[mack]

Continued, Pt.2:

He pioneered the idea of scripting a game's first 25 plays, a habit he started with the Bengals. At first it was just four plays, then six. When he went to the Chargers, it was 15, then 25. He refined the script at Stanford, and it later was a staple with the 49ers. The script was never a hard and fast list; he would stray from the list if the situation warranted, then return to it later.
"The whole thought behind 'scripting' was that we could make our decisions much more thoroughly and with more definition on Thursday or Friday than during a game, when all the tension, stress and emotion can make it extremely difficult to think clearly," he wrote.

Practices under Walsh were not the bruising sessions they were under most other coaches. "We didn't beat guys up," he said in an interview in Football Digest. He preferred to save the contact for the game and concentrate instead on preparing for every situation that might come up in a game.
"The format of practice and contingency planning - those, to me, are the biggest contributions that I've made to the game," he said.
Another contribution was the Minority Coaching Fellowship, a program he created in 1987 to help African American coaches improve their job prospects in the NFL and Division I colleges by inviting them to an up-close look at the 49ers' training camps. Among those who took advantage of the program were Tyrone Willingham, a former Stanford head coach and current head coach at the University of Washington; Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis and several NFL assistants. The NFL later turned the fellowship into a league-wide program.

When he quit as coach of the 49ers, Walsh moved into a vice president's position in the organization. He wasn't there long. He joined NBC Sports in 1989 and teamed with Dick Enberg for three seasons as the network's top analyst on NFL and Notre Dame telecasts. Although Walsh could be very glib, his TV work was cautious, and he didn't seem to enjoy it.
Walsh maintained his strong ties with Stanford and, in a decision that surprised the football world, returned as head coach in 1992. He immediately led the Cardinal to a 10-3 record, including a victory over Penn State in the Blockbuster Bowl. "If Walsh was a general," said ESPN analyst Beano Cook, "he would be able to overrun Europe with the army from Sweden."
After three years at Stanford and a 17-17-1 record overall, he left coaching for good. "It was time to move on," he said.
To him, diagramming plays and getting players to execute them exactly represented an art form. "I am a man who draws pass patterns on his wife's shoulder," he said.

He fostered the image of the articulate, white-haired professor who cracked jokes at news conferences and devoured biographies and history books in his spare time. In reality, his cool shell hid a feisty disposition.
Fred VonAppen, who coached with him on the 49ers and at Stanford, told an interviewer in 1993, "He's a complex man, somewhat of an enigma. I gave up trying to understand him a long time ago. In a way he has the kind of personality that creates a love-hate relationship. He's not always the distinguished, patriarchal guy television viewers are used to seeing on the sidelines. He's a very competitive guy, and he can be scathing, especially in the heat of battle. There have been times when I would have gladly split his skull with an ax. Then again, he's the greatest."

Over the years, Walsh served as a consultant in various NFL ventures. In 1994, he helped create the World League of American Football, which became NFL Europe.
He returned to the 49ers in 1996 as a consultant, but the organization was in turmoil. DeBartolo was under a federal investigation into his pursuit of a riverboat casino license in Louisiana. Walsh clashed with team president Carmen Policy, personnel director Dwight Clark and some of the coaches. He felt he couldn't get anything done. Meanwhile, salary cap problems were building.
He left but came back two years later. Policy and Clark had left for the Cleveland Browns. Walsh helped extricate the team from its cap difficulty and get it through the ownership change from DeBartolo to his sister, Denise York, and her husband, Dr. John York. He had a strong influence in restocking the roster and signed Jeff Garcia, a former San Jose State quarterback then starring in Canada. His faith in Garcia would pay off; the quarterback was elected to the Pro Bowl three times with the 49ers.
Walsh turned the general manager's position over to Terry Donahue in 2001, but continued to serve as a consultant. This was a tragic time in his life. His mother died in 2002. A week later his son Steve, a KGO radio reporter, died of leukemia at the age of 46. His wife, Geri, was still enduring the debilitating effects of a stroke in 1998.

He went back to Stanford for a third time in 2004 to work with then-athletic director Ted Leland on special projects and fundraising initiatives, as well as serving as a consultant for coaches and athletes. He also was in demand as a public speaker.
When Leland left, Walsh served as interim athletic director for seven months and was instrumental in planning for the rebuilding of Stanford Stadium, which was accomplished with breathtaking quickness in 2006. He gave up the athletic director position when Bob Bowlsby took over last summer.
William Ernest Walsh was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 30, 1931, the son of a day laborer who worked at various times at an auto factory, a railroad yard and a brickyard. When Walsh was 15, his father got him a job in a garage near the Los Angeles Coliseum. The family moved around California frequently.
He had only average athletic skills but was a running back on the football team at Hayward High. Unable to attract a scholarship offer, he played quarterback for two years at the College of San Mateo and went on to an injury-hampered career as a receiver at San Jose State.

In college, he met a pretty woman from Walnut Creek named Geri Nardini during a day at the beach. Shortly thereafter he proposed, and they married in 1955, the same year he earned his bachelor's degree.
After a hitch in the Army at Fort Ord, he became a graduate assistant at San Jose State under his old coach Bob Bronzan. When Walsh completed his studies for his master's in education in 1959, Bronzan wrote a recommendation for Walsh's placement file: "I predict Bill Walsh will become the outstanding football coach in the United States."
He took over a struggling team at Washington Union High School in Fremont - the team had lost 27 straight games - and took it to a conference championship in 1958 with a 9-1 season.
"When you went to a game, you or one of the guys you worked with had to drive the team to the game," he said. "That was just part of the job, so I learned to drive one of those big school buses."

He took a big step forward in 1960 when he was hired as defensive coordinator by Cal coach Marv Levy. In 1963, he moved up to administrative assistant, recruiting coordinator and defensive backfield coach at Stanford under John Ralston.
When he left Washington High at 27, he had hoped to be a college head coach by the time he was 30. Instead, he spent the next 18 years as an assistant.
In 1966 he took his first pro job with the Raiders and made the switch from defense to offense, coaching the backfield. Although John Rauch was the head coach, Walsh later called owner Al Davis one of his mentors. Another was Paul Brown, who was awarded an expansion franchise in Cincinnati and hired Walsh as an assistant coach for the first Bengals team in 1968.
Brown gave Walsh free rein to refine his sophisticated passing game, but when Brown retired in 1976, he named offensive line coach Bill Johnson as his successor. Had Brown named Walsh, it's conceivable that the Bengals, rather than the 49ers, would have been the Team of the '80s.

Walsh, who had turned down several promising jobs because he was sure he was Brown's heir apparent, was devastated. Miffed that "nobody would take me seriously," he considered leaving football. "It was beginning to look as if I would never make it as a head coach," he said.
Instead, San Diego coach Tommy Prothro hired him as offensive coordinator, and he guided the Chargers' high-powered aerial attack around Fouts. A year later he finally got a head coaching job, at Stanford at the age of 45, and quickly proved he was up to the task of leadership. Two years later, he was the 49ers coach. Three years after that, he was The Genius of San Francisco.

He disclosed his illness in 2006 after undergoing many months of treatment and blood transfusions.
Besides his wife, he is survived by two children, Craig and Elizabeth; his sister, Maureen; and two grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.