Marcos Bretón: Walsh touched so many in his 75 years of life

By Marcos Bretón - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Monday, the day Bill Walsh died after a long bout with leukemia, it was easy to look across the NFL and see his impact as mentor to the league's best coaches -- as an innovator, talent evaluator and consummate winner.

Name a single man with a bigger imprint than Walsh on the NFL today? You can't.

His coaching disciples -- Mike Shanahan, Mike Holmgren, Tony Dungy -- are Who's Who in NFL coaching. As an advocate for diversity, Walsh helped create opportunities for African American coaches.

Add three Super Bowl wins -- and fingerprints on two others -- and one could argue that Walsh was the greatest NFL coach ever.

How ironic then that the 49ers -- the team Walsh built into a dynasty -- are now a unit of hulking offensive linemen, power backs, and a defensive-minded coach. While other NFL teams still emulate Walsh, the new 49ers are the antithesis of what he brought to the NFL.

That was strikingly evident Monday when Walsh was remembered with great affection at a ceremony held at Stanford -- not at 49ers headquarters.

It was there that Keena Turner -- a member of Walsh's great 49ers teams of the 1980s -- described his era under Walsh, which stands in contrast to today's 49ers.

"Running the football wasn't the way to get there," Turner said on Monday. "It had to be pretty, it had to be beautiful."

The philosophical estrangement between Walsh and the team he built is testament to the legacy of a complicated man who achieved great success tempered by great disappointment and personal loss.

Who else but Walsh could be known as arguably the greatest decision maker in NFL history -- and yet make a mistake on the biggest decision of his own career?

He quit the 49ers too soon in 1989, a rash decision that Walsh made because he felt burned out yet always regretted.

Walsh later returned as a consultant but the experiment caused tension for 49ers coaches such as Steve Mariucci -- who could never measure up to Walsh.

Over time, the old master just faded away from 49ers headquarters -- even as his legend grew.

He died too soon at 75, but at least he lived long enough to be loved.

"One of the things that made him such a complex man was the complex nature of his legacy," said Randy Cross, the former 49ers offensive lineman who played under Walsh during his heyday. "He was a guy we all respected greatly but he wasn't a guy we necessarily liked during the process. But we all came to love him deeply as a person."

Walsh was like a stern former teacher whose impact on the lives of his students was best appreciated with the perspective and the passage of time.

He should have been an NFL head coach long before the age of 47 when the 49ers hired him in 1979. But he spoke of being stabbed in the back by his old boss -- Hall of Fame coach Paul Brown.

Instead of being hardened by the experience, Walsh derived joy from the success of his pupils -- in football and outside of football.

"I asked him about coaching stuff, family stuff. About the dealing with the media. I asked him about everything," said Dusty Baker, the former Giants manager who was a close friend of Walsh. "He fought cancer like everything else. He was always there to help, even when he was sick."

And even while caring for his wife, who was debilitated by a stroke -- and by the death of his son Steve in 2002, also of leukemia.

In January, Walsh was in Roseville for the memorial service of his college coach -- Bob Bronzan. It was a bitter, cold day of tears and warm embraces as Walsh looked frail -- and was affectionate far beyond his cooly cerebral persona.

He had to know he didn't have much time left. He spoke with old friends with the same urgency that drove him from ordinary receiver at San Jose State in the 1950s to a coaching legend.

There were many knocks along the way, but Walsh reached the end with his oldest friends embracing him and telling him how much he meant to them.

That's bigger than winning Lombardi trophies. That's called being a winner in life.