The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  In his first four seasons Bubba’s weight jumped around, but the trend line pointed up. Offered many choices between carrots and sticks, Bubba reached every time for another jelly doughnut. The 49ers won the Super Bowl again, after the 1984 season. But the next three seasons they went into the playoffs with high hopes and were bounced in the first round. In 1985 and 1986, they were beaten badly by the New York Giants, and in both games Lawrence Taylor wreaked havoc. He’d been too quick for Bubba. The 49er offense, usually so reliable, had scored only three points in each of those games. Joe Montana had been knocked out of the 1986 game with a concussion. The hits didn’t always come from the blind side but the blind side was the sore spot. As 49er center Randy Cross said, “Increasingly, we game-planned specifically for that rush guy on the right side.” The right side of the defense, the left side of the offense, was the turf Bubba Paris was meant to secure. “There’s that old Roberto Duran idea from boxing,” said Cross. “Get the head and the body dies. More and more teams were coming for our head.”

  It was at the end of the 1987 season that Bill Walsh’s frustrations with his promising left tackle peaked. That left side of the line was now, obviously, the pressure point that a very good pass rusher could use to shut down the 49er passing game. And Bubba Paris just kept getting fatter, and slower, and less able to keep up with the ever-faster pass rush. During the regular season Bubba’s weight hadn’t mattered very much. He was waddling onto the field at well over 300 pounds, and the 49ers still cruised through the season. They’d finished with a record of 14–2. Amazingly, they had the number one offense and the number one defense in the NFL. Going into the playoffs, they were viewed as such an unstoppable force that the bookies had them as 14-point favorites to win the Super Bowl, no matter who they played.

  They appeared to be a team without a weakness; but then, the regular season is not as effective as the playoffs at exposing a team’s weakness. The stakes are lower, the opponents generally less able, their knowledge of your team less complete. It’s when a team hits the playoffs that its weaknesses are most highly magnified; and in the 1987 playoffs, Walsh discovered that his seemingly perfect team had a flaw.

  The first game was against the Minnesota Vikings, and it was supposed to be a cakewalk. But the Vikings had a sensational six five, 270-pound young pass rusher named Chris Doleman, and he came off the blind side like a bat out of hell. He was fast, he was strong, he was crafty, he was mean. He wore Lawrence Taylor’s number, 56, and when he was asked who in football he most admired, Doleman said, “The one guy who has the desire to be the best, and the tenacity, is Lawrence Taylor. I’m not saying I want to be exactly like Lawrence…” Every blind side rusher knew about the anxiety of influence. Doleman wasn’t exactly Lawrence Taylor but he was exactly in the tradition of Lawrence Taylor. He’d been drafted as an outside linebacker, but in the 4–3 defense, which the Vikings played, the outside linebacker wasn’t chiefly a pass rusher. Finally it occurred to the Vikings coaches to try him as a right defensive end—that is, to make him a pass rusher. To give him the role in the 4–3 that Taylor played in the 3–4. He was an instant success.

  Fearing that Doleman might shut down his passing game, Bill Walsh considered his trick of pulling a guard to deal with him. John Ayers had moved on, and the 49ers had no one quite so well designed to the job. Anyway, the trick was old: the Vikings would see it for what it was and quickly move to exploit the hole left in the middle of the 49er line. They had a weapon to serve just this purpose: right tackle Keith Millard. He lined up beside Doleman, and was himself—oddly, for a tackle—a speedy pass rusher. Send the guard to help with Doleman and you left Millard to run free. Walsh couldn’t do that.

  Thus Bill Walsh received another lesson about the cost of not having a left tackle capable of protecting his quarterback’s blind side. This time the lesson was far more painful than the last. This time he had expected to win the Super Bowl. He had built the niftiest little passing machine in the history of the NFL, manned with talented players, and this one guy on the other team had his finger on the switch that shut it down. Chris Doleman hit Joe Montana early and often, but even when he didn’t hit Montana he came so close that Montana couldn’t step into his throws. Backup left tackle Steve Wallace watched from the sidelines. “He never let Joe get his feet set,” he said later. What Doleman did to Joe Montana’s feet was minor compared to what he did to his mind. “Every time Joe went back, he was peeping out of the corner of his eye first,” said Wallace, “then looking at his receivers.” The pass rush rendered Joe Montana so inept that in the second half Walsh benched him and inserted his backup, Steve Young. Young was left-handed, which enabled him to see Doleman coming. Young was also fast enough to flee—which he did, often. Against a team they were meant to beat by three touchdowns on their way to an inevitable Super Bowl victory, the 49ers lost 36–24. Afterwards, Vikings coach Jerry Burns told reporters that “the way to stop [the 49ers] is to pressure the quarterback. Our whole approach was to pressure Montana.”

  A football game is too complicated to be reduced to a single encounter. Lots of other things happened that afternoon in Candlestick Park. But the inability of his left tackle to handle the Vikings’ right end was, in Walsh’s view, a difference maker: it created fantastically disproportionate distortions in the game. “Bubba got beat,” he said. “Doleman and Millard just dominated the game.” After the game, Walsh was so shattered he walked right out of Candlestick Park without pausing to speak to his players. Always a bit leery of the way Walsh viewed them—as cogs in his intricate machine—the players would later point to that playoff loss as the beginning of the end of their feeling for their ingenious coach. “Walsh couldn’t talk to us the day after,” defensive back Eric Wright later told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He lost a lot of respect with the players. When it was going well, he was there. When the ship was shaky, he couldn’t face us.”

  Walsh coached football just one more season, and he decided to hang his fortunes on something more dependable than the Bubba Paris Diet. But Bubba had no obvious replacement. His backup was Steve Wallace, and Wallace hadn’t been trained as a left tackle. He’d been drafted by the 49ers in the fourth round in 1986, and was known chiefly for having blocked for running back Bo Jackson at Auburn. The joke was that Auburn had only three plays: Bo left, Bo right, and Bo up the middle. Having spent most of his college career run blocking, Wallace had to teach himself how to pass-block; but Wallace was a student of the game, willing to pay a steep price to play it, and the recipient of Walsh’s highest compliment: nasty. As in: “Steve Wallace was a nasty football player.”

  A year after their loss to the Vikings, the 49ers found themselves in exactly the same place: in the playoffs, facing the Minnesota Vikings. The 49ers weren’t as good as they had been the year before, and the Vikings were better. They, not the 49ers, now had the NFL’s number one defense. It was led by Chris Doleman who was, if anything, even better at sacking quarterbacks.

  The night before the game, Steve Wallace didn’t sleep. “I’d just try to go to bed early and hope somewhere along the way I fell asleep,” he said. The inability to fall asleep on the night before the game had already become a pattern for him. Apparently, it came with the left tackle position. Will Wolford, who protected Jim Kelly’s blind side for the Buffalo Bills, had exactly the same experience. He started out his career as a guard—and slept—then moved to left tackle—and didn’t. Late in his career, he moved back to guard, and, presto, he could sleep again. The left tackle position, as it had been reconceived by the modern pass-oriented offense, presented a new psychological challenge for the offensive lineman. In the old days, no one could really see what you were doing, and you usually had help from the lineman on the other side of you. That was still true at the other line positions. A mistake at guard cost a running back a few yards; a mistake at left tackle usually cost a sack, occasionally cost the team the ball, and sometimes cost the team the quarterback.

  And—here was the m
ain thing—you only needed to make one mistake at left tackle to have a bad game. The left tackle was defined by his weakest moment. He wasn’t measured by the body of his work but by the outliers. “You have this tremendous ability to be embarrassed,” said Wallace. “You know you can’t afford three bad games in a row. They gonna say, ‘Nice knowing you.’ And it only takes one play—if he has one sack, then he’s interviewed after the game. And you’re the guy who gave up the sack. I could be good on thirty-four out of thirty-five pass plays, and all anyone would remember was that one sack.”

  This point was driven home to him the Saturday before the Vikings game, when Bill Walsh called the team into the auditorium for the pleasurable viewing of its past highlights. Walsh did this before every game. He thought it helped his players to see themselves at their best before they went out to play. The players watched Jerry Rice dash into the end zone, Ronnie Lott intercept a pass, and Joe Montana thread the ball between defenders. They whooped and hollered and cheered for each other. It was all good fun, all positive. But at the very end of the highlight reel, Walsh, perversely, had inserted a single negative play: the Doleman sack.

  The sack came during the regular season in a game the 49ers won, 24–21. Doleman had got by Wallace just that once, but he had crushed Joe Montana. Wallace didn’t need to be reminded of the play. That one sack was all he had thought about for days. Doleman had beaten him to the outside. Wallace had reached out to punch him but he, not Doleman, had lost his footing. Doleman rose up off Montana, jumped around celebrating, and then found Wallace, to editorialize.

  “You got this all day,” he’d said.

  Wallace responded as he had done thirteen other times that season, by starting a fight. “I remember thinking: if I don’t do something, he may get ten sacks,” he said. “So I decided to mix it up.” The NFL hadn’t yet begun to levy big fines for fights, and Wallace had taken full advantage of the freebies. He now had a reputation as one of the league’s dirtiest linemen—because he started so many fights. “I thought that’s how it had to be,” he said. “I had to fight if I was going to make it. And I had some folks to feed. And when you have some folks to feed you have a whole different mentality.”

  That really was how Wallace thought about these beasts bent on killing Joe Montana: you go by me and my family goes hungry. And it wasn’t all that far from the truth. His first paychecks would be so thoroughly consumed by the $1,426 monthly note on the new house his parents had bought for themselves that he’d finally summoned the nerve to tell them to sell the house. He was deeply insecure. People were saying that he wasn’t a good pass blocker, and he wasn’t all that sure they were wrong. Just that morning—the morning Walsh played the tape of the Doleman sack—Doleman was quoted in the paper saying “the reason Wallace fights so much is to cover up his lack of ability.”

  Now he had to face Doleman again. Doleman was about to go to the Pro Bowl for the second straight year. No one on the team had forgotten what Doleman and Millard had done to them in the playoffs the year before. And yet Bill Walsh felt the need to replay that one sack. Over and over again Wallace watched Doleman beat him and crunch Joe Montana. He didn’t understand why Walsh needed to humiliate him. He said nothing, of course, but was at once livid and ashamed. He wasn’t going to sleep tonight anyway; now he wasn’t going to sleep with a vengeance. “All night long I’m laying there thinking: why did he show that one play? A lot of times you can’t understand what Walsh was doing until he’s done it.” At some point that night he decided “the lesson for me was to concentrate one play longer. As hard as you can possibly work, you can do it for one more play.”

  The next day, after he’d suited up, Wallace received another explanation for Walsh’s perverse behavior. John McVay, the team’s director of football operations, pulled him aside in the hallway and said, “You are going to be the key to this game. The game is going to turn on your performance.” This wasn’t the front office pep-talking. McVay was a former NFL head coach—and he was completely serious.

  This was new. Until this season, his first as a starting NFL left tackle, Steve Wallace had never experienced line play as an individualistic event. But that is what the left tackle position had become: a one-on-one encounter, a boxing match. The passing game, increasingly, was built around the idea of getting as many receivers out into patterns as quickly as possible. More receivers meant fewer pass blockers. Fewer pass blockers meant the left tackle had to deal with whatever was coming at him all by himself. Every now and then a running back might nip at Doleman’s heels on his way out to catch a pass. On very rare occasions a tight end might line up beside Wallace and lend a shoulder. But mostly it would be just him and Doleman, one on one. And the importance of the private battle was now clear to him. “No one had ever said anything like that to me before,” said Wallace. “No one had ever said, ‘The game depends on you.’ I never thought a lineman could be that important. I started thinking, ‘Oh my goodness…’”

  NUMBER 74 TROTS to the edge of the tunnel leading from the locker room to the field. He loves this moment. This moment is the offensive lineman’s one shot at positive recognition. Later in his career he’ll milk it for drama. He’d sprint so fast from the tunnel that the other players wouldn’t put a hand out to slap his “because they were afraid I’d break it off.” When he’d started playing football as a kid, he wanted to play tight end; even then, he preferred basketball. He enjoyed attention. It’s still not natural to him to play a game in front of millions of people and go completely unnoticed. It’s like playing the cantaloupe in the school play.

  “At left tackle, Number Seventy-four, Steve Wallace!”

  His name is announced to the packed stadium and he runs out. He’s still so nervous and new that he concentrates on not stumbling. The day is sunny and bright but the turf, he notices, is slick and muddy. That’s a break. Opposing teams who came to Candlestick Park were deceived by the sunshine. They’d think: on such a nice day the ground just must be firm. The ground was seldom firm. By the second quarter they’d be slipping and sliding, yet they wouldn’t think to change their cleats. A pass rusher like Doleman counted on traction to turn the corner. If he forced Doleman to carve especially tight turns, Wallace knew, the turf might do the rest.

  When he reaches the 49ers’ sideline he looks across the field, to find Doleman. “I’m looking to see if he’s all cocky, like, ‘I’m gonna kick your butt,’ you know.” Back when Bubba was starting, he’d engaged in this tribal chest-pounding ritual with certain opponents. Before the game he’d look across the field, find the guy he was going up against, and literally start howling and beating his chest. Wallace is too worried about the task at hand to pound his chest. In any case, he doesn’t catch Doleman’s eye; but as he looks around, he notices another piece of luck: Jerry Markbreit. Markbreit will referee the game. He’s Wallace’s favorite ref. Jerry let left tackles get away with a lot, like where they’d line up. On passing plays he’d want to line up a few inches further back from the line of scrimmage than was strictly legal. If it became a race to cut off Doleman on a wide loop, those few inches might make all the difference. A lot of other refs would just flag you for not being exactly on the line. Jerry at least warned you before he flagged you.

  The Vikings got the ball first. Steve Wallace thinks: just get to halftime. Worry about the rest of the game then. He couldn’t even think about an entire game. Before he mucked out the Augean stables, Hercules probably carved them in half in his mind, too. Wallace thinks in terms of getting through the half without humiliation. He thinks: make it to halftime without a sack, you got a chance.

  He watches the 49er defense try to stop the Vikings offense and prays they don’t leave the 49er offense with their backs to their own goal line. If we get the ball in a bad place, he thinks, Doleman’s gonna be even harder to handle.

  They give up a field goal: 3–0 Vikings. The offense takes over on its own twenty-yard line. That was fine.

  Wallace had made up his mind b
efore the game that he would take a different approach. He’d play within himself. Doleman’s words in the paper had stung: the reason Wallace fights so much is to cover up his lack of ability. “I said to myself: no matter what happens, I’m not going to fight him today. And it helped me to become a true left tackle.”

  When he looks back over his career from the end of it, he will say that this was the day he embraced his position. He is focused on his technique—on where his feet are, where his hands are, the timing of his contact. He adjusts according to the tiny hints that Doleman gave him of what he plans to do next. Wallace keeps a mental list of the different moves of pass rushers. He has names for them: the spin, the swim, the power, the shoulder grab, the arm drag, the hand slap, the hip toss, the dead leg (“they fake as if they’re stopping just to make you freeze your feet”). Each guy was a little different; each guy had his own moves. Doleman hasn’t yet learned to spin. He’d develop a spin move later and it would make him so good at getting to quarterbacks that he’d break the NFL’s single-season sack record. But he has a swim move, where he brings his arms crashing down on top of the left tackle’s arms, to break his hold. He also has a speed move—which is what he’d used to beat Wallace during the regular season.