Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/110292/1102520.000

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                                                                                PROFILE, Page 62

The Second Coming


With his return to Stanford, BILL WALSH converts campus agnostics
into believers and raises an academic question: Can a football
coach be called a genius?

By PAUL WITTEMAN/PALO ALTO


    Nestled in a stand of fragrant eucalyptus trees at the
Embarcadero Road entrance to the campus of Stanford University
is a billboard advertising the home schedule of the varsity
football team. But the larger-than-life image on the billboard
that causes motorists to pause is that of a man with a mane of
white hair beckoning them to turn in on a Saturday afternoon,
park their cars, fill the 85,500 seats at Stanford Stadium and
watch him lead the local student athletes to the promised land.
Which, in the vernacular of Stanford football, means the Rose
Bowl game in Pasadena on January 1st.

    In the rich but checkered history of Stanford football,
sporting supplicants who have placed their fannies on Stanford
Stadium's wooden-bench seats in prayerful anticipation of just
such an event have spent more than their share of New Year's
days sorely disappointed. There have been moments of brilliance,
of course. On occasion, there have even been seasons of
considerable distinction. But the chroniclers of sport have
always preferred to measure excellence in terms of eras. Eras
have been in short supply recently at Stanford. So too have been
coaching dynasties. There's certainly been nothing like the
dynasty Bill Walsh ruled when he was the coach of San
Francisco's professional team, the 49ers.

    Sportswise, that was a dynasty with substantial heft. It
lasted the better part of a decade and led to three triumphs in
the Super Bowl. As a result, Walsh first had the cloak of
greatness draped around his shoulders. Then, as the
championships accumulated, the purveyors of hyperbole whisked
it away and replaced it with the heavier mantle that bore the
title "genius." The fact that Walsh on occasion used words such
as "sublime" to describe the play of his team certainly set him
apart from those in the pro-football fraternity, whose
grammatical constructions often drift toward the martial,
monosyllabic and scatological. No less a personage than former
Secretary of State George Shultz, now penning his memoirs at the
Hoover Institution on Stanford's campus, says, "I have come to
admire him as a great intellect."

    In January, at age 60, years after he stepped down as head
coach of the 49ers, Walsh decided to seek the sublime again,
leaving the television booth and a lucrative contract as an
analyst of N.F.L. games for NBC. To the surprise of many,
perhaps even himself, he took a pay cut to $150,000 a year (plus
fringes) to become head coach at a school where athletes can
conjugate a verb, carry on a conversation and occasionally play
a little football. Walsh described the feeling upon his return
home to a campus where he last coached 14 years ago as one of
unmitigated "bliss."

    Midway through his first season that feeling is
undiminished, and it has spread into academic nooks where
enthusiasm for football has rarely flourished. Unexpected
back-to-back victories over Notre Dame and UCLA propelled
Walsh's charges into a national ranking in the top 10 for the
first time in 22 years; despite a subsequent loss to Arizona,
Walsh's return to Stanford and his application of complex pro
strategies to college ball have revived discussion of whether
a mere football coach could actually qualify for the untenured
title of genius.

    Some students of the sport believe so. Says Beano Cook,
the clever TV analyst for ESPN: "If Walsh was a general, he
would be able to overrun Europe with the army from Sweden."
Leonard Koppett, whose observations of the game have graced many
publications, including the New York Times, for almost 50 years,
puts it another way: "In that narrow field of conceptual
football, Walsh is a genius the way Heifetz was a genius with
the violin."

    The genius flows, in part, from Walsh's capacity to master
the intricacies and smallest details of the game. If an
opponent devised a defense that nullified the five options
designed into the 49er offense, Walsh would quickly create a
sixth. Then a seventh. No detail was too insignificant, and no
game ever strayed far from his mind. "If we won by 35, I would
wake up in the middle of the night and see how we could have won
by 42," he says. "In the early days, if we lost by 21, I would
wake up and see how we could have lost by only 14."

    Walsh would extract those lessons from his subconscious
and bake them into his next game plan. In turn, he made his
players practice the hypothetical so as never to be surprised
when it unexpectedly happened the next Sunday. "Everybody was
ready for every situation," says 49er offensive tackle Harris
Barton. "When we began a game, we really had an edge." Adds 49er
linebacker Mike Walter: "On the field, the game can be a blur.
If you have panic on the sideline, it will kill a team quickly."
Walsh, standing serenely on the 49er sideline, secure in the
knowledge that he had every option covered, was the antithesis
of panic.

    Yet Walsh has often seemed most creative when he turns
apparent weakness into unorthodox strength. At Stanford that has
proved to be something of a necessity. Walsh inherited a stout
defense from his predecessor and onetime protege Dennis Green.
The offense is a different story. With the exception of Glyn
Milburn, an elusive back who runs like a scalded whippet, there
is little team speed. After some thought, Walsh converted
250-lb. defensive end Nate Olsen, son of former N.F.L. star
Merlin, into a blocking back, and sometimes uses 290-lb. tackle
Jeff Buckey as if he were a tight end. "I never would have
thought of that," says Stanford running-back coach Bill Ring,
who played for Walsh in San Francisco and suspended a successful
career as a banker with Wells Fargo to learn to coach at the
knee of the master. "We had to get an advantage somehow," says
Walsh. "Without speed, we sought a size advantage." Olsen has
yet to run with the ball, but the genius says the opportunity
will present itself when least expected. "We've got a play," he
hints.

    "Walsh is unhappy unless he's plotting to beat somebody on
Saturday," says Beano Cook. Not really, says Walsh, who sees his
role now as a coach of coaches as well as of players. Besides
Ring, there are four other former 49er players on Walsh's staff
who have little or no coaching experience. Says Ring, speaking
of the intellectual challenge Walsh presents to both players and
coaches: "You don't have to be a Rhodes scholar, but it helps
to be bright." The bright, of course, are easier to teach. "This
is a platform to use my teaching and counseling skills," Walsh
says. "When you reach age 60, you want to give something back,
to teach. There isn't anything I have to prove to myself."

    Without question, but Walsh is not being entirely honest
with himself. He still wants to win each Saturday. "It will be
difficult to be the Rose Bowl representative, but it can be
done," he says, articulating goals that are tangential to
teaching. "It is not likely that we will be national champion."
He quickly ticks off the reasons: admissions standards that are
arguably the toughest of any college playing Division 1
football, academic standards that require players to take
courses in actual intellectual disciplines. "A lot of
universities have a group of mercenaries playing for them,"
Walsh says. "You hope they're learning something, but their goal
is merely to play pro football."

    Stanford's rigorous academic requirements can be viewed,
as they should be, as laudable institutional attributes. Or
they can be seen darkly as impediments to achieving the kind of
success that has made Bill Walsh famous. "Some people will look
for me to fail," he says. That Walsh worries about such things
reveals an ego that is curiously fragile. "For all his success,
he's not as secure as he should be," says a former coaching
colleague. "He agonizes." Walsh is also easily wounded by
criticism. Several years ago, when quarterback turned
TV-talking-head Terry Bradshaw publicly criticized Walsh's
earnest style in the broadcast booth, Walsh subsequently
buttonholed friends and colleagues to seek reassurance that he
was not a failure.

    In the days immediately following his appointment, San
Francisco newspapers reported that Walsh's compensation package
ranged anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000. If true, that would
have been more than the salary of then Stanford president
Donald Kennedy, who made $240,000 in 1990. There was a brief
flurry of protest raised by faculty members who thought the
football tail was wagging the institutional dog at a university
that had always placed academics first. English professor
Ronald Rebholz raised the issue in the faculty senate to no
avail. "It's nonsense," says political science professor Stephen
Krasner. "Football is a business. The guy is going to bring in
more money than his salary is going to cost."

    Indeed, athletic director Ted Leland points out that
season-ticket sales increased by 5,000 over 1991 after Walsh's
appointment was announced. That's a net increase in revenue of
$250,000. The size of the radio contract Stanford signed to
broadcast its games doubled this year, a fact Leland attributes
directly to Walsh. While Walsh draws a percentage from that
contract, he's still probably making less than David Korn, dean
of the Stanford school of medicine, who has yet to beat UCLA.
Korn was paid $274,000 in 1990, the last year for which figures
are available.

    Says Walsh: "I engaged in no negotiations whatsoever. I
accepted what Stanford offered." Since then he has checked with
his good friend Lou Holtz at Notre Dame, who has a practiced eye
for assessing compensation packages among his peers. "Lou tells
me that I'm in the top 30. There are probably three coaches in
the Pac-10 who make more. I'm sure I'm not breaking the bank,
but I can understand the faculty's feelings."

    Not to worry, Bill. "From the faculty standpoint, this is
not an issue," says Krasner. Even critic Rebholz admits the
truth of that assertion. "Everybody is delighted by the fact
that Stanford is doing well. There is no negative sentiment."

    If the faculty and athletic administration are pleased,
the football players required some initial convincing. "Most of
the members of this year's team were recruited by Denny Green,"
says Merlin Olsen. "They liked Denny. Bill had to do a sales
job, and he has done a good one." But in the early days of the
Walsh regime, the players held back, not sure what to make of a
coach whose sense of humor once prompted him to disguise
himself on the spur of the moment as a bellhop. He then tried
to extract tips from his players as they emerged from the team
bus after it arrived at the hotel. "In the beginning," says
junior quarterback Steve Stenstrom, "he would say something
funny, but we weren't sure we should laugh. Now we laugh at his
jokes every day. He keeps us loose."

    On top of that, Stenstrom was suddenly attending a seminar
in the techniques of becoming a great quarterback run by the
premier teacher of N.F.L. quarterbacks over the past two
decades. "The day I found out that he was coming here, I was
overwhelmed," says Stenstrom. "I was a big Joe Montana fan, and
now I was going to be coached by Joe Montana's coach." One
problem. Walsh was unable to bring Jerry Rice from the 49ers to
catch passes. Walsh will be scouring the nation's high schools
for a Rice catch-alike.

    Stanford's opponents will not be happy if he finds such a
player. Or three. Stanford is no longer a soft touch eagerly
sought out by schedulemakers at other institutions. "He's going
to drive Notre Dame nuts," says ESPN's Cook of Walsh. That will
surely be the case as well with traditional rivals U.S.C. and
California. Not to mention powerful Washington, which shares the
top of the national polls this season with Miami of Florida.

    Washington will be favored comfortably when Walsh takes
his team to Seattle for the game that will probably decide who
goes to the Rose Bowl. If Walsh manages to upset the odds again
and bring home a victory, there are some at Stanford who feel
that it would be time to re-examine the question of genius. "If
he beats Washington," says Professor Krasner, "all questions
will have been answered. We will deify him."

    Don't take it personally, Bill.