If Bill Walsh said it once, he said it 49 times during his first couple years as an NFL head coach:
“You know,” he would say, “I didn’t get the chance to be a head coach until I was 48.”
He said it so often and with such a wistful countenance that one had no choice but to assume he was haunted by his perpetual longing.
It’s common knowledge that Walsh was devastated when the great Paul Brown passed him over for the head coaching position with the Cincinnati Bengals. Walsh had served on Brown’s staff for eight years, first as receivers coach, then quarterbacks coach and de facto offensive coordinator. He had earned a reputation as a creative talent, an innovator. Upon his retirement after the 1975 season, Brown anointed defensive coordinator William “Tiger” Johnson as his successor.
Walsh spent the next season as the San Diego Chargers’ offensive coordinator, followed by two seasons as head coach for Stanford. This is the legend that countless 49ers fans can recite by heart. But according to the recently published book “Guts and Genius: The Story of Three Unlikely Coaches Who Came to Dominate the NFL in the ’80s,” Walsh experienced earlier, more personal setbacks.
(By the way, the two other coaches featured in the book are Joe Gibbs and Bill Parcells. And you’re right, this would make a great Christmas gift, giving 49ers fans something to smile about and all.)
“My dad resented his dad because he moved him around,” Walsh’s son Craig told author Bob Glauber. “There wasn’t a lot of sharing of emotions between my grandfather and my father. There’d be a lot of drinking and screaming and yelling at his mom. There wasn’t a lot of hand-holding.”
The amateur psychologist in you might conclude that young Bill was seeking for something more basic than a head coaching job. “Having to be the new kid always destroyed me,” he told David Harris, author of the 2008 book “The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty.”
Then there was this scarcely believable anecdote. It seems Walsh’s mother bought Bill a duckling for a pet. “The duck would wait for my dad to come home from school,” Craig Walsh said. “The duck would come over, and my dad would embrace the duck, feed the duck.”
One evening Walsh was unable to locate the duck. Turns out Walsh’s dad was preparing it for dinner.
“He realized right then that it was going to be up to him,” Craig Walsh said of his dad. “He was close to his mother, but his dad … he couldn’t stand him.”
Bill Walsh played football in high school and college. His first head coaching job was at Washington Union High in Fremont where he did everything including driving the team bus. He went on to work as an assistant coach at Cal, Stanford and the Raiders. Then there was the job he rarely spoke of, and never put on his resume — with the semipro San Jose Apaches.
“Bill always wanted to be a pro head coach,” John Madden told Glauber. “He wanted it so bad that he took the San Jose Apaches job. If you look at his trail (to become an NFL head coach) it wasn’t an easy trail. He thought it would happen a lot earlier.”
Interestingly, Walsh and Madden worked at the same desk with the Raiders, though not at the same time. Madden had just been hired as the new linebackers coach. He got the workspace vacated by Walsh when he joined the Apaches.
“Is there anywhere he ever talks about it?” Madden asked. “I couldn’t believe it. He was leaving pro football to coach semipro. I thought, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ but he wanted to be a head coach.”
He eventually got there, winning three Super Bowls in eight years, making dreams come true and earning widespread acclaim. But he never forgot the journey.