The Second Coming

By PAUL WITTEMAN PALO ALTO

NESTLED IN A STAND OF FRAGRANT EUCAlyptus trees at the Embarcadero Road entrance to the campus of Stanford University is a billboard advertising the home schedule of the varsity football team. But the larger-than-life image on the billboard that causes motorists to pause is that of a man with a mane of white hair beckoning them to turn in on a Saturday afternoon, park their cars, fill the 85,500 seats at Stanford Stadium and watch him lead the local student athletes to the promised land. Which, in the vernacular of Stanford football, means the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena on January 1st.

In the rich but checkered history of Stanford football, sporting supplicants who have placed their fannies on Stanford Stadium's wooden-bench seats in prayerful anticipation of just such an event have spent more than their share of New Year's days sorely disappointed. There have been moments of brilliance, of course. On occasion, there have even been seasons of considerable distinction. But the chroniclers of sport have always preferred to measure excellence in terms of eras. Eras have been in short supply recently at Stanford. So too have been coaching dynasties. There's certainly been nothing like the dynasty Bill Walsh ruled when he was the coach of San Francisco's professional team, the 49ers.

Sportswise, that was a dynasty with substantial heft. It lasted the better part of a decade and led to three triumphs in the Super Bowl. As a result, Walsh first had the cloak of greatness draped around his shoulders. Then, as the championships accumulated, the purveyors of hyperbole whisked it away and replaced it with the heavier mantle that bore the title "genius." The fact that Walsh on occasion used words such as "sublime" to describe the play of his team certainly set him apart from those in the pro-football fraternity, whose grammatical constructions often drift toward the martial, monosyllabic and scatological. No less a personage than former Secretary of State George Shultz, now penning his memoirs at the Hoover Institution on Stanford's campus, says, "I have come to admire him as a great intellect."

In January, at age 60, years after he stepped down as head coach of the 49ers, Walsh decided to seek the sublime again, leaving the television booth and a lucrative contract as an analyst of N.F.L. games for NBC. To the surprise of many, perhaps even himself, he took a pay cut to $150,000 a year (plus fringes) to become head coach at a school where athletes can conjugate a verb, carry on a conversation and occasionally play a little football. Walsh described the feeling upon his return home to a campus where he last coached 14 years ago as one of unmitigated "bliss."

Midway through his first season that feeling is undiminished, and it has spread into academic nooks where enthusiasm for football has rarely flourished. Unexpected back-to-back victories over Notre Dame and UCLA propelled Walsh's charges into a national ranking in the top 10 for the first time in 22 years; despite a subsequent loss to Arizona, Walsh's return to Stanford and his application of complex pro strategies to college ball have revived discussion of whether a mere football coach could actually qualify for the untenured title of genius.

Some students of the sport believe so. Says Beano Cook, the clever TV analyst for ESPN: "If Walsh was a general, he would be able to overrun Europe with the army from Sweden." Leonard Koppett, whose observations of the game have graced many publications, including the New York Times, for almost 50 years, puts it another way: "In that narrow field of conceptual football, Walsh is a genius the way Heifetz was a genius with the violin."

The genius flows, in part, from Walsh's capacity to master the intricacies and smallest details of the game. If an opponent devised a defense that nullified the five options designed into the 49er offense, Walsh would quickly create a sixth. Then a seventh. No detail was too insignificant, and no game ever strayed far from his mind. "If we won by 35, I would wake up in the middle of the night and see how we could have won by 42," he says. "In the early days, if we lost by 21, I would wake up and see how we could have lost by only 14."

Walsh would extract those lessons from his subconscious and bake them into his next game plan. In turn, he made his players practice the hypothetical so as never to be surprised when it unexpectedly happened the next Sunday. "Everybody was ready for every situation," says 49er offensive tackle Harris Barton. "When we began a game, we really had an edge." Adds 49er linebacker Mike Walter: "On the field, the game can be a blur. If you have panic on the sideline, it will kill a team quickly." Walsh, standing serenely on the 49er sideline, secure in the knowledge that he had every option covered, was the antithesis of panic.

Yet Walsh has often seemed most creative when he turns apparent weakness into unorthodox strength. At Stanford that has proved to be something of a necessity. Walsh inherited a stout defense from his predecessor and onetime protege Dennis Green. The offense is a different story. With the exception of Glyn Milburn, an elusive back who runs like a scalded whippet, there is little team speed. After some thought, Walsh converted 250-lb. defensive end Nate Olsen, son of former N.F.L. star Merlin, into a blocking back, and sometimes uses 290-lb. tackle Jeff Buckey as if he were a tight end. "I never would have thought of that," says Stanford running-back coach Bill Ring, who played for Walsh in San Francisco and suspended a successful career as a banker with Wells Fargo to learn to coach at the knee of the master. "We had to get an advantage somehow," says Walsh. "Without speed, we sought a size advantage." Olsen has yet to run with the ball, but the genius says the opportunity will present itself when least expected. "We've got a play," he hints.

"Walsh is unhappy unless he's plotting to beat somebody on Saturday," says Beano Cook. Not really, says Walsh, who sees his role now as a coach of coaches as well as of players. Besides Ring, there are four other former 49er players on Walsh's staff who have little or no coaching experience. Says Ring, speaking of the intellectual challenge Walsh presents to both players and coaches: "You don't have to be a Rhodes scholar, but it helps to be bright." The bright, of course, are easier to teach. "This is a platform to use my teaching and counseling skills," Walsh says. "When you reach age 60, you want to give something back, to teach. There isn't anything I have to prove to myself."

Without question, but Walsh is not being entirely honest with himself. He still wants to win each Saturday. "It will be difficult to be the Rose Bowl representative, but it can be done," he says, articulating goals that are ! tangential to teaching. "It is not likely that we will be national champion." He quickly ticks off the reasons: admissions standards that are arguably the toughest of any college playing Division 1 football, academic standards that require players to take courses in actual intellectual disciplines. "A lot of universities have a group of mercenaries playing for them," Walsh says. "You hope they're learning something, but their goal is merely to play pro football."

Stanford's rigorous academic requirements can be viewed, as they should be, as laudable institutional attributes. Or they can be seen darkly as impediments to achieving the kind of success that has made Bill Walsh famous. "Some people will look for me to fail," he says. That Walsh worries about such things reveals an ego that is curiously fragile. "For all his success, he's not as secure as he should be," says a former coaching colleague. "He agonizes." Walsh is also easily wounded by criticism. Several years ago, when quarterback turned TV-talking-head Terry Bradshaw publicly criticized Walsh's earnest style in the broadcast booth, Walsh subsequently buttonholed friends and colleagues to seek reassurance that he was not a failure.

In the days immediately following his appointment, San Francisco newspapers reported that Walsh's compensation package ranged anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000. If true, that would have been more than the salary of then Stanford president Donald Kennedy, who made $240,000 in 1990. There was a brief flurry of protest raised by faculty members who thought the football tail was wagging the institutional dog at a university that had always placed academics first. English professor Ronald Rebholz raised the issue in the faculty senate to no avail. "It's nonsense," says political science professor Stephen Krasner. "Football is a business. The guy is going to bring in more money than his salary is going to cost."

Indeed, athletic director Ted Leland points out that season-ticket sales increased by 5,000 over 1991 after Walsh's appointment was announced. That's a net increase in revenue of $250,000. The size of the radio contract Stanford signed to broadcast its games doubled this year, a fact Leland attributes directly to Walsh. While Walsh draws a percentage from that contract, he's still probably making less than David Korn, dean of the Stanford school of medicine, who has yet to beat UCLA. Korn was paid $274,000 in 1990, the last year for which figures are available.

Says Walsh: "I engaged in no negotiations whatsoever. I accepted what Stanford offered." Since then he has checked with his good friend Lou Holtz at Notre Dame, who has a practiced eye for assessing compensation packages among his peers. "Lou tells me that I'm in the top 30. There are probably three coaches in the Pac-10 who make more. I'm sure I'm not breaking the bank, but I can understand the faculty's feelings."

Not to worry, Bill. "From the faculty standpoint, this is not an issue," says Krasner. Even critic Rebholz admits the truth of that assertion. "Everybody is delighted by the fact that Stanford is doing well. There is no negative sentiment."

If the faculty and athletic administration are pleased, the football players required some initial convincing. "Most of the members of this year's team were recruited by Denny Green," says Merlin Olsen. "They liked Denny. Bill had to do a sales job, and he has done a good one." But in the early days of the Walsh regime, the players held back, not sure what to make of a coach whose sense of humor once prompted him to disguise himself on the spur of the moment as a bellhop. He then tried to extract tips from his players as they emerged from the team bus after it arrived at the hotel. "In the beginning," says junior quarterback Steve Stenstrom, "he would say something funny, but we weren't sure we should laugh. Now we laugh at his jokes every day. He keeps us loose."

On top of that, Stenstrom was suddenly attending a seminar in the techniques of becoming a great quarterback run by the premier teacher of N.F.L. quarterbacks over the past two decades. "The day I found out that he was coming here, I was overwhelmed," says Stenstrom. "I was a big Joe Montana fan, and now I was going to be coached by Joe Montana's coach." One problem. Walsh was unable to bring Jerry Rice from the 49ers to catch passes. Walsh will be scouring the nation's high schools for a Rice catch-alike.

Stanford's opponents will not be happy if he finds such a player. Or three. Stanford is no longer a soft touch eagerly sought out by schedulemakers at other institutions. "He's going to drive Notre Dame nuts," says ESPN's Cook of Walsh. That will surely be the case as well with traditional rivals U.S.C. and California. Not to mention powerful Washington, which shares the top of the national polls this season with Miami of Florida.

Washington will be favored comfortably when Walsh takes his team to Seattle for the game that will probably decide who goes to the Rose Bowl. If Walsh manages to upset the odds again and bring home a victory, there are some at Stanford who feel that it would be time to re-examine the question of genius. "If he beats Washington," says Professor Krasner, "all questions will have been answered. We will deify him."

Don't take it personally, Bill.