by Bill Walsh
And of course there was the deep fulfillment of climbing the mountain, of going where few in my profession were able to go. Our first Super Bowl championship was profoundly meaningful and satisfying—thrilling beyond my ability to fully articulate. Thrilling.
I miss all of that.
Quick Results Come Slowly: The Score Takes Care of Itself
The Fujian Province of China is known as the Venice of Asia because of the superb stone sculptures created there over the centuries. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, near the city of Sichuan, artists—stone sculptors—worked in a time-honored and time-consuming way. Legend has it that when their sculpture was completed, the artist immersed it in the shallows of a nearby stream, where it remained for many years as the waters constantly flowed over it.
During this period, the finishing touch was applied by Mother Nature (or perhaps Father Time). The gentle but constant flow of water over the stone changed it in subtle but profound ways. Only after this occurred would the sculptor consider it complete—only when time had done its work was the sculpture perfect.
I believe it’s much the same in one’s profession; at least it was in mine. Superb, reliable results take time. The little improvements that lead to impressive achievements come not from a week’s work or a month’s practice, but from a series of months and years until your organization knows what you are teaching inside and out and everyone is able to execute their responsibilities in all ways at the highest level.
Your team has absorbed and assimilated not just the mechanics of your own Standard of Performance, but the attitudes and beliefs that are central to it. I believe that every organization has a cultural conscience that it carries forward year after year. That ethos may be good or bad, productive or unproductive. Some leaders are able to create the former, others the latter. But productive or unproductive, it exists, and it is guiding ongoing personnel and informing new arrivals as they come on board.
The attitudes and actions I installed, including the inventory of San Francisco’s football plays—offensive and defensive—were the result of the same guys (or their similarly trained replacements) doing the same thing for years and years. Subsequently, it became almost routine to execute at the highest level when the heat was on. Excellence in every single area of our organization had been taught and expected from the day I arrived as head coach.
The “big plays” in business—or professional football—don’t just suddenly occur out of thin air. They result from very hard work and painstaking attention over the years to all of the details related to your leadership.
Talent, functional intelligence, experience, maturity, effort, dedication, and practice may not be perfect, but they will get you so close to perfection that most people will think you achieved it. And the results will show it.
It takes time to develop this Standard of Performance; it is not just a seminar or a practice or a season’s worth of seminars and practices, but thoughtful and intense attention over years and years. Then, when you’ve got to score on the last play of the game to win, you know it can happen. This is a powerful force to have within you.
In Super Bowl XXIII, the final game I ever coached in the NFL, the Cincinnati Bengals led San Francisco 16-13 when we took possession of the ball on our own eight-yard line with 3:08 remaining to play. Most smart observers assumed a Cincinnati victory was now almost a given. What followed has become legendary in the NFL: the Drive. It is a wonderful example of the principles demonstrated by the stone sculptors of China as applied to one’s profession.
The 49ers methodically—and artistically—marched ninety-two yards in eleven plays, culminating with orderly precision in an eighteen-yard pass from Joe Montana to John Taylor (“20 halfback curl X up”) for a touchdown and a Super Bowl championship. There was hardly a hiccup as Joe and the team looked up from our own eight-yard line and saw the mountain’s summit ninety-two yards away, then calmly—almost nonchalantly—climbed to the top.
As the Drive unfolded—those eleven plays—I had a deep sense that what I was witnessing was the manifestation, the expression, of everything we had done along the way in the previous decade, culminating with this final opportunity for a grand victory. Everything that was happening in front of me went back to the beginning, the first day of practice at training camp ten years earlier, and was linked by all the years of effort and intelligence by all the people in our organization during the decade since then.
From my first day at 49er headquarters, I had begun imbuing individuals with a sense that a higher standard was being taught and learned, executed and expected in all of our actions and attitudes. My Standard of Performance and the hard work all of us put into achieving it had created a deep sense of organizational character, commitment, and ability—a sense that every individual was connected to the entire team, and that this group fighting its way to the summit against Cincinnati was a natural extension of those that had preceded it—culminating now in a work of near perfection.
There was almost a sense of inevitability. We seemed certain, almost destined, to drive the length of the field against a ferocious Cincinnati Bengals defense. At least, that’s how I remember feeling—no panic, no anxiety, no uncertainty. All we had to do was exactly what we had been doing for years and years: adhere to the Standard of Performance we had been sculpting for a decade.
The Drive became the final offensive series of plays in my career as a head coach in the National Football League. As it unfolded on the field in front of 75,129 fans in Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium, I was filled with an appreciation that what these players and the members of our organization who were not on the field were doing was a work of art, one that had been created over many years—similar, in a way, to the sculptures in China. It was a thing of beauty.
I believe it’s true in your profession. Your effort in the beginning is part of a continuum of effort; your Standard of Performance is part of a continuum of standards. Today’s effort becomes tomorrow’s result. The quality of those efforts becomes the quality of your work. One day is connected to the following day and the following month to the succeeding years.
Your own Standard of Performance becomes who and what you are. You and your organization achieve greatness.
For me, the road had been rocky at times, triumphant too, but along the way I had never wavered in my dedication to installing—teaching—those actions and attitudes I believed would create a great team, a superior organization. I knew that if I achieved that, the score would take care of itself.
As you’ve seen, there were stretches where I found it impossible to truly allow that to happen, when I became almost terrified of losing, of letting the score take care of itself. But ultimately, I got back to it. On that final San Francisco 49er drive, ninety-two yards to a championship, I was at peace knowing the score—one way or another—would take care of itself.
And it did.
THE WALSH WAY
A Complex Man. A Simple Goal.
Craig Walsh
I was with my father on that final day, experienced with tens of thousands of others the incredible conclusion not only to Super Bowl XXIII, but to the NFL coaching career of Bill Walsh. “The Drive,” ninety-two yards against Cincinnati for his third Super Bowl championship in eight years, has become legendary—a point of perfection when experts talk about how great teams perform under pressure.
Moments after the final gun sounded and victory was secured, my father found himself in the midst of total pandemonium. The San Francisco 49ers’ locker room was exploding with joy and manic energy—reporters, players, staff, and many others all jammed inside to celebrate. Amid the wild crowd, Bill Walsh was an anomaly—quiet, withdrawn, almost melancholy. As he stepped off the podium after receiving the Lombardi Trophy and trying to give a short speech—shortened because of his overwhelming emotion and fatigue—he found me in the crowd, put his arm around my shoulder, and wept. “Let’s go,” he said quietly. My father was stepping down at the top, like he had asked hi
s players to do when it was their turn.
The Score Will Take Care of Itself is an appropriate title for his book on leadership. As head coach he was tireless—even obsessive—in his drive to intelligently prepare himself and his entire organization (players, assistant coaches, trainers, staff, and everybody else) so that they were in a position to prevail in one of the most fiercely contested professions—the National Football League. A man of great logic, he truly believed that in the end, your ultimate assignment as a leader is getting those on your team totally ready for the battle. After that, you have to let winning take care of itself. His ability to do that contributed to his success; his inability to do that, increasing as the years went by, forced him to leave the game as an NFL head coach.
Having said that, I will share an interesting and revealing and little-known fact about my father: When he started his coaching career, the approval of and acceptance by fans meant very little to him. Football was in large part an intellectual activity in which he completely immersed himself—almost like a scientist searching for, and fascinated by, a mathematical solution in quantum physics. For Dad, “quantum physics” was about leadership, team building, and extraordinary performance in the context of football. (Of course, he also had a competitive streak a mile wide.)
How football could create devotion, fan frenzy, and be America’s number one sport was something of a mystery to my father. When he did the impossible and won Super Bowl XVI in his third year as head coach, he quietly argued against a victory parade in San Francisco because he didn’t think many people would show up; he feared that it would be an embarrassment for his players to be riding down empty streets waving at nobody.
He was surprised, but delighted, when over five hundred thousand people lined Market Street in downtown San Francisco to wildly cheer their newly beloved 49ers. Nevertheless, he could never fully comprehend what all the excitement was about. His excitement was drawn from a completely different source than the average fan’s.
However, after the rallying point of that first San Francisco 49er Super Bowl victory, my father realized what a dramatic role the team had played in bringing the city back together as one following the public trauma of the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the Jonestown massacre a few years earlier. The “Niners” had become the common ground for the entire city of San Francisco and much of the Bay Area—a wildly diverse group of people. Dad took immense pride in this.
In a sense, Bill Walsh introduced twenty-first-century playmaking and management in the NFL two decades before the new century arrived—starting in 1979 when he was appointed president, general manager, and head coach of a lowly franchise in San Francisco, a distant outpost in the eyes of many throughout the league.
While most observers focus on his “genius” when it came to figuring out how a football team gains ground and scores touchdowns, few understand the complex psychological make-up of this remarkable man, whose need to prove himself, while almost self-destructive, was the fuel in the engine that helped catapult him to the top.
I’ve come to understand that, in some ways, my father’s life was almost Shakespearean, because what got him to the top professionally was his downfall personally; in spite of his incomparable achievements, he had trouble ever feeling fulfilled on a continuing basis. While he learned from each loss and every win, my dad increasingly took something away from a defeat that he couldn’t shake. Driven by a desire to gain the stamp of approval from his peers (but not necessarily the public), he was consumed by work and winning, increasingly haunted by losing. When you achieve what he achieved, the inability or unwillingness to grant yourself happiness and satisfaction is perhaps tragic.
By the sixth and seventh year of his decade as head coach with the 49ers, he was showing the price being paid emotionally. After a home game I would sometimes stop by and join him for a Jacuzzi in the backyard of his house on Valparaiso Street in Menlo Park, California. Although by then he had won Super Bowl XVI and was on his way to more championships, his mind-set was not what you’d expect.
Late at night, we would sit there in that hot tub, father and son. If the 49ers had won their game that afternoon at Candlestick Park, he would have a sort of blank look on his face; if they had lost the game that afternoon, he’d have the same blank look. I kidded him about it once. He said ruefully, “This is what happens to a man, Craig.” He wasn’t talking about fatigue from that day’s work. I felt bad for him.
It happened in part because one manifestation of his creative abilities—the West Coast Offense (a name he didn’t like)—was such a paradigm shift that most of the NFL elite, including other head coaches, were reluctant to acknowledge him as a true equal or admit that his system was a dramatic improvement, a giant step into the future. “Backyard football” Dallas rival and head coach Tom Landry called Dad’s radical but successful offense. Others were similarly dismissive and sometimes explained a loss to the 49ers with some version of the following: “We just had a bad day. We were off our game.” Rarely did they like to mention that the cause of their “bad day” was the great football team they had faced across the line of scrimmage. In fact, as the 49ers gained dominance in the NFL, he would sometimes motivate his players when, for example, Dallas was next on the schedule by telling them, “According to Landry, we’ve never beaten the ‘real’ Dallas Cowboys. They’ve always got some goddamn excuse: ‘We had an off day, somebody was injured, the sun was shining.’ Always some excuse for us beating the hell out of them.” His speech was meant to motivate but was based on his own perception of being discounted.
For some, perhaps, dismissive comments and excuses for losing to their team would mean nothing. It was different for my father; it was personal.
As a young athlete, my father moved around a lot. Going to three different high schools, he never felt as if he fit in with the teams he played on; his friends were always changing. With average grades, he fell to the wayside. He grew up tough and had a left hook to prove it. Dad was an outsider; he wanted to be an insider.
What he found along the way professionally, starting in his days as an assistant coach, was an unwillingness by others to “let him in.” He didn’t have the pedigree—the athletic résumé from a big-name school or assistant coaching credentials from a big college program.
He told me this story about a dinner he attended with my mother while he was a quarterbacks coach for the Cincinnati Bengals way back when. Some of the other assistant coaches talked about where they had played football—Duke, Ohio State, Alabama, and other big-name schools were mentioned, as he recalled it. When it came his turn, he said, “I played at San Jose State.” A woman at the table asked, “Is that in Mexico?”
Most of the head coaches at the major colleges and all but a very few NFL coaches had had stellar playing careers; many were already household names. In their eyes, he felt, Bill Walsh was the runt of the litter.
This is the reason that he hid from view—never included on his professional résumé—a brief but successful tenure as head coach of the San Jose Apaches, a semipro football team that he coached very early in his career. Dad feared that others would view it as a step down, “slumming” as a coach, furthering the image that he was not big-league material.
He gradually recognized that the old boys’ network that defined the NFL management and ownership in those days considered him junior grade, not up to head coach potential, in part because of his lack of a pedigree, but also because his style was not traditional, not heavy-handed. It was more professorial or corporate in style than the shouting and screaming, intimidation and punishment that were the usual tools of old-school head coaches in the league.
Here’s a very small example: In those days, one method of “toughening up” players was to prohibit them from drinking any water while they were on the field during practice. Bill Walsh allowed it, because he saw no gain in the policy. In fact, he felt depriving players of water during practice was counterproductive; it lowered performan
ce. The “toughening up” approach, however, was the one owners felt comfortable with because it had been around since the start. In this and many other ways big and small, nobody had ever done it like Bill Walsh did it. His unorthodoxy put off owners who subsequently held him at arm’s length.
My father found evidence of their bias at Cincinnati, where he consistently worked wonders with the Bengals’ offense but didn’t receive a single inquiry from any NFL owner in those many years about becoming a head coach. Even the Bengals’ Paul Brown, the man for whom he was working the wonders, didn’t hire him as his replacement when he retired. Brown chose another assistant, Bill “Tiger” Johnson, who fit the conventional mold of what a head coach should do.
Dad felt snubbed by the NFL, and his feelings didn’t change much as he emerged as one of football’s greatest coaches.
As San Francisco became the dominant team in the NFL, he recognized another kind of prejudice on the part of critics elsewhere—not just against San Francisco but against other teams from “way out west.” The media, especially in the eastern media capitals, were loath to admit that the center of gravity for professional football had moved to the other coast; that “backyard football” had replaced brute force coupled with the occasional long bomb pass; that a guy who looked like he belonged in a board-room or lecture hall was the top dog in coaching.
The other West Coast team that won Super Bowl championships during this era, Al Davis’s Raiders, was given short shrift because Al was viewed by the league as a troublemaker, a renegade. Even though the Raiders had a more traditionally NFL style of football, they, too, were considered interlopers because they were on the “wrong” coast.
My father’s irritation continued when the radical offense he created was dubbed the “West Coast Offense” by the media. The slight may have been unintentional, but perhaps not. He had been the sole creator of the brand-new offense that turned football on its head, and he hadn’t created it on the West Coast but in Ohio with the Bengals. No writer, not one, felt it appropriate to call it the Bill Walsh Offense. Even now, after all these years, that seems either intentional or uninformed.
