His beautiful game

Bill Walsh transformed football into a work of art, and gave San Francisco a boost when the city needed it most.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: San Francisco, Football, Gary Kamiya, Opinion

AP Photo/File

San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh is hoisted on the shoulders of his team after they defeated the Miami Dolphins 38-16 in Super Bowl XIX on Jan. 20, 1985.

Aug. 7, 2007 | Since 1981, there has been one pleasure I have been able to count on every week: Watching the 49ers on Sunday. I have fallen off a bit in these last few years, but over a 20-year stretch, I think I missed only one game.

The true pleasures in life are not always august. In fact, maybe most of them aren't. Alfred Hitchcock's anthologies -- which rejoice in titles like "Happy Deathday!" -- slam Kierkegaard to the turf, and P.G. Wodehouse and Georges Simenon don't even let Robert Musil and Cervantes get off the line of scrimmage. As I get older, and small pleasures can be hard to come by, I value the things that brought me happiness, any kind of happiness, a little more, the way you treasure the memory of a face or a place that you may not see again.

And so when I heard the news July 30 that Bill Walsh had died, those decades of winning Sundays came back to me, long vanished but still buzzing with excitement, like the sound of a big crowd as you approach the stadium. Those Sundays were a gift that I and thousands of other San Franciscans will never forget. And Bill Walsh was the man who gave us that gift. Actually, two gifts: He gave us championships, and he gave us a special style of football. Call it the beautiful game.

The beautiful game, o jogo bonito, refers to the unique flair of Brazilian soccer -- graceful, flowing, with velvety, uncannily accurate one-touch passes. The Brazilians, at their best, seem to samba down the field, barely touching the ground. American football, too, had its version of the beautiful game. Bill Walsh created it, his players executed it, and no one could stop it. The result was a kind of football never seen: beautiful football, football as a work of art.

There are certain times when a sports team captures something essential about its city. You think of the swagger of the New York Yankees. The blue-collar grit of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The flash and dazzle of the Los Angeles Lakers. Walsh's 49ers mirrored their city, too, but in perhaps the most unlikely way of all. The qualities San Francisco is famous for -- beauty, sophistication, intellectuality, artistry, eccentricity, hipness -- are the last ones you would think would translate into success on the football field, that arena of blood and sweat and mayhem. But Walsh succeeded in forging a team that not only exemplified those qualities, but kicked the league's ass while doing it. The city of "slim, swivelling hips," as Chicago newsman Mike Royko once derisively called San Francisco, smashed its way into football immortality.

Throwing out the strike-shortened 1982 season, the 49ers won an average of almost 12 games a year in the 18-year period between 1981 to 1998 -- a period of sustained excellence unmatched in the post-AFL-merger era. They won five Super Bowls in 14 years, the most of any team in that period of time, and came within two plays (a ludicrous pass-interference call on Eric Wright against the Redskins and a last-minute Roger Craig fumble against the Giants, both of which are still seared into my memory) of going to two more. Perhaps the most amazing statistic is this one: Between 1981 and 1989, the 49ers had a better regular-season record on the road than any other team in the NFL had at home.

But the numbers don't tell the whole story. For that, we have to go to the cold, clear, chess-grandmaster brain of Bill Walsh. And the players whose talent he recognized, and who he fit into his system the way Miles Davis fit Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams into his second quintet. The comparison to soccer and jazz isn't accidental. Because the real innovation Walsh brought to pro football was controlled improvisation.

Walsh didn't invent the so-called West Coast offense by himself. As my colleague King Kaufman has pointed out, he built on the concepts of Sid Gillman, the great passing-offense genius from the early AFL days. He was also indebted to Don Coryell, who, like Gillman, coached the San Diego Chargers, and the legendary Paul Brown -- both major innovators in opening up the passing game. However, it was under Walsh that the West Coast offense came to fruition and revolutionized the game.

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