Weird ways and times of a football icon

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/31/OSTLER.TMP

Weird ways and times of a football icon
Scott Ostler
Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Bill Walsh was weird.

He didn't have a normal bone in his body.

It wasn't just his playbook. Walsh's general thinking process was so far outside the box, the box was a $30 cab ride away.

The West Coast offense was weird. And effective, although opposing coaches would have found a way to stop Walsh's crazy dink 'n' dunk attack had he given them another decade or so.

"Before the West Coast (offense)," says Mike Shumann, a wide receiver on Walsh's first 49ers team, "teams would stretch the field vertically. Now we're out there running shallow crossing patterns, the linebackers are looking at our wide receivers, going, 'Where'd he come from?' They'd be so surprised, they'd reach out and try to grab you."

Before Walsh, nothing said football tradition like the daily test of manhood known as dehydration. Walsh watched his 49ers work in the 100-degree heat of training camp and had a weird idea: water.

While other coaches and NFL decision-makers were congratulating themselves on being racially colorblind in the coach-hiring process, Walsh noticed that being colorblind meant being blind to the fact that all the colors were white. He also observed that talk was extremely cheap, so he instituted a program to give black coaches real access to NFL jobs.

He was the rare coach who could mix up his pitches. Walsh had fastballs, curves and change-ups. One minute he's Vince Lombardi, fire and brimstone and bad words. Next minute he's prancing through the locker room wearing football shoes and black tights with a wide-receiver towel tucked in the front, lampooning the ultra-tidy Jerry Rice.

To warn his players about the dangers of night life before a road trip to Los Angeles, Walsh introduced them to a pimp, a prostitute and a drug dealer, played, in full costume, by assistant coaches Bob McKittrick, Sam Wyche and Ray Rhodes.

I missed covering the 49ers in the Walsh era, but I got to know him later, and it was always a treat to talk to the guy. He couldn't help himself from giving you amazing insights and titillating bits of info.

I went away from the sports world for a few years, then I returned to sportswriting duty, and the very day that happened, before anyone knew about that little change, I got a phone message from Walsh.

Whenever a coach or player phones a writer at home, you're either in deep doo-doo or they dialed your number by mistake. I get more unsolicited phone calls from sitting U.S. Presidents than I get from athletes or coaches. I probably hadn't spoken to Walsh since a few years earlier when, in print, I called him a "weasel."

"I was just thinking you should get back to writing about sports," Walsh said, and added some compliments.

If he was working some suck-up agenda, I never figured what it was, because for all he knew I would never have cause to write about him again.

It was just typical Walsh weirdness. When Shumann landed a post-NFL job as a TV sportscaster, Walsh phoned after Shumann's first show and said, "You looked good on TV, Mike, but quit shaking your head so much."

Genius is in the details. If Walsh noticed his players sitting in the same little groups every day at lunch, he would make it known that it was time to mix it up, socially. You're either a team or you're not.

Dying of leukemia is probably not the best ways to be ushered out of the Big Stadium, but dying the way he did allowed Walsh to spend his last couple of years truly appreciating his friendships. His strength would come and go, but his life was a fairly constant interaction with his old players and friends, over long lunches and at his bedside.

There were a lot of stories, a lot of laughs, and every session would end with Walsh saying, "I love you." One recent day Walsh huddled with Al Davis and John Madden. How would you like to harness the weird creative vibes in that room?

Walsh was notorious -- and feared -- for cutting his great players before they were ready to retire. Before Jerry Rice's last season with the 49ers Walsh told him, "It's time for you to move on."

Same deal with Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott and many others. The players now say Walsh wanted to get his men out of the game a year too soon, rather than a year too late and busted up beyond repair. Ruthlessness or compassion? Maybe both.

So if Walsh was taken away from us too soon, nobody would understand that better than he.

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle