AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > July > 30 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USBill Walsh was the coach for the ages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Just last week, while I strolled in Palo Alto, Calif., between the Eucalyptus and palm trees that are as perfectly executed across the Stanford University campus as a play in the West Coast offense, I had that old thought. Maybe Jane and Bill are there. During the post-Walsh era with the San Francisco 49ers, you took it for granted that they’d always be there.
Then after I reached the Hoover Tower, I remembered something that I wanted to forget: They’ll never be there again at the Arrillaga Family Sports Center, where Jane and Bill landed in the Stanford football offices earlier in the decade after their 49ers days. While Jane Walsh (no relation) was the chatty and witty secretary, Bill Walsh was the charismatic and perceptive coach for the ages.
Yes, I remembered, while shaking my head. Walsh confessed last November that he quietly had spent the previous months undergoing treatment and blood transfusions for leukemia. Then I remembered my five years at the San Francisco Examiner during the early 1980s, when the Bill Walsh at the start of the greatest dynasty in sports history was nearly as engaging as the Bill Walsh down the stretch of his 75 years of life.
Those Bill Walshes smiled, joked and told inside stories. If those Bill Walshes weren’t using vivid detail to explain why the Falcons under former 49ers defensive coach Jim Mora and others weren’t running a true West Coast offense, those Bill Walshes were speaking in comical ways about some of their former players.
Nothing tickled Walsh more than recalling how he tried in vain to keep Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson sober and functioning. Nothing angered Walsh more than recalling his days in Cincinnati, where he first invented the West Coast offense for the Bengals of the early 1970s.
That’s when Ken Anderson was the original Joe Montana, and Isaac Curtis was the original Jerry Rice. So, with football’s most prolific offense in decades, Walsh assumed he was the successor to Hall of Famer Paul Brown, the Bengals’ founder, owner and head coach. It didn’t happen, which is why Walsh clenched his teeth when he told me that he was so hurt after he was passed over by Brown in 1975 that he rarely spoke to the man again.
Hurt turned to revenge. While winning 10 of 14 postseason games, including three world championships during his decade with the 49ers, Walsh defeated the Bengals in two Super Bowls. Through it all, he barely uttered Brown’s name.
Which brings us to the Bill Walsh at the height of joining Curly Lambeau, George Halas, Vince Lombardi, Pete Rozelle and Al Davis as the most significant forces in NFL history. That Bill Walsh was pleasantly arrogant and deceptively ruthless. He had a professorial image in public, but he scared the chinstraps off his players as the 49ers’ hidden combination of Bill Parcells and Bobby Knight.
Once, when Ronnie Lott yelled disparaging words at Walsh from across the practice field, the head coach shocked onlookers by rushing to jump in the face of his noted tough-guy safety. They had to be separated. Things calmed down for the rest of the practice, and in case you didn’t know, here is what often happens after such blowups between big-time coach and big-time player: They meet afterward, exchange grins and shrug away their spat.
This time, Walsh waited the next day to saunter across the room in front of the entire team to Lott’s locker. In a stern voice, the stone-faced head coach told the startled defensive back that if he ever did something like that again, he’d be shipped to the worst team in the league faster than a Roger Craig sprint off tackle.
Then Walsh left, with others in the room getting the message: If he’s doing that to Lott, then …
I remembered more Walsh stories as I reached Maples Pavilion, right next to the sports center. Then I turned around. Maybe I’ll see Jane and Bill next time, I thought, when Bill is better. But along came the news on Monday: Walsh had departed his earthly home in Woodside, Calif., to tell his stories Up There.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Comments
By Randy in China
July 31, 2007 10:59 AM | Link to this
That’s a poignant, wonderfully wrought piece. Sounds like a good way to spend an early sportswriting career: covering Walsh and the Niners. Keep up the good work, Terence. Your perceptive, incisive writing is always welcome among us Atlantans in China.
By Demahl
July 31, 2007 2:29 PM | Link to this
Terrance you are the definition of a “True Sell Out”!
By Justice 4 All
July 31, 2007 3:33 PM | Link to this
Man you suck! if its a black anything you hate them if there white its alright huh? You out of the closet self hating racisit. Who hired you? they should be fired and you should be sent back whateva rock u climbed from under!
By VICK #1 FAN
July 31, 2007 3:52 PM | Link to this
Dog fighting or abuse of women? You tell me which issue is more important:
NFL: American Football League & N’Gro Football League
Michael Vick. Say his name slowly. Doesn’t it just roll off your tongue like a five-year prison sentence and permanent banishment from the National Football League?
Now say this name ———— Patrick Kerney. Sounds like a field of dreams, a gangly cornstalk growing into a strong young man, upstanding and flag-bearing Americans ideal of high morals - Jesus Christ, these United States, and American football.
He is a gentrified young man. A Man of the South and its genteel intelligentsia that was just as easily able to pull a Thomas Jefferson and justify slavery as it is careful in hiding anything resembling a sordid underbelly.
Kerney, a native Pennsylvanian, played his college ball in horse country Charlottesville at the University of Virginia. Vick, born and raised in Newport News, Va., played his ball in b******* beautiful Blacksburg at Virginia Tech. At the time of their stays at the two schools, the two universities never crossed paths. It was as if the horse breeders from the rolling hills of Charlottesville might soil their skin if they crossed in close proximity to that Blacksburg university’s agricultural corn-pone origins.
Today, Vick is a ruthless dog killer, squandering his money on jury-rigged Aquafina bottles, diamonds and other thug toys - and betting on dog fights. Kerney, on the other hand, is looking toward rejuvenating his career under Super Bowl Champion head coach Mike Holmgren and the Seattle Seahawks.
But Kerney, like the university he attended, has a potentially nasty reality that belies his cherubic smile and down-to-earth image.
See, in Patrick Kerney’s home early in the morning of March 18, a woman was raped. Kerney, who is now in Seattle, had a home just outside of Atlanta in Buckhead, Georgia. Here’s an excerpt from a WSB-TV, Atlanta report:
Police said a woman claims she was raped inside Kerney’s home early Sunday morning.
Channel 2’s Dale Cardwell said as rape allegations go, the police report filed is extremely thin. Nobody has been named in the police report, no one has been arrested and, at this point, there is no indication Kerney was involved.
According to the victim, the incident started at Saturday night at a Buckhead bar. The 29-year-old woman said she and some friends accepted a ride home from three men.
There is no mention in the report of Kerney being involved.
Once back at his home, the report says a man and his two friends were invited inside Kerney’s home for a couple of drinks, at which point the victim stated she got sleepy and, “fell asleep on the sofa.”
The woman then said she woke up in the bedroom and a man was having intercourse with her. She said she told the man to stop but he then placed his thumb on her throat and continued. She also said she was forced to perform oral sex on the man.
The woman said that she was able to escape by telling him she was going to get a friend to join them. Once outside the bedroom, the woman said she ran into a bathroom with a friend and the man fled the scene along with his two friends.
Kerney, who recently signed a multiyear deal with the Seattle Seahawks, answered his door for Channel 2 and told us he was the victim in this, but did not elaborate.
In a statement issued yesterday, Kerney said an assault had happened at this house while he was asleep. But he says he can’t comment further, “out of respect for my friend who was assaulted and the police officers who are diligently working to apprehend the offenders.”
A neighbor of Kerney’, a woman, was asked if Kerney might have been involved in the rape. She said she knew him for years and there was no way Kerney was involved.
Now, here’s a report in the News Tribune in Seattle:
A police report named no suspects, WSB-TV in Atlanta reported, but Kerney identified the victim as a friend. She had apparently returned to Kerney’s home with three men after a night at a nearby bar.
“I am aware that, while I was asleep on Sunday morning, an assault took place in my home,” Kerney said in a statement. “Out of respect for my friend who was assaulted, and the police officers who are diligently working to apprehend the offenders, I cannot comment any further.
“My focus is on supporting my friend during this time of need.”
News of the incident broke Monday afternoon on WSB, the ABC affiliate in Atlanta. The woman, 29, told police she rode from the bar to Kerney’s home with three men other than Kerney, the station said.
And by the time the story hit the Internet shock jocks, the headline read:
“Alleged Rape Took Place in Kerney’s Home” (emphasis mine)
In the Kerney rape case we have the immediate premise of innocence for the Seahawks defensive lineman; his female neighbor tells us so. We have a “thin” police report. It is so thin, that it barely exists in the police’s consciousness. In the sports blogsphere, the rape was alleged.
As we know, Michael Vick had no such luxury as the presumption on innocence. There was no “alleged” in sports blog headlines. And no one was sought out to speak in his behalf. Kerney proclaimed his innocence without as much as a sniff of a challenge. Vick, like Kerney, proclaimed his innocence, It was met with abject derision.
Kerney’s house was never scoured for evidence. Neither Kerney, nor anyone who was at his house that night was taken down to the police station and questioned. Kerney’s flimsy story that he was asleep was never challenged by the police or by the local press.
With Vick, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) immediately flexed its muscles and lunged after Vick like a ———- fighting dog. There was no rebuking of Kerney or the perpetrator(s) by the National Organization of women (NOW) or any other Women’s rights groups. For Kerney, there were no mainstream sports media reports on rape in relation to athletes.
There are between 20,000 and 40,000 people in the U.S. who participate in dog fighting activities. If we average the two numbers, one-one hundredth of one percent of the U.S. population is involved in dog fighting. By contrast, 31% of women in the U.S. - about 49 million - report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives. Nearly 25% of U.S. women - about 38.25 million -report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime.
Dog fighting or abuse of women? You tell me which issue is more important.
You tell me why Tom Lantos (D-Ca.) feels the need to speak out against Michael Vick and dog fighting, but not against Patrick Kerney or his friends and the rape and physical abuse of women?
You tell me how Michael Vick is being held accountable for the alleged actions of his cousin Devon Boddie and Tony Taylor in a house that Vick bought for his cousin but did not live near, but Patrick Kerney is not being held accountable for the rape that took place in his house while he allegedly lay asleep in another room?
I don’t hear about Patrick Kerney being forced to tell police investigators who was in his house that evening. No psychological examination was performed on the woman to explore the possibility that she might actually be protecting Kerney. To date, no DNA evidence has been gathered from either the rape victim or Kerney, or anyone else allegedly involved with the case. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell hasn’t called Patrick Kerney into his office. In fact, Goodell has issued not one public statement regarding Patrick Kerney or the Kerney rape case.
Terrence Moore, columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, never wrote a column criticizing Kerney or his choice of friends, like he did with Michael Vick. He never wrote a column asking for an expanded police presence in the Kerney case as he has with federal agents and Vick. AJC writer Steve Wyche, since May 28, has written 24 articles or columns about Michael Vick. He hasn’t come remotely close to doing the same with Patrick Kerney.
Why Terrence, why Steve? If Moore and Wyche reported the Kerney case as with the same vigor as they have the dog fighting case, today our primary topic of conversation in the sports world would be vastly different.
And it’s not as if the Vick case wouldn’t see the light of day. The outright lies, the anti-Vick bias, and the sensationalism surrounding the case would disappear. The Michael Vick case would stand a chance of being reported responsibly.
However, the two cases are where they stand and responsible reporting is the least of the problems with the disparity in the treatment of Michael Vick and of Patrick Kerney.
We cannot blame the relative fame of the two athletes. Duke Lacrosse was barely a blip on the sports radar before the infamous rape case involving lacrosse team members. We cannot blame the issues. Both are important, but dog fighting doesn’t compare with the physical abuse and rape of women.
There is one issue, though, that looms over both the Patrick Kerney rape case and the Michael Vick case. And that issue has nothing to do with fame, evidence, or the relative importance of the issues.
I know what that issue is.
So do you.
By troybliss
July 31, 2007 4:15 PM | Link to this
its about time u guys caught on toe terrance. first, sorry to hear about bill walsh. second, teresa moore is a undercover self hater like u guys said. he’s always been on the notre dame, black yuppie stuff undercover. he hates atlanta blacks because they real. teresa, how do you manage to offend both whites AND blacks. we see you butt on tv trying to patronize us with that vick stuff. always cutting down anything that starts with atlanta or georgia. bye, get, go get your check somewhere else. using vick’s troubles so you can get air time on espn. we see your tomming butt. like u a authority figure all of a sudden. pathetic.
By P.J.
July 31, 2007 4:51 PM | Link to this
1 Vick fan the word is jerry-rigged. But overall, I’m quite impressed by your prodigious vocabulary.No doubt you scored an 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT.
I would like to refute the claims posited in your argument, but there’s no way I can win a debate with someone who makes Noam Chomsky look like, well Michael Vick.
By CC
July 31, 2007 5:36 PM | Link to this
Terrence, PLEASE stop saying that Atlanta is divided along racial lines regarding the MV debacle. IT IS NOT!!! All black people are not blindly supporting MV, nor are all white people immediately ready to fry him. It is bad enough that we in Atlanta are exposed to your gross generalizations, but you go on Jim Rome and make it sound as though ALL black Atlantans and all black Falcons fans are void of reason and just want MV to play, even if he is found guilty of committing the terrible crimes of which he is accused. Unless you have spoken with every citizen and Falcons fan, please don’t attempt to speak for us