Just a couple of months ago, Bill Walsh was enjoying a sandwich and white wine on the patio behind his home, lunching with two sportswriters he has known for many years.
Walsh's meal was interrupted repeatedly, because his cell phone rang constantly. There were coaches looking for job recommendations, former players, friends, golfing partners or associates from Stanford University, where Walsh worked in recent years.
Even in his twilight years, news of his fight with leukemia no longer a secret, Walsh remained a kingmaker. Nearly 20 years after he coached his final game for the San Francisco 49ers, his influence in the NFL remains strong.
In fact, over the last three decades, including the final quarter of the 20th century, it is quite likely there was not a more significant figure in pro football than Walsh.
Walsh, a Hall of Famer and architect of the San Francisco 49ers dynasty and the popular West Coast offense, died Monday at 75 of leukemia. He was 102-63-1 in 10 seasons with the 49ers, including 10-4 in the postseason. But his impact on pro football went well beyond the 49ers and that prolific offense.
His fingerprints are all over today's NFL. Perhaps his West Coast offense has waned in influence in recent years, but at least a version of it can be found in just about every team's playbook, and the organizational structure he created with the 49ers remains the model for most teams in the league.
Walsh's training camp and practice regimen, which emphasized classroom work and lighter drills than was normal for teams at the time, is now standard practice around the NFL.
And it's not stretching a point to say the last Super Bowl, which featured the first two African-American coaches ever to reach that game, also was a tribute to Walsh's forward thinking; he was years ahead of the league in recognizing and promoting minority coaches.
Before there was a single black head coach in the NFL, Walsh created a minority fellowship program that brought black coaches to training camps to speed their development. Cincinnati coach Marvin Lewis was one of the first to go through it. Tony Dungy, coach of the champion Indianapolis Colts, once played for Walsh in San Francisco.
Walsh, who was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993, coached for only 10 years in the NFL, taking over a down-at-the-heels franchise and transforming it into the team of the decade, if not it's own era. But even after he left the 49ers, following his third Super Bowl victory at the end of the 1988 season, he never was far away from the league.
Former commissioner Paul Tagliabue called on Walsh for several projects, many involving minority coaches and executives. And the 49ers, whenever they had a problem, called on Walsh, too. He turned the team down once and returned two other times, first as a special assistant to the coaching staff for a year in 1996 and later as club president in 1999 following the departure of Carmen Policy to the expansion Cleveland Browns.
There was also a brief turn in broadcasting at NBC and a second run as head coach at Stanford where, more recently, Walsh was the acting athletic director.
As a head coach, Walsh's strengths were his offensive ingenuity and his foresight. He was a master coach and strategist, but many in the league thought him even better at personnel judgment. Ernie Accorsi, a general manager with three NFL teams and recently retired from the New York Giants, once observed that Walsh would have been a great general manager even if he never coached a single game.
