by Bill Walsh
This was embarrassing because, among other reasons, when it came to technical football, Eddie knew about as much as the average fan, which is to say, not too much. It reached a point, after one loss in a season during which we struggled, that he called me into my office for a ranting critique of the game and my coaching of it. The team knew what was going on because they could see and hear it; it was embarrassing—more than that, humiliating.
Eddie’s background in football, his knowledge of football, was limited, but he felt peer pressure from his friends when we lost, and he occasionally reacted in an uncontrolled manner, usually after overindulging.
When people are frustrated, they look outside themselves for someone to blame; it was someone else causing his problem, others are making bad decisions, not him. “I’m being criticized unfairly,” Eddie may have thought. It’s human nature when your deep emotions are involved in something that you lash out at anything or try to reach in and fix it even if you don’t know what’s going on.
Looking back, it was something I should not have allowed. I let him haul me over the coals in regard to my effort or performance when he had no basis for doing it. His only basis was that he owned the team, a pretty good basis, but not enough for me to let him excoriate me without significant cause in front of the team even once.
I regret that I didn’t back him down. Or leave. Ironically, it was part of the reason I left, for good. By then I had lost my taste for the job. I’m not sure I ever got it back, and in some way Eddie was part of the reason. I let him set a preposterous standard and then humiliate me when I couldn’t reach it.
Looking back on it, I concluded that there are times when you must stand up for yourself even if the consequences include being fired. That’s easier said than done, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t do it.
For Eddie—and I admit, for me too—eventually only a Super Bowl championship was acceptable; anything less was failure and cause for disgust and dismissal. (George Seifert, my immediate and able successor as 49er head coach, won two Super Bowls in eight years and was fired two seasons after the second championship in spite of having the highest winning percentage of any coach in NFL history: .766 with a 98-30-1 record. Eddie wanted a Super Bowl. Every year.)
All of the above, in a nutshell, contributed to why I had to retire. The pursuit of the prize had become an exercise in avoiding pain; the expectations had become unattainable; the behavior of our owner had become—on occasion—unacceptable; and the responsibilities I took on, coupled with the pressure I put on myself, were unmanageable. Or so it seemed.
A profession I loved and had worked for all my life had gone from being joyful to unenjoyable to unendurable. I couldn’t win when I won; there were no points in winning and thus no point in continuing.
Later, when I became a commentator for NBC after I got out of NFL coaching, I would see similar pain when I’d interview some coaches at the beginning of the regular season. They were hanging on for dear life after a bad year and had just been through eight weeks of training camp working eighteen-hour days with no sleep, bad food, and all kinds of forces pounding them, including decisions on which players stay, which players go, and how to deal with the press, injuries, holdouts, agents, owners, media, and everything else.
On some of those occasions, a coach would see me and just break down. Marty Schottenheimer broke down one time when I opened the door to his hotel room after he had lost two consecutive games early in the season. He came to me and put his arms around me and quietly cried. Why? He looked at me, a former coach, and saw relief, someone who had been there, who understood and sympathized.
Football coaches, just like executives who push themselves to the brink and beyond, often have no support system and become isolated from family, friends, and normal interactions. I’ve described it as being in a submarine, submerged and cut off from the human race.
My good friend Dick Vermeil did it as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. In his quest for a Super Bowl title, he ultimately began living full time in his cramped little office deep inside Veterans Stadium, working to the exclusion of everything else. His team reached Super Bowl XV only to lose to the Oakland Raiders (led by Jim Plunkett). Dick then pushed himself even harder.
Not long after, he was finished—“burnout,” as he described it to reporters at a very emotional press conference when he announced he was quitting. Dick retired for fourteen years before returning in triumph by leading the St. Louis Rams to victory against the Tennessee Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV. Later he told the story of having a sign on the wall while he was the Eagles head coach. It said, “The best way to kill time is to work it to death.” He told people, “I worked time to death until it killed me.”
Can you imagine how burned out you must be to wait fourteen years to return to doing something you love? I don’t have to imagine it. I never returned to the NFL as a head coach, in spite of offers where I was given a blank contract and told to fill it in with whatever I wanted and then sign it.
In professional football, just as in corporate life, as you press harder and harder the ownership (shareholders or the board of directors) may or may not support you. At midnight, while an exhausted coach is staring at a screen watching game video inch by inch by inch, back and forth, over and over, eating stale, cold pizza in the dim light, they’re deciding over martinis and a steak dinner by candlelight whether he’s worth keeping around: “Does he measure up?” they’re asking over dessert while you’re killing yourself with work. “Poor bastard looked pretty beat up last time I saw him,” somebody says with a chuckle. Everybody nods. I didn’t want to be that “poor bastard” again.
Nevertheless, that’s part of their duty—to plan ahead, to be ready for whatever the future brings, to decide when their “poor bastard” should be gotten rid of. But the volatility and emotional exhaustion of the environment can just drain you totally, and you’re living with it continuously. It can make you very vulnerable, fragile.
I was in Columbus, Ohio, to receive an NFL award just after the 49ers had won a Super Bowl. I got up, started talking, and lost it because I was still emotionally exhausted from the season. Most of the folks in the crowd didn’t really care. Some did, some didn’t.
I sat down afterward, and it occurred to me, “Most of these people don’t give a damn about me. Why am I exposing my emotions to them? For what?” In that situation you can become a walking basket case for people to gawk at. When this happens, you must have the extreme discipline to alter your perspective. You must change things, but, oh, boy, is that tough to do.
Aggressively looking for the positive elements, however small, can dilute the toxic pressure of personalizing the results by allowing you to take pride in your strategies, tactics, effort, and execution even when they don’t produce victory every time. It can provide comfort and ease the severity of an ever-growing loathing of failure, which, uncontrolled, can eventually take over to a point of making you almost dysfunctional.
And, of course, you must derive satisfaction and gratification from winning without letting it define your self-worth, just as you cannot allow defeat to define you as a person. There has to be a balance. You can’t put yourself in a smaller and smaller box where there’s only the infliction or avoidance of pain—a personal torture chamber.
I was increasingly unable to do this. Consequently, during my tenth season with the 49ers, I knew I had to get out. We had achieved great success, gone beyond anything we or anyone else could have imagined early on. In the eyes of many, a San Francisco 49ers dynasty had been created in which a Super Bowl championship was now a given. Imagine that. Winning a Super Bowl was a given. But I bought into it and thought anything less was utter and contemptible failure. I believed it, but I didn’t really believe it.
I was suffering from the emotional and mental exhaustion of having been at various times head coach, president, general manager, offensive coordinator, and play caller, in addition to having other unofficial titles and responsibilities
for various parts of a decade. But much of it had to do with our ultimately unattainable expectations and my inability to deal with the prospect of failure. All of it put together became too much.
Had I been able to avoid the dead-end calculation of “zero points for winning,” I would have continued to coach the 49ers and, I believe, won additional Super Bowl championships. That is something that has never stopped eating at me. But by the end I wasn’t thinking straight. When CBS announcer Brent Musburger interviewed me in the locker room in the middle of the wild celebration immediately after our third Super Bowl victory, he asked me, “Will this be the final game on the sidelines for Bill Walsh?”
Before he could even finish the sentence, I dropped my head and began weeping. I looked for my son Craig in the crowd and put my arm around him for support; we walked away. Somebody took a picture of us at that moment. I saw it the other day. I looked like an old man—frail, weak, almost bewildered.
Like my dear friend Dick Vermeil when he left Philadelphia, I had nothing left in the tank. In retrospect, it seems so simple; that is, the steps I could have taken to remain the productive and enthusiastic head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
Let me share some thoughts on avoiding the trap I fell into, some ideas on how to deal with escalating expectations that become preposterous, personalization of results, and “zero points for winning.” I must admit that I’m not sure any of this would have benefitted me by the time I reached the end of my rope. The time to do it is before your tank is empty.
1. Do not isolate yourself. While your spouse and family can be extremely important for support, they may not be equipped to deal with the magnitude of your professional issues in this area. Thus, develop a small, trusted network of people whose opinions you respect and are willing to honestly evaluate. My own make-up resisted this. As I marched forward as head coach, I became isolated, increasingly separated, even lonely. Keep your lines of communication open with mentors and professionals in your business whom you trust, even a professional counselor. (I had one for a while.) They can help you restore perspective and help clarify and prioritize situations and responsibilities. Be very discreet about whom you confide in. Crying on somebody’s shoulder, if it’s the wrong “somebody,” can have negative repercussions.
2. Delegate abundantly. If you’ve done your job in leadership, you’ve brought on board individuals who are very talented. Allow them to use their talent in ways that serve the team and lighten your load. If you’ve hired and taught them well, they will do their job. I confess it was hard for me to amply delegate, even though I was surrounded by exceptionally talented people. I hired them, added to their expertise, and then had trouble turning some of them—especially on the offensive side of the game—fully loose to do their jobs. I was like a man dying of thirst who was sitting on the edge of a mountain stream. I denied myself what was available.
3. Avoid the destructive temptation to define yourself as a person by the won-lost record, the “score,” however you define it. Don’t equate your team’s “won-lost record” with your self-worth.
4. Shake it off. Marv Levy lost four straight Super Bowls as head coach of the Buffalo Bills and was able to keep it in perspective: “It hurts like the devil for ten days or two weeks and then you bury it and go back to work and look ahead.” Bud Grant lost four Super Bowls as head coach of the Minnesota Vikings and was able to keep it in perspective: “I’ve got a 24-hour rule. You only let it bother you for 24 hours and then it’s over.”
As you may have noted, I was unable or unwilling to utilize any of the prescriptions that I’ve just suggested. It would be facile to say it was because I didn’t know about these options while I was head coach. In honesty, I did know—at least I think I did—but I didn’t have the strength or intelligence to use them, to protect myself. Like many who wear blinders and focus on victory to the exclusion of everything else, I barreled down the highway until the engine burned up.
One of the common traits of outstanding performers—coaches, athletes, managers, sales representatives, executives, and others who face a daily up/down, win/lose accounting system—is that a rejection, that is, defeat, is quickly forgotten, replaced eagerly by pursuit of a new order, client, or opponent. They know that a defeat, whether a lost account or a loss on the field, can’t be taken personally. Like Bud Grant, they shake it off and go forward. And so must you.
In my early days, I did this too. I firmly believed that if I took care of my job the score would take care of itself. When it didn’t, I worked even harder to improve my coaching and elevate the Standard of Performance of our team. This was one of the reasons I drove myself so relentlessly. But gradually I found it harder and harder to accept my concept that the “score will take care of itself.” I became consumed with how the score would take care of itself, whether it would be in a manner that resulted in victory for me. I became overwhelmed with worry about that score and lost sight of the fact that in a fight you go as hard as you can, do all you’re capable of doing, knowing that ultimately, while you can influence the result to a greater or lesser degree, you do not control the result.
If your hard work is coupled with intelligence and talent, you may win. If not, you go back to work and get ready for the next fight without feeling that somehow, having given it everything you’ve got (as I did for ten years), you are somehow inadequate as a person, that you didn’t measure up. You can’t let that happen to yourself.
What Do I Miss Least?
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.
What Do I Miss Most?
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 s
eeing 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.