The Score Takes Care of Itself (36 page)

The cruelty of the sport, both mental and physical, was almost repellent to me—not what occurs during a game so much, but the brutal attitudes and practices I saw when I was coming up: treating players in an almost thuglike manner, working them to death in practice, pitting one against another, disrespecting their intelligence, dehumanizing them, and all the rest of it. It just seemed to be a crude model of leadership, an ineffective way of bringing out great performance for an organization filled with highly competitive and usually intelligent individuals who just happened to be fantastic athletes. I changed that completely when I became a head coach in charge of everything.

Even more, it was disgusting to see how people under stress can turn on one another and how those satellite and peripheral people will try to take credit for what you’ve done. I’ve got a list of people—albeit short—who claim
they
discovered Joe Montana and had to talk me into drafting him because I didn’t think he had what it takes. One of the lessons I learned was how people change with success or failure. People’s behavior and attitudes can be transformed in the most positive
or
most disturbing ways.

Also, it was unpleasant to know that doing a good job in the NFL wasn’t much different from doing a bad job. Both will get you fired; the latter just gets you fired sooner. You know you’re there as a coach temporarily, only while you’re very successful, only when you do a fantastic job. Then you learn that even a fantastic job is inadequate. The norm becomes the impossible, and when you don’t achieve the impossible, your head’s on the chopping block.

Good and bad are about the same in the NFL, perhaps in corporate America too. You’re gone if good is the best you can do. Good just buys you time; great buys you a little more time. And then you’re gone. In the NFL, a head coach is on a very short string.

I will start a list like this with the athletes and the relationships I had with others in the organization, especially assistant coaches and staff such as John McVay, Bill White, Bobb McKittrick, George Seifert, Norb Hecker, Denny Green, Ray Rhodes, Bill McPherson, and so many others—sharing a common goal, sacrificing, interacting, navigating the dynamics of dealing with other people in moving toward our goal. In fact, even though my relationship with Eddie DeBartolo became almost toxic at the end, during the early years it was wonderful. (And by the way, we repaired things in the years after my retirement and became very good friends. Eddie DeBartolo did what nobody else was willing to do; namely, he gave me a chance. I will always be indebted to him for seeing in me the potential that others did not. Eddie and I were partners in one of the great success stories in the history of sports.)

I also really miss the strategy and tactics of the game—designing plays and seeing them work. Nothing is more gratifying than creating something that you’re sure no one else has ever seen or thought of and having it succeed. Then later to see it become a commonly used device throughout football is really something that is satisfying.

The offensive system I came up with was like that, what they called the West Coast Offense. As variations of it spread throughout the NFL and college football, it was very nice to see. I felt good about it, perhaps because it was the ultimate compliment, something along the lines of, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Many started “joining” my approach to offensive football. It was in some sense a validation of what I’d created at Cincinnati and then been mocked for at San Francisco even after we won a Super Bowl. (I’ve never forgotten the dismissive comments, even ridicule, by many who thought that the kind of football I was teaching wasn’t “real” football, that it was a gimmick. For reasons that I’ve never totally figured out, there was a reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy of what I was doing.)

I also got a kick out of seeing opposing coaches start using the situational advance planning of plays, written out on a clipboard (usually covered in clear plastic to protect against rain and snow). I started it in response to Paul Brown’s question at Cincinnati, “What’ve you got for openers, Bill?” and then developed and greatly expanded it as the benefits became more obvious.

And of course there was the deep fulfillment of climbing the mountain, of going where few in my profession were able to go. Our first Super Bowl championship was profoundly meaningful and satisfying—thrilling beyond my ability to fully articulate.
Thrilling
.

I miss all of that.

The Fujian Province of China is known as the Venice of Asia because of the superb stone sculptures created there over the centuries. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, near the city of Sichuan, artists—stone sculptors—worked in a time-honored and time-consuming way. Legend has it that when their sculpture was completed, the artist immersed it in the shallows of a nearby stream, where it remained for many years as the waters constantly flowed over it.

During this period, the finishing touch was applied by Mother Nature (or perhaps Father Time). The gentle but constant flow of water over the stone changed it in subtle but profound ways. Only after this occurred would the sculptor consider it complete—only when time had done its work was the sculpture perfect.

I believe it’s much the same in one’s profession; at least it was in mine. Superb, reliable results take time. The little improvements that lead to impressive achievements come not from a week’s work or a month’s practice, but from a series of months and years until your organization knows what you are teaching inside and out and everyone is able to execute their responsibilities in all ways at the highest level.

Your team has absorbed and assimilated not just the mechanics of your own Standard of Performance, but the attitudes and beliefs that are central to it. I believe that every organization has a cultural conscience that it carries forward year after year. That ethos may be good or bad, productive or unproductive. Some leaders are able to create the former, others the latter. But productive or unproductive, it exists, and it is guiding ongoing personnel and informing new arrivals as they come on board.

The attitudes and actions I installed, including the inventory of San Francisco’s football plays—offensive and defensive—were the result of the same guys (or their similarly trained replacements) doing the same thing for years and years. Subsequently, it became almost routine to execute at the highest level when the heat was on. Excellence in every single area of our organization had been taught and expected from the day I arrived as head coach.

The “big plays” in business—or professional football—don’t just suddenly occur out of thin air. They result from very hard work and painstaking attention over the years to all of the details related to your leadership.

Talent, functional intelligence, experience, maturity, effort, dedication, and practice may not be perfect, but they will get you so close to perfection that most people will think you achieved it. And the results will show it.

It takes time to develop this Standard of Performance; it is not just a seminar or a practice or a season’s worth of seminars and practices, but thoughtful and intense attention over years and years. Then, when you’ve got to score on the last play of the game to win, you know it can happen. This is a powerful force to have within you.

In Super Bowl XXIII, the final game I ever coached in the NFL, the Cincinnati Bengals led San Francisco 16-13 when we took possession of the ball on our own eight-yard line with 3:08 remaining to play. Most smart observers assumed a Cincinnati victory was now almost a given. What followed has become legendary in the NFL: the Drive. It is a wonderful example of the principles demonstrated by the stone sculptors of China as applied to one’s profession.

The 49ers methodically—and artistically—marched ninety-two yards in eleven plays, culminating with orderly precision in an eighteen-yard pass from Joe Montana to John Taylor (“20 halfback curl X up”) for a touchdown and a Super Bowl championship. There was hardly a hiccup as Joe and the team looked up from our own eight-yard line and saw the mountain’s summit ninety-two yards away, then calmly—almost nonchalantly—climbed to the top.

As the Drive unfolded—those eleven plays—I had a deep sense that what I was witnessing was the manifestation, the expression, of everything we had done along the way in the previous decade, culminating with this final opportunity for a grand victory. Everything that was happening in front of me went back to the beginning, the first day of practice at training camp ten years earlier, and was linked by all the years of effort and intelligence by all the people in our organization during the decade since then.

From my first day at 49er headquarters, I had begun imbuing individuals with a sense that a higher standard was being taught and learned, executed and expected in all of our actions and attitudes. My Standard of Performance and the hard work all of us put into achieving it had created a deep sense of organizational character, commitment, and ability—a sense that every individual was connected to the entire team, and that this group fighting its way to the summit against Cincinnati was a natural extension of those that had preceded it—culminating now in a work of near perfection.

There was almost a sense of inevitability. We seemed certain, almost destined, to drive the length of the field against a ferocious Cincinnati Bengals defense. At least, that’s how I remember feeling—no panic, no anxiety, no uncertainty. All we had to do was exactly what we had been doing for years and years: adhere to the Standard of Performance we had been sculpting for a decade.

The Drive became the final offensive series of plays in my career as a head coach in the National Football League. As it unfolded on the field in front of 75,129 fans in Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium, I was filled with an appreciation that what these players and the members of our organization who were not on the field were doing was a work of art, one that had been created over many years—similar, in a way, to the sculptures in China. It was a thing of beauty.

I believe it’s true in your profession. Your effort in the beginning is part of a continuum of effort; your Standard of Performance is part of a continuum of standards. Today’s effort becomes tomorrow’s result. The quality of those efforts becomes the quality of your work. One day is connected to the following day and the following month to the succeeding years.

Your own Standard of Performance becomes who and what you are. You and your organization achieve greatness.

For me, the road had been rocky at times, triumphant too, but along the way I had never wavered in my dedication to installing—teaching—those actions and attitudes I believed would create a great team, a superior organization. I knew that if I achieved that, the score would take care of itself.

As you’ve seen, there were stretches where I found it impossible to truly allow that to happen, when I became almost terrified of losing, of letting the score take care of itself. But ultimately, I got back to it. On that final San Francisco 49er drive, ninety-two yards to a championship, I was at peace knowing the score—one way or another—would take care of itself.

And it did.

Craig Walsh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was with my father on that final day, experienced with tens of thousands of others the incredible conclusion not only to Super Bowl XXIII, but to the NFL coaching career of Bill Walsh. “The Drive,” ninety-two yards against Cincinnati for his third Super Bowl championship in eight years, has become legendary—a point of perfection when experts talk about how great teams perform under pressure.

Moments after the final gun sounded and victory was secured, my father found himself in the midst of total pandemonium. The San Francisco 49ers’ locker room was exploding with joy and manic energy—reporters, players, staff, and many others all jammed inside to celebrate. Amid the wild crowd, Bill Walsh was an anomaly—quiet, withdrawn, almost melancholy. As he stepped off the podium after receiving the Lombardi Trophy and trying to give a short speech—shortened because of his overwhelming emotion and fatigue—he found me in the crowd, put his arm around my shoulder, and wept. “Let’s go,” he said quietly. My father was stepping down at the top, like he had asked his players to do when it was their turn.

The Score Will Take Care of Itself
is an appropriate title for his book on leadership. As head coach he was tireless—even obsessive—in his drive to intelligently prepare himself and his entire organization (players, assistant coaches, trainers, staff, and everybody else) so that they were in a position to prevail in one of the most fiercely contested professions—the National Football League. A man of great logic, he truly believed that in the end, your ultimate assignment as a leader is getting those on your team totally ready for the battle. After that, you have to let winning take care of itself. His ability to do that contributed to his success; his inability to do that, increasing as the years went by, forced him to leave the game as an NFL head coach.

Having said that, I will share an interesting and revealing and little-known fact about my father: When he started his coaching career, the approval of and acceptance by fans meant very little to him. Football was in large part an intellectual activity in which he completely immersed himself—almost like a scientist searching for, and fascinated by, a mathematical solution in quantum physics. For Dad, “quantum physics” was about leadership, team building, and extraordinary performance in the context of football. (Of course, he also had a competitive streak a mile wide.)

How football could create devotion, fan frenzy, and be America’s number one sport was something of a mystery to my father. When he did the impossible and won Super Bowl XVI in his third year as head coach, he quietly argued
against
a victory parade in San Francisco because he didn’t think many people would show up; he feared that it would be an embarrassment for his players to be riding down empty streets waving at nobody.