Bill had a plan for everything, a Standard of Performance for each one of us that was so clear he could spell it out exactly. And he did. If you were a San Francisco 49er, you were not foggy on what his goal was for you specifically—what he wanted you to do—and for the organization too.
Right from the start, he really got out there and coached—rolled up his sleeves and got totally into teaching what he was aiming for. And he did that every day of every year for a decade. Of course, the offense was his baby, his first love, and he was totally involved in coaching the smallest details of its execution. He was not aloof, but right in there with the troops. Sometimes he’d take a break for a few minutes and be over on the side shadowboxing and the next minute be back in the thick of things. (Shadowboxing! That got noticed.)
The year before Bill arrived, we were 2-14 and maybe the worst team in the history of the NFL. The next year, under Bill, we had exactly the same record, 2-14, but we were the
best
2-14 team in the history of the NFL. We had the germinating seeds of a good offense, and we sensed it. Players are very hard to fool, and we could see things happening because of Bill.
For the first three years, when he was doing this almost miraculous turnaround of the San Francisco 49ers, from the worst in the NFL to champions, we were all like coworkers, so we could really see what he was suffering through; only two wins his first year, followed by a horrible eight-game losing streak in the middle of our second season. That streak just ate his stomach up. It was his team, his deal, and he could not figure out a way to pull us out of it. You saw how it really killed him, because he was in so close with us. We could feel it, what he was going through.
When we’d watch film and see a guard go the wrong way pulling, or a running back hit the wrong hole, or a quarterback ignore the first read, we knew we were screwing up
his
offense. It was ours too, but it was his first. He had created perfection on paper, and we couldn’t execute it. But he kept pushing us to get better.
He’d tell us that perfection usually wasn’t possible, but that was what he wanted us to aspire to. And the offensive plays he dreamed up needed perfection in order to work. Bill had the same high standard not just for the offense and for the defense and for the special teams, but for everything: the way the office was run, the personnel department, everything and everybody. He had his hands on everything in the organization.
After three or four years, Bill started giving each of us individually the Talk. He called you into his little office in that rat hole of a building we were in on Nevada Street in Redwood City, California, and gave you a synopsis of how he saw your future. You could tell when a guy came down from his office and he’d heard a version of reality from Bill that he didn’t like.
He called me in one time after I’d had the best season of my career and said, “Randy, you probably have five to six years left in the NFL. But my guess is that here, with us, you’ve got three or four years.” I gulped: “What?”
I came down from his office with one of those looks on my face I’d seen on others. But he was doing everybody a service, because he was absolutely right. And that’s a little piece of why he was ahead of his time. He was looking out for the welfare of organization, but also the players, by helping us deal with that harsh little reality; namely, we weren’t playing football forever, and we
certainly
weren’t playing for him forever. He didn’t lead us down a rosy path. He gave us the truth.
We won a Super Bowl in Bill’s third year and the following season basically tanked. After that, he pulled back from us in some ways. Not only did he feel we had forfeited his trust, but also there were veterans on the team and he was going to have to start making some hard decisions about them. So he began separating himself somewhat. From then on, he had a more arm’s-length connection emotionally, a more professional relationship than in the early days. He was still hands-on with his coaching, but he pulled back from the personal part of it. It’s hard to explain, but there was a change.
Two years later we won another championship, Super Bowl XIX—just tore through people during an 18-1 year, one of the best teams that anybody had ever seen. Once that happened, from that moment on, we had sort of set our own high-water mark. Good luck meeting that one every year. Nevertheless, the pressure on Bill got ratcheted way up by the owner, Eddie DeBartolo. A Super Bowl was the norm; anything less was not acceptable, and the pressure became crushing.
In Bill’s final season, his tenth, he really got put through the wringer. We were 6-5 at one point and being written off by everybody. After a one-point loss at Phoenix to the Cardinals, Eddie stormed into our locker room immediately after the game and was livid. He dressed down everybody verbally, I mean really hard. Threatening us. That wasn’t such a big deal; we’d been screamed at as a team before, nothing new there. But this time Bill himself was targeted in the threats and dressing-down. He got screamed at along with the rest of us. That was an eye opener right there—a first for us. It had to really hurt him—to be humiliated like that. Looking back, I don’t think Eddie would consider it one of his sterling moments.
But that’s what that place was about as the years went on. We weren’t there to be good, we weren’t there to win a lot of games, we were there to win Super Bowls. Otherwise, get out. And personally, I think that level of expectation is productive. It’s the only way to go about doing it, even though it cost Bill a couple of years on his career and maybe some more Super Bowls.
Under the pressure he had on him during the last few years, there was no way he could keep going. At the end he would have needed a six-month vacation all by himself on a desert island—making him sleep all the time, making him relax, making him chill out—if he wanted to continue under that load and that pressure.
Throughout the years, Bill’s passion was so evident. It became the passion of his team and the staff and everybody in the organization. We stepped up to his level of dedication, his standard, his vision, and his ability to get the job done. And brother, if he detected anything less than an equal kind of passion from any one of us, we’d get the sharp end of the stick.
That’s why I chuckle when I see all these pictures of Bill, that image of him being a professor, pensive, the “thinker” with his hand on his chin, contemplating the exact words of his next lecture. Nobody on the outside ever saw the
other
side that he could summon up. Bill Walsh could burn a hole right through you with his eyes. Right through your bones and everything. His eyes could knock you out.
We saw a whole different guy from the professor. He could present a whole different vocabulary when he wanted to—like a longshoreman. But it was part of his passion for greatness.
Bill Walsh had the ability to change the way people thought—not just how we performed a task, but how we thought and
felt
about who we were. In the beginning, when we were as bad as we were, nobody was thinking about a Super Bowl. Our goal in life was just to be pretty good. Bill’s goal in life was to convince us that we could be great. And he did; and we were. That’s why he was such a great leader.
PART V
Thin Skin, Baloney, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”: Looking for Lessons in My Mirror
How You Get Good: No Mystery to Mastery
If you’re Jerry Rice, the greatest receiver in NFL history and, according to some, the greatest player, you’re practicing a slant pass pattern at 6 A.M. over and over with nobody within a mile of you—no football, no quarterback, nobody but Jerry working to improve, to master his profession.
Why is the NFL’s greatest-ever receiver doing this? Jerry Rice understands the connection between preparation and performance; between intelligently applied hard work and results; between mediocrity and mastery of your job. And Jerry has the skill coupled with the will to do it.
Joe Montana, perhaps the greatest quarterback in NFL history, in his last season as a professional, when he was playing for Kansas City, would spend two hours a day every day at the same little practice field at Menlo College near San Francisco. I would work with him on basic fundamentals that would bore a high schooler to death. Joe had four Super Bowl rings. How did he get them? Why was he on that little practice field? Joe Montana understands what mastery means.
You never stop learning, perfecting, refining—molding your skills. You never stop depending on the fundamentals—sustaining, maintaining, and improving. Jerry and Joe, maybe the best ever at their positions, at the last stages of their careers were still working very hard on the fundamental things that high school kids won’t do because it’s too damn dull.
It wasn’t dull to Jerry and Joe, because they understood the absolute and direct connection between intelligently directed hard work and achieving your potential. We all do; you do; I do. Everybody who’s a serious player knows what it takes. The difference is how much you’re willing to give to get there.
For us, there is no mystery to mastery. And it applies to football players and coaches, general managers and executives in sports or business. It applies to anyone anywhere who wants to get really good—who wants to master his or her profession. It applies to you.
Sine Qua Non: Your Work Ethic—What William Archibald Walsh Taught His Son
For me, the starting point for everything—before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience—is the work ethic. Without one of significant magnitude you’re dead in the water, finished.
Among other things, I knew the example I set as head coach would be what others in the organization would recognize as the standard they needed to match (at least, most of them would recognize it). If there is such a thing as a trickle-down effect, that’s it. Your staff sees your devotion to work, their people see them, and on through the organization.
Obviously, it’s not enough for you alone to work hard; there must be a similar organizational work ethic for anything of significance to occur. You—the one in charge—are the reference point for what that means.
What does total effort and 100 percent commitment and sacrifice look like? The leader—head coach in my case—is the one who answers that question by example for the entire team; you demonstrate in your behavior what it looks like. Just talking about it, exhorting those in your organization to “give it all you’ve got” is close to meaningless. It’s like telling someone what constitutes a great movie. They’ve got to see it to know it. Same thing with a voracious appetite for work. Most people don’t have it; many people can achieve it; one person is charged with setting the standard and demonstrating what it means: you.
During my years as head coach both at Stanford University and with the San Francisco 49ers, I believe it is safe to say there was no single individual in the organization—player, assistant coach, trainer, staff member, groundskeeper, or anyone else—who could accurately say he or she out-worked me. Not one. I can state that with no fear of contradiction. Some worked as hard—nobody worked harder.
I never asked anyone to do more than I was willing to do, nor what I wasn’t willing to do. Nobody could ever—not once—point at me and say, “Walsh sits on his ass in his office all day while we do the work.” When that sentiment spreads through an organization, you have signaled that “sitting on your ass all day” is an accepted standard of performance.
I was fortunate in this regard, because when I was growing up my role model was a good one. The guy who set the standard for me was my father. Dad knew what it meant to really work hard. And he did. William Archibald Walsh never went past eighth grade, scrambled around as a young man to make money, and came through tough times, including the Great Depression. He struggled to make a living for his family but showed me what a man does when he has a job to do: He goes out and does it.
During the Depression, my father was paid thirty-one cents an hour to work ten hours or more a day on the assembly line at the huge Chrysler plant near our small house in south central Los Angeles. That didn’t pay the bills, so he set up a little auto body repair shop in our garage, where he worked after he got
done
working at the plant, late at night and on weekends.
When I was a teenager, I had to work with him on many of those evenings and weekends, long hours into the night helping him out. I hated it, but he taught me the connection between hard work and survival, between survival and success. Dad taught me that. His work ethic became
my
work ethic.
He paid a tremendous price for his willingness to work. It may have shortened his life—a life that offered little in the way of fun or material reward—and kept him from connecting in any meaningful way with his son. I never really got to know my father; he didn’t have time. It was all work for Dad, or his family wouldn’t survive.
Over the years, I’ve heard many theories, often complex or convoluted, on what it takes to be an outstanding leader. Most of the theories seem to take a monumental work ethic for granted, as if it is assumed or something, as if people automatically know what it is and do it. I didn’t assume it. The majority of people out there don’t know what it is. They need to be shown, and you’re the one who must show it.
Some of our great leaders come from the military, not just America’s, but those we fought against. General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, as he was known commanding Germany’s tank brigades in North Africa during World Ward II, understood the power of example in the area of effort. Here’s what he said: “A commander must accustom his staff to a high tempo from the outset, and continuously keep them up to it. If he once allows himself to be satisfied with norms, or anything less than an all-out effort, he gives up the race from the starting post, and will sooner or later be taught a bitter lesson.”