In Bill Walsh’s final days, the football universe went to him. Joe Montana, Al Davis, Ronnie Lott, John Madden – they all went to visit Walsh, the brilliant coach who launched the 49ers dynasty and forever transformed the football landscape.
Perhaps the most influential strategist in NFL history, Walsh died at his Woodside home Monday morning after a three-year battle with leukemia. He was 75.
“He was the most important person in football over the last 25 years, and I don’t think there’s any debate about that,” former 49ers quarterback Steve Young said Monday at a press conference at Stanford.
“He brought into Silicon Valley, about the time Silicon Valley was being born, the same kind of innovation,” Young added. “When you mention Steve Jobs or Andy Grove, you just say Bill Walsh. He was doing the same thing, just in a different venue – football. I’ve always said Bill would have been a great CEO of anything. Luckily for us, it was the 49ers.”
Walsh popularized and perfected the “West Coast offense” that paved the way for five Super Bowl victories for the 49ers. His innovations provided an oft-copied blueprint for coaches at every level and propelled players such as Montana and Jerry Rice toward the Hall of Fame.
“Outside of my dad, he was probably the most influential person in my life,” Montana said.
Walsh went 102-63-1 in 10 seasons with the 49ers and led the team to Super Bowl victories in the 1981, 1984 and 1988 seasons. He also left behind the framework for the ’89 and ’94 title teams. Along the way, Walsh was a mentor for dozens of men who went on to be NFL coaches, and he later served as a major force in shaping the athletic departments of San Jose State and Stanford.
Hired by desperate 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. in 1979 and charged with turning around a moribund franchise, Walsh promptly laid the groundwork for one of the most successful stretches in sports history. His teams won six NFC West titles and set a standard in which anything less than a Super Bowl was a crushing disappointment.
“The secret was not only the fact that the team was victorious, but also the way it went about winning and handling the wins,” said Carmen Policy, the 49ers president during Walsh’s glory years. “The team became a virtual bridge that linked the entire Bay Area into one community and all of the components of that community into one citizenry.”
Known as intellectual
Walsh died peacefully at 10:45 a.m. with his family by his side, according to spokesman Kirk Reynolds. He is survived by his wife, Geri; his daughter, Elizabeth; his son, Craig; his sister, Maureen; his daughter-in-law, Kim; his brother-in-law, Ed; and his grandchildren, Samantha and Nathan. A second son, Steve, died of leukemia at 46 in 2002.
Both private and public services are expected to be held this week, although details are not yet known.
“This was a loss of such a great man who meant so much to so many people, and I was one of them,” said Jeff Garcia, another of Walsh’s quarterback proteges. Garcia, who learned of the news while at camp with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, described it as “a sad, sickening feeling.”
“I spoke to him as I spoke to my father,” Garcia said.
Walsh, who looked like a professor, was frequently portrayed as an egghead. As the late Jim Murray, the legendary Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote: “You half expect his headset is playing Mozart.”
There was an element of truth to the depiction, as Walsh’s wizardry at the chalkboard earned him the nickname “The Genius.” But the coach bristled at the stereotype; he was no wimpy intellectual. Walsh fought as a heavyweight in college – and later used boxing psychology in his tactics – and he wasn’t afraid to berate a burly lineman for a mistake.
Walsh proved to be tough in his personal life as well, caring for his ailing wife and dealing with the death of his son. Walsh even overpowered the effects of leukemia longer than expected and remained active in his final months.
Walsh was accustomed to a hectic schedule. He retired from coaching the 49ers in 1989 but still managed to reshape Bay Area football over the next 18 years.
He was the 49ers’ general manager. He served Stanford in several capacities, including head coach and interim athletic director, and he helped save the football program at San Jose State, his alma mater, by advising the Spartans to hire Athletic Director Tom Bowen and Coach Dick Tomey, who turned the team around in two seasons. Walsh also wrote multiple books, worked as a television analyst, gave clinics and lectures, and taught classes at Stanford.
But Walsh will be remembered most for his accomplishments with the 49ers, starting in January 1982 with an iconic victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC championship game. That contest culminated with the throw from Montana to Dwight Clark in the back of the end zone, a winning touchdown that became known as “The Catch.”
“Overcoming Dallas that day was huge, huge for our franchise,” Walsh recalled during an interview with the Mercury News this year. “Joe’s throw and Dwight’s catch continued our momentum to our first Super Bowl. But it was our coaches, players and team as a whole coming together in the crucible of a pressure game that was central to the ascendancy of the 49ers. That was the breakthrough for us.”
Mediocre playing career
William Ernest Walsh was born Nov. 30, 1931, in Los Angeles, and his family moved to the Bay Area while he was a teenager.
Walsh played football at Hayward High, where he dreamed of being a quarterback. The coaches thought he was better suited to play running back. Indeed, young Walsh was sensationally fast until he suffered a torn quadriceps while running track.
Lacking a scholarship offer to a four-year school, Walsh spent two years at the College of San Mateo as a quarterback.
He transferred to San Jose State, majored in physical education and played offensive and defensive end for the Spartans under then-coach Bob Bronzan, who became Walsh’s mentor. The highlight of Walsh’s otherwise forgettable playing career was a 66-yard touchdown catch against Fresno State.
In 1956, after a stint in the Army at Fort Ord, Walsh became a graduate student in physical education at San Jose State. He reunited with Bronzan as a graduate assistant coach.
Walsh’s master’s thesis was called “Defensing the Pro-Set Formation,” a project he later dismissed as “the silliest little thing.” Bronzan, though, was amazed. He would later write, in a recommendation for Walsh’s file: “I predict Bill Walsh will become the outstanding football coach in the United States.”
Climb toward greatness
While he was a student at San Jose State, swimming in the Pacific Ocean one day, Walsh met his future wife, Geri Nardini. They married in 1954.
“The immediate attraction was that he was very good-looking and the senior hero,” she recalled to Sports Illustrated years later. “He was kind.”
Walsh got his first head-coaching job in 1957, at 25, taking over at Washington Union High School in Fremont. Although Walsh would later say he “stumbled through,” his record indicates otherwise. The school went 1-26 in the three years before Walsh’s arrival, then went 9-1 and won a league championship in its first season with him.
In 1960, he called Marv Levy, who had just been hired as Cal’s coach, in hopes of making the leap to college assistant. Before making contact, Walsh asked Bronzan for some advice on how to handle the job interview.
“Ask for only 15 minutes,” Bronzan told him. “And when you go in, take a small chalkboard. After a nice greeting, show him some plays.”
Walsh parlayed his 15 minutes into two hours – and eventually three years at Cal. Levy made Walsh the Bears’ defensive coordinator, “which might have been his undoing,” joked Walsh, whose specialty was offense.
From Berkeley, Walsh went to Stanford, where he spent three seasons as a defensive coach under John Ralston. He moved back across the bay – and into the NFL – in 1966 to be the offensive-backfield coach for the Raiders, where Al Davis had just become part-owner. Davis was a disciple of Sid Gillman, the father of the modern downfield passing game whose system used wider formations to open up the field and amp up the excitement.
After one season with the Raiders, Walsh coached the San Jose Apaches of the Continental Football League.
Then came the biggest step of Walsh’s young career: He was hired by Cincinnati Bengals Coach Paul Brown to oversee quarterbacks and receivers. While in Cincinnati, in the early 1970s, Walsh devised the system that would become known as the West Coast offense and revolutionize the game.
His scheme was based on short passes that were likely to be completed, not the high-risk, high-reward downfield passes that had been the norm. His innovations helped transform Kenny Anderson, a late-round draft choice from Augustana College, into a star – one of the “most gratifying experiences of my coaching career,” Walsh said.
Walsh turned down several job offers so he could remain in Cincinnati because he was certain he was in line to succeed Brown. When Brown instead handed the job to Bill “Tiger” Johnson, Walsh was shattered. He resigned his post and moved to San Diego, where he served one year as an assistant for Coach Tommy Prothro.
Walsh would go 5-0 in his career against Cincinnati, including victories in two Super Bowls; Johnson went 18-15 before resigning from the Bengals halfway through his third season.
The big break
Stanford was looking for a coach in 1977 but was skeptical about Walsh. So were other prospective employers, who wondered why the Bengals had snubbed him.
Ultimately, Stanford officials checked with Prothro, who assured them that Walsh was a rising star.
In two years on The Farm, Walsh erased all doubt. He went 17-7, turned Steve Dils and Guy Benjamin into NCAA passing leaders, beat Cal twice and won two bowl games.
“Stanford was the opportunity of a lifetime,” Walsh later said, “and it more than compensated for the Cincinnati disappointment.”
Just down the road, the 49ers were hitting rock bottom. The team staggered to a 2-14 season in 1978. General Manager Joe Thomas had gone through four coaches in two years and traded 14 draft picks during that span.
DeBartolo, the owner, fired Thomas and entrusted the roles of coach and general manager to Walsh, who, at 47, was finally in charge of an NFL team. Things didn’t look much different in the standings at first, as Walsh endured another 2-14 mess and sputtered to a 6-10 finish the next season.
But, behind the scenes, the changes were dramatic. The 49ers were headed in the right direction, with Walsh pointing the way. “From the very start,” former lineman Randy Cross recalled, “you knew what we were doing was different.”
Walsh’s maneuvering came together with the arrival of a skinny quarterback out of Notre Dame, a lowly third-round draft pick whose arm was supposed to be too weak for him to succeed in the NFL. Montana was such a slight figure at his first training camp that Clark, upon seeing him for the first time, was sure the guy in the No. 16 jersey was a Swedish place-kicker.
But Walsh saw something in Montana that no one else did. He saw a player who made up for a lack of arm strength with an exquisite blend of timing, footwork, accuracy, poise and mobility. Here was the ideal maestro for the Walsh orchestra.
“Walsh’s offense was always smooth and very simplistic,” said Mike Singletary, a 49ers assistant who was a star linebacker for the rival Chicago Bears during the 1980s. “Maybe some of the gurus thought it was complicated, but I never thought that. Walsh understood the fundamentals. Everything was done perfectly.”
The 49ers broke through in 1981, with Montana and Clark hooking up for “The Catch.” After the 49ers beat the Cowboys in the NFC title game, Walsh’s first Super Bowl victory would come against his old employer, the Bengals.
The emotional outpouring from the Bay Area after that ’81 championship season stayed with Walsh for the rest of his life. During a reunion of those great 49ers teams in Las Vegas last year, Walsh laughed as he recalled their first victory parade through the streets of San Francisco.
“I thought perhaps a few thousand people might show up, and it was more like 200,000,” Walsh said. “My God, it was incredible. And what I remember is one of our players, Charle Young, standing up before all those people saying, `We are champions!’ “
Powerful legacy
Walsh retired after 10 seasons as coach. His final act that 1988 season was getting carried off the field on his players’ shoulders after a triumph in the Super Bowl – another victory over the Bengals.
He left behind a football family tree that grows new branches with each passing season. Many of his 49ers assistants went on to become head coaches, including Super Bowl winners George Seifert and Mike Holmgren, and in the late 1980s Walsh created the Minority Coaching Fellowship Program, whose products include Bengals Coach Marvin Lewis and former Stanford and Notre Dame coach Tyrone Willingham, now at the University of Washington.
Walsh’s knack for developing up-and-coming coaches was surpassed only by his ability to find overlooked talent on the playing field.
While flipping channels one night in a Houston hotel room, Walsh spotted a dazzling receiver playing for Mississippi Valley State: Jerry Rice, who would go on to demolish every major NFL receiving record after Walsh moved up to draft him with the No. 16 pick in 1985.
Years later, Walsh unearthed another gem in Garcia, who had gone undrafted out of San Jose State and was toiling in the Canadian Football League. Given a chance with the 49ers, Garcia would earn his way into three consecutive Pro Bowls.
Walsh worked as an NBC football analyst early in the 1990s and returned to “teach” Stanford’s football team in 1992. After an initial winning season, however, his teams went 7-14 in the next two seasons, and he resigned.
Although he never completely cut the cord with SJSU, Stanford or the 49ers, he maintained “elder-statesman” advisory roles until his death.
At the 49ers training facility in Santa Clara, the flag was flying at half-staff Monday. Fans had created a small, impromptu memorial of bouquets of flowers and hand-drawn posters.
One read: Rest in Peace Bill Walsh. NFL’s Greatest Coach Ever.
Contact Daniel Brown at dbrown@mercurynews.com and Jon Wilner at jwilner@mercurynews.com. Mercury News Staff writer Dennis Georgatos contributed to this report.
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