Walsh’s genius blossomed from his axioms to his hyper-preparedness

Bill Walsh existed for me as a person and he existed as conversation. I spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about him. His personality flowed into my life and many other lives, and when I talked about Bill I usually talked with my friend Fred vonAppen.

VonAppen had been an assistant coach for Bill both times Bill was the head man at Stanford, and vonAppen had been an assistant for Bill with the 49ers. Fred liked to talk about Bill. When I began to write this obituary in advance of Bill’s passing, I phoned Fred, who is retired and lives in Montana. He was the only one I needed to talk to, and he said, “Does this mean the end is close?”

“I’m just trying to be prepared,” I said.

“I understand,” he said. “Write how Bill was a difference maker in the game. Write how he changed the game.”

“Give me an example.”

“The 10 offensive plays he always scripted before games, no one ever did that before Bill. Then it became 15 and 20.

“It was brilliant. I was in training camp at Rocklin the night before an exhibition game and I was just fascinated listening to him. He’d finish explaining a play to the team and it would make sense to you — why it would work and the context it would be used in. Bill was always prepared.”

I told Fred that Bill was prepared in other ways, hyper-prepared. He was prepared because one time he wasn’t prepared and he failed. He was in Cincinnati, was Paul Brown’s No. 1 assistant, and he was calling the plays. In 1975 the Bengals lost to the Raiders in the playoffs and that’s where Bill failed. Near the end, the Raiders fumbled and the Bengals got the ball. If they could gain a few yards and kick a field goal they could send the game to overtime. But Walsh panicked, couldn’t think straight, froze, and he made bad calls and the Bengals didn’t get their field goal.

He never had practiced a two-minute offense because Brown did not believe in a two-minute offense. When Bill went to the 49ers, he relentlessly practiced situational football. “The Catch,” that famous reception by Dwight Clark against Dallas in the 1982 NFC championship game, may have looked improvised, but it was a situational play Bill had made Montana and Clark practice dozens of times.

Fred and I agreed Paul Brown had broken Bill’s heart. When Brown stepped away from day-to-day operations of the Bengals, Bill assumed he would become head coach. He didn’t understand how Brown perceived him. Bill’s hair was too long. He wore boots that zipped up the side. He was too California. He once had coached a semipro team, for heaven’s sake, the San Jose Apaches. And he was too sensitive. Brown never would give his team to Bill, and he didn’t.

When he learned the truth, Walsh arranged to leave Cincinnati, got a job with the Chargers. He walked into Brown’s office to inform Brown he had another job, but he burst into tears. He felt like a betrayer.

Brown could not understand this. For him, the crying was proof he had been correct in passing over Walsh, a crybaby, a weakling.

After Walsh became famous, Brown would take pleasure in saying, “I had Walsh here. I got him from a semipro team.”

Fred and I agreed Walsh was sensitive and insecure. We liked that about him. He had an artistic sensibility, but he also could be tough, had boxed as a light heavy at San Jose State, knew everything anyone could know about boxing, thought Joe Louis would have whipped Muhammad Ali.

I told Fred a story Bill had told me more than 10 years ago. He and his wife Geri had gone to Tahoe for a few days. It was late winter and snow covered the ground and Bill was out driving.

A guy in a pickup behind Bill thought Bill was driving too slowly. He started honking. Bill ignored him. The guy whacked his bumper into Bill’s rear. Bill pulled into a turnout and the guy followed him. Bill climbed out of his car and the guy got out, too.

Bill sized him up — young, big, slightly overweight. The guy rushed toward Bill, ready to fight.

“I punched him twice in the face and I left him there,” Bill told me. “I drove home and Geri saw blood on my hand and shirt and she asked what happened and I said, ‘A young punk thought he could take advantage of an old guy.’ ”

Bill asked me not to reveal that story and I never did until today.

Fred had seen Bill’s toughness with the 49ers. In 1986, they had lost a game in New Orleans. Joe Montana, recovering from spinal surgery, didn’t play and neither did second-string quarterback Jeff Kemp. Walsh had to use third-stringer Mike Moroski.

Afterward, 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo went berserk. Eddie did that in those days. He threw a Coke can at a TV screen in the locker room and then he wanted to shout at the coaching staff and after that he wanted to yell at the team.

Fred and the other coaches started to walk into the coaches’ locker room but Bill said, “Men, wait outside. Eddie and I need to talk.”

Fred could hear the shouts coming from the room. Fred could hear Bill calling the Niners “my team.”

“Eddie didn’t understand this was Bill’s turf and he wouldn’t relinquish it,” Fred told me. “We appreciated that.”

Eddie decided not to speak to the coaches or the team.

“Let me tell you the Charles Haley story,” Fred said.

He had told me this story before, but I always liked to hear it. Sometimes we tell each other the same story over and over again and they never seem stale.

Haley, as you remember, was a great defensive player for the Niners but he also could be a flake. It was preseason in Haley’s first year and the team had played an exhibition game and Haley had not played well. The next day at the defensive team’s meeting Ronnie Lott said to George Seifert, who was defensive coordinator at that time, “Coach Seifert, may I have a minute.”

Lott looked at Haley.

“Haley, stand up,” he ordered.

Haley obeyed.

“You have great potential,” Lott said. “We 49ers start harder and finish better than all the other teams. We have a standard of play. You better get it or you won’t fit in here.”

Fred said Lott was tough, but that wasn’t the point. Bill had instilled a standard of play in his veterans and they passed it down to the rookies. The standard made the Niners the Niners, and a veteran like Lott would not allow the standard to slip. Haley eventually got the standard.

Fred said Bill never lost a bowl game. He won every bowl game he coached at Stanford and he won every Super Bowl his 49ers played.

“He’s undefeated,” Fred said.

Fred said Bill had wisdom. It wasn’t just something big like the “standard.” It was little things, too. Fred called these Bill’s axioms and postulates.

Bill told his coaches not to do all their coaching on the practice field. Hold something back. Walk into the locker room later on and make a point to a particular player about tackling or catching the ball. Something technical.

Why? Bill didn’t want the players to own the locker room. Bill didn’t want coaches to feel uncomfortable in there. If players ruled the room, some malcontent could recruit others and pretty soon you’d have an insurrection on your hands. Bill understood that. Later on, the players owned the locker room on a team Fred worked for. The team wasn’t very good.

Fred and I had been talking a long time now. He said Bill had a great sense of humor. He said he had two stories I’d never heard.

He said in Bill’s first go-round at Stanford they were recruiting a big defensive lineman from Bakersfield. Fred said the lineman is a great guy, but I’ll leave out his name because it doesn’t matter. Bill was on his phone in his office and Fred was on the extension in his office. The parents wanted the kid to go to Stanford but he was caught up in the hype of USC and Oklahoma. Fred had heard Barry Switzer even slept at the kid’s house on a recruiting trip.

So, they were schmoozing the lineman, and Bill, a great recruiter, had just reached the point where he started emphasizing how going to Stanford was for more than the education — it was about networking with the country’s elite for later life. The kid’s mother, on another extension, said, “Son, you need to consider this.”

To which the kid replied, “Mom, shut up. Are you on drugs?”

Fred went off.

“You can’t talk to your mom like that,” he shouted at the kid. “If you come here, I’ll work your ass off.”

And then Fred hung up on him. Bill came running into his office, his face white.

“You blew that kid out of the tub. Get your car. We’re driving to Bakersfield right now.”

They started driving to Bakersfield. Somewhere on I-5 Bill decided he was hungry. He hadn’t had breakfast before Fred started shouting at this lineman Bill really wanted and now he needed to eat. Fred pulled into the parking lot of some joint, and as they starting walking in, Bill noticed about 40 Harleys.

“I’ve got to go all the way to Bakersfield because of you,” Bill said, “and now you bring me to some Hell’s Angels Place.”

And then they busted up laughing right there in the parking lot.

When they got to the house in Bakersfield, the mom told Bill that USC and Oklahoma said they’d really take care of her son.

“Nonsense,” Bill said. “At Stanford we’ll teach him to take care of himself.”

The lineman went to Stanford.

“You’ve got to hear this one,” Fred said.

It was before the 1977 season, Bill’s first year at Stanford, and he’d assembled a distinguished staff. They had convened to a conference room for Bill’s first staff meeting and they were sitting around a table with Bill at the head in the power position. Fred was there and Seifert and Rod Dowhower and Norb Hecker.

Fred said Bill was pontificating about what it would take at Stanford to create a winner. He warned everyone not to criticize former coach Jack Christiansen. His coaches didn’t do things like that. Fred sat there thinking Bill was “classy.”

As Bill warmed to his subject, Fred noticed he began leaning back in his chair.

“All of a sudden, Bill topples backwards and he keeps talking,” Fred said. “He didn’t go, ‘Oh, my God I’m going over.’ He just kept talking like this was some kind of routine. He’s lying on his back in the chair and he’s talking. Of course, he knew it was funny, but he didn’t want what happened to detract from his first meeting with his staff.”

Fred and I laughed a long time. I felt the tears in my eyes. It was time to hang up and we said we’d talk again soon and when we do, we’ll talk about Bill. The conversation continues.

You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lcohn@pressdemocrat.com.