scenery is worth the trip.
“If unique is what you seek,” said 49er guard Randy Cross, “then Bill Walsh is your man.”
We all know what the best football coaches are like. Their jaws jut, they have gaps between their teeth, their foreheads hang like awnings over their eyes and their life is at the end of the next can of game film. They have the sense of humor of a pit bull and the tolerance of a tax auditor.
WALSH LOOKS LIKE he just stepped out of a library. He talks like he has read half the books there and acts like he wrote the other half.
“The Super Bowl,” Walsh said, before he won one, “is to the American people what May Day is to Eastern Europeans, an added holiday.”
What most football coaches know of Eastern Europe they learned from their placekickers.
The older Walsh gets, the less inclined he is to dishevel the sport that has made him notable, but he once condemned the NFL support structure as “jockstrap elitists” and pro football itself as the plaything of “45- year-old football groupies.”
From the frosty tips of his silver hair to the barbs on the end of his pointed tongue, Walsh is quite decidedly not your run-of-the-cliche football coach.
AT ITS MOST basic, the upcoming Battle of Palo Alto, otherwise known as Super Bowl XIX, is a confrontation between modern and old-school coaches, Don Shula of Miami championing the traditional.
Shula came from Paul Brown, through Blanton Collier, by way of Weeb Ewbank, and was once a boy wonder head coach. He has never spoken of, or to, elitists and groupies, though he has been known to chat with the odd fan. Shula has never found any reason to abandon coaching lessons he learned early. Nothing beats hard work, organization and discipline.
“I don’t have peace of mind until I know I’ve given the game everything I can, because the whole idea is to get a winning edge,” said Shula, summarizing his vision and giving himself a title for his autobiography.
Walsh, at 53, is just two years younger than Shula, but he spent 18 years as an assistant while Shula was winning Super Bowls. Walsh’s long tenure as one of the boys may account for his more free-form approach to leadership.
“EACH OF US has a role to play,” said Walsh. “Mine does not have to be commander-in-chief. It’s kind of like being a submarine commander on a long, undersea cruise. You just can’t run around saluting all the time.”
In spite of his eccentricity, or maybe because of it, Walsh has become known commonly as a genius. He makes quarterbacks the way other coaches make excuses. His credits include Greg Cook, Ken Anderson, Dan Fouts and Joe Montana, not to mention assorted others at Stanford during his tenure there.
“I’m not sure I like the word ‘genius,’ t ” Walsh once protested. “There’s a certain figment of crackpot that goes with that, like a professor in a laboratory.”
Walsh will accept the title of artist, or even expert.
“I think I have as much expertise as anybody coaching football,” he said.
HE INSISTS HE is not consumed by ambition, but it is hard to believe him. He was irked at losing out on head jobs to Lou Holtz (Jets), George Allen (Rams) and Bill Johnson (Bengals) before he got the San Francisco job.
As if he needs to convince the world that none of this is important to him, Walsh has threatened twice to stop coaching the 49ers. Each time he has changed his mind.
Walsh cannot quite conceal his pride in having accomplished what he has, doing it his way, even as he insists, “I am not interested in having my won- lost record on my tombstone.”
Style matters less than results, and Shula has gotten better results than anybody. No other coach has ever been to six Super Bowls, but if Walsh should happen to win this Super Bowl, he will have won two in six years as a head coach, or just as many as Shula has in 22.
FOR ALL HIS varnished exterior, Walsh is not that much different from Shula underneath. As much as he might resist the truth, Walsh is a football coach and not half bad at it.
The chief difference between Shula and Walsh is that Shula does not apologize for his life’s work, and Walsh would have you believe that he has been merely slumming.