Since the history of the National Football League is constantly rewritten, Bill Walsh is remembered today as one of its seminal figures ever.
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| Joe Montana was at or near the top of Bill Walsh's talent finds. (AP) |
His most notable innovation, the West Coast offense, endured well beyond his own tenure, and innovations like scripted plays remain today, since he filled the NFL with protégés as his own mentors, Paul Brown and Al Davis, did for him and his contemporaries. He's on more short lists than we can reasonably count.
But the one he never got full credit for, the one everyone seemed to forget, the one that might actually be his truest gift, is talent visualization. He not only used the knowledge he gleaned to fashion a new offense, he found the players who could run that offense best. Lots of guys know an X from an O, but Walsh, as the San Francisco 49ers general manager, could envision college players, see how they fit his new toy and acquire them.
Joe Montana was a third-round draft choice, which tells us Walsh saw something nobody else did, although if he could see how grandly Montana would play, he probably wouldn't have left him undrafted through 81 picks. But he did maneuver to get Jerry Rice in the first round, and he saw the value of Ronnie Lott and found 15 important members of the Super Bowl years in four drafts.
That isn't coaching, that's talent acquisition. So was his work collecting other teams' castoffs like Hacksaw Reynolds, Fred Dean, Steve Young and Charles Young. So was his ability to build coaching staffs. The only thing he never had to master was the salary cap, because the 49ers of the '80s didn't have one. Under Eddie (My Money Is Your Money) DeBartolo, the 49ers spent more, lavished more and invested more in the football team than any other; in fact, the 49ers inspired the NFL to create and enforce the salary cap.
So the concept of Walsh the Coach does a disservice to Walsh the Football Man. It also does a disservice to Walsh the Man, as labels tend to do. But that's the risk you take when you wear double-knit pants and a whistle at work. People think of you as a coach.
In fact, he was worried at one point in his career that he would only get to be a coach, and a lifelong assistant at that. He didn't succeed Brown in Cincinnati when Brown gave up coaching the Bengals to merely own them, which forced Walsh to find his own way at a fairly advanced age. Stanford fell into his lap, and he spent two years turning them from mediocrity to maddeningly effective. In fact, he spent only a small amount of time doing that; he went 9-3 and 8-4 in his two years.
From there, he was given the run of the 49ers by DeBartolo, who had bought a distressed team and let Joe Thomas turn it into a laughingstock. He didn't spin them around quickly, going 2-14 and then 6-10 in 1979 and 1980.
But in 1981, he had a roster that was largely his own creation, and the method by which that roster could excel. Thus, while the coaching was how he trained for this moment, it was talent accumulation that gave his concepts life. Montana ... Lott ... Rice ... coaches like George Seifert and Bobb McKittrick, Dennis Green and Ray Rhodes, Sam Wyche and Mike Holmgren. They all combined to make one of the great teams in the history of American professional sports, with Walsh as the magnet.
Oh, there were things he didn't do quite so adeptly. He wasn't an effective TV analyst, and his second coaching tour at Stanford ended badly, but he knew the value of timing in a successful life. He came to his true calling late, and he didn't linger long at things that he sensed weren't his cup of meat. He hated the waiting, but it helped hone his skills; getting what he wanted at a younger age might have meant him not having full understanding of his gifts.
But he did wait, and as a result he understood the full depth and breadth of what he needed to do to be more than just another guy with double-knit pants and a whistle. Oh, he could coach at an early age, but what separated him was his keen and broad eye for talent. He was, in short, a hell of a general manager. He won't be remembered for that, but he is remembered because of it.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
