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Bill Walsh

Added on 25 April 2008 at 01:15:59, by Charley

Bill Walsh has died. Not a name that resonates, or really has any meaning at all, to Brits over here in Britland where I live. But it has meaning to me, and I believe he was pretty amazing occurrence in a subculture that permeates the entire world, organised sport.
Let’s set the stage. American football is much derided over here as Neanderthal, brutal and incredibly boring with endless pauses between split-second skirmishes.
Well, boring is in the mind of the beholder; these are people who somehow find it possible to watch cricket. American football plays out like a chess game with moments of balletic grace unequalled in any other sport. There’s a lot wrong with American football, but the chess and ballet bits are superlative.
Meanwhile, to someone who didn’t grow up kicking a spherical ball around on a street, soccer (or simply, over here, football) looks like a lot of young men endlessly running around in big shorts bouncing a ball off their heads and feet. The level of inaccuracy in this game, the inability to complete almost any intended action, is as exasperating as it is mind-numbing.
Like I said, it’s in the mind of the beholder.
Getting back to the subject of this column, the uniqueness of Bill Walsh: this was a man who put an enormous emphasis on a quality that is rarely seen in any sport (the jury is still out on whether chess is a sport): intelligence.
He selected players for intelligence, often over their size or athletic skill. He created a style of play that was based on intelligence. Of course, that’s not all. Walsh valued agility, speed, grace, good eyes – the ability to take in a field full of players and make sense of it in a millisecond, particularly useful in quarterbacks. He liked experience, and he valued it particularly when mixed with youth. Simple bulk did not automatically register higher than any of these attributes.
Joe Montana, his perfect quarterback, was fairly slow of foot, not particularly agile, and looked like a wimp on a football field full of giants. He was clearly not a running quarterback like his successor, Steve Young. Nor was he an elusive scrambling wizard, like Fran Tarkenton, or laser-guided cannonball thrower like John Elway.
But he had those eyes, that could instantly pick the best receiver out of up to four of them all jockeying for position. And keep in mind that a quarterback has to throw the ball well before the receiver is actually in an open position. Eyes and brains. And he was accurate. He was perfect for Walsh, and Walsh was perfect for him. They revolutionized football. They made it a sport instead of a social ritual, a test of manhood.
At least it seemed like a revolution: unheard of concepts. Where I was living at the time, in a tiny rural Northern California town, Walsh and the Niners were largely hated. Walsh’s values equated to unmanly trickery; deception plays, option passes, short passes, in fact, just passing the ball at all, was seen as somehow, homosexual. They were known as the Fag-Niners.
Well, when you put your eggs, as it were, in that basket, you know who wins. Four Superbowls to the Niners, while the then-everyman hero coach, Bum Phillips… well, who exactly was Bum Phillips?

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