NFL Icon and Hall of Famer, Bill Walsh, Dead at 75

By Gordon Forbes, USA TODAY

Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl champion and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, died Monday at 75 after a long battle with leukemia.

Walsh came to be known as "The Genius" while coaching the 49ers to three Super Bowl wins. He never felt comfortable with the label. "It's almost like having a crazy nickname in sports," Walsh once said. "You don't give it much credence over a period of time."

AUDIO REMEMBRANCE: Walsh a wizard at evaluating talent

After Walsh retired in 1989, the 49ers won a fourth Super Bowl the next season. They were coached by George Seifert, but 17 of the starters were from Walsh's last team. Walsh soon regretted stepping aside and letting Seifert coach the team he called "the best in the history of the league." That 49ers team crushed Denver in Super Bowl XXIV, 55-10.

"People were talking about our 1984 team as the best," Walsh said. "That team had an even better record. But that team did not include Jerry Rice. Every position was strong. Every position had a Pro Bowl football player. And the depth was outstanding. Like Steve Young backing up Joe Montana."

While other coaches motivated through fear and intimidation, Walsh motivated through attention to detail, fast, snappy practices and references to military battles. His system was known as the West Coast offense, parts of which are still used by many NFL teams.

Unlike the trendy long-ball offenses of the 1980s, Walsh developed a short, rhythmic passing game. The key elements were the high-percentage pass, the quick delivery to avoid the sack and the run after the catch. And on those Sundays when Walsh was calling plays, the first 25 specifically scripted for the opponent, and quarterback Joe Montana had his rhythm — which was almost always — the 49ers were virtually unbeatable.

"He was not so much fire and brimstone, but more of an intellect," says former Walsh assistant Lynn Stiles. "He knew how to move people and utilize people and how to attack defenses. He was really a game-day coach."

Walsh's overall record with the 49ers was 102-63-1. But that included a struggling 2-14 team in 1979, the year before Montana arrived to run Walsh's offense. By the 1982 season, the 49ers had won their first Super Bowl, holding off the Cincinnati Bengals, 26-21. To loosen up his players, Walsh posed as a bellhop at the team hotel, a funny interlude that showed another side of his creative mind.

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With Montana operating the West Coast offense as if it were a mid-week practice, the 49ers won three Super Bowls and six division titles during the Walsh years. Walsh then retired, citing the pressure of the game. He went out on a wave of high drama in Super Bowl XXIII. Montana, working against the odds and the clock, completed eight of his nine pass attempts on the winning 92-yard drive. There were only 34 seconds left when John Taylor caught the winning pass, ending one of the greatest drives in Super Bowl history.

As Stiles said, Walsh was a great game-day coach.

"I thought Bill was one of the head coaches who was technically brilliant," said former NFL coach Dick Vermeil, one of Walsh's closest friends. "But he could also see the big picture of the whole organization and the whole scheme of things — the whole process of what it takes to win. And he put it together as a leader and then coached it as a leader, probably better than anybody has ever done."

In his book, Finding the Winning Edge, Walsh detailed a remarkable building process that included every aspect of the game. He delivered seven lectures to his coaches every season. He outlined job descriptions and goals for every employee in the 49ers' organization. Walsh also told of holding two four-hour meetings each offseason with his highly competitive owner, Eddie DeBartolo, Jr.

"We had standards of performance that had to be very high," Walsh once said. "You have to focus on details or players can lose their concentration."

Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, once said that "you have to stoke the fires of hate" to play the game. Walsh admitted to using a similar approach to winning.

"I don't know if 'hate' was the word," Walsh once said. "But we always played with our backs to the wall. Every time we played we were in a survival mode, that nobody could take the game away from us."

In their three Super Bowl years, the 49ers were 38-10 in the regular season. Reflecting Walsh's theme of survival, the 49ers were 20-4 on the road in those three years (45-14 as the visiting team over eight seasons), a truly remarkable record.

"On the road, when we were leading and the home fans start to leave, the defensive players would start up a chant, 'There they go there they go.' " said Walsh. "We considered every road game a business trip. We had to take care of business."

Walsh wasn't sure he would ever become an NFL head coach. He was in line to coach the Bengals in 1975 when Paul Brown retired. But Brown chose Bill Johnson over Walsh, who had developed a high-scoring offense with quarterbacks Greg Cook, Virgil Carter and Ken Anderson. Brown, it turns out, refused to recommend Walsh for several open jobs, and claimed he couldn't handle the emotional highs and lows of the game as a head coach.

Years later, Brown apologized. "I was wrong, Bill," he said.

Walsh was 47 when he was hired by the 49ers. He learned the tricks of the trade from Brown, Al Davis, Tommy Prothro and John Ralston, blending their philosophies into an offensive scheme of his own.

"We practiced fast," recalled Stiles. "Quick and explosive. He was a perfectionist."

In offensive meetings, Walsh and the players would talk through plays, rehearsing them in their minds, step by step, until they knew every nuance and reason behind Walsh's strategy. Sometimes in the snappy practices that followed, "you'd never see the ball on the ground," said Stiles.

Former Cleveland quarterback Bernie Kosar is given credit for the term "West Coast offense." After he signed with Dallas in 1993, Kosar told friends, "We're using some of that West Coast stuff here."

Obscured, perhaps, by the 49ers' offensive excellence was Walsh's ability to evaluate players. One of his drafts produced three rookies who would start in the 49ers secondary: Ronnie Lott, Carlton Williamson and Eric Wright. Among his pickups: tight end Russ Francis; linebackers Jack (Hacksaw) Reynolds and Matt Millen; pass rushers Fred Dean and Charles Haley; kicker Ray Wersching and halfbacks Lenvill Elliott and Bill Ring.

"If you ask 10 different people about what made him so successful, you might get 10 different answers," said Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick. "There are any number of people who will tell you it was his ability to evaluate talent."

Indeed, Walsh spotted Ring at the far end of the field in an open free-agent camp. "Who's that little blond-haired kid down there?" he asked John McVay, then the vice president for football administration and general manager. Given Ring's name, Walsh told McVay to sign him.

Walsh, likening the game to a battlefield, often motivated players by quoting famous military commanders. "He always liked war books," said Vermeil, who discovered a number of them in Walsh's spare bedroom during a vacation.

Gen. George Patton, commander of the Third Army in World War II, was one of Walsh's heroes. "Discipline is based on pride in the profession of arms, on meticulous attention to details and on mutual respect and confidence," Patton once said. "Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of the battle or the fear of death."

Walsh lived by Patton's ideology. Under the enormous pressure of the game and his critics, he took a team of marginal skills and turned it into a Super Bowl winner in just three seasons. With Walsh, there was always discipline, detail and precision, the key elements of Patton's military creed. And not long after Walsh joined the 49ers, there was pride, and eventually, those cherished Super Bowl rings.

Walsh's later years were marked by health problems. After he was knocked off his feet by leukemia, he was forced to give up his tennis game. He kept playing golf, but limited his play to nine holes, sometimes as few as five holes. His wife, Geri, suffered a stroke in 2000 that paralyzed her left side. She wore a brace and walked with a cane.

"It takes me an hour to get her ready to go out," he said. "I've been in more women's restrooms. I go right in there with her. I say, 'excuse me.' I have no other choice. She is so critically handicapped. It is sad, so sad."

Soon after he was diagnosed with leukemia, he became anemic and at times unable to eat. At the lowest point, he was flat on his back and could only digest crackers. "At one point," he said, "I didn't care whether I made it or not."

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Heard about this just as we were entering a restaurant.  It took my appetite, so I am putting grief to good use.  No comment here, not yet.

Sorry I couldn't do a better article, because he certainly deserves it, but I'm on the fly.