As the first of my FOUR blogs today I'd like to dedicate this first one to one of the greatest coaches of all-time...Bill Walsh, for today he died at the age of 75. Bill was born on November 30, 1931 in L.A. starting his football career at Chatham Glenwood High School in the mid 1940's. Walsh was recruited to play at San Jose State as a Wide Receiver and a boxer at the same time. His first coaching stint was head coach for Washington High School in Fremont. It was there he began to work his way up through the coaching ranks.
He would head to the University of California before becoming head coach for rival school Stanford. At Stanford Walsh went 17-7 in a 2 year span, but couldn't give the Cardinal a Pac 8 championship. In 1979 he became head coach for a fledgling San Francisco 49ers football team that had struggled throughout the 1970s. Within 2 years he was able to turn the 49ers into one of the best teams in the NFL. The 49ers turn around would come full circle in the 1981 NFC Championship as they faced off against the Dallas Cowboys at Candlestick Park.
The game would be known as "The Catch"(pictured below). With 58 seconds to go and at the Dallas 6. Joe Montana was flushed out of the pocket and chased down by Dallas defenders as he scrambled he managed to get the ball off and seemingly out-of-nowhere Dwight Clark made the catch to tie the game at 27 and eventually give the Niners a 28-27 victory and a birth to Super Bowl XVI.
The next week(yes the Super Bowl used to be the week after), the 49ers jumped out to a 20-0 lead and eventually won Super Bowl XVI, 26-21 over the Cincinnati Bengals. It was only the beginning for Bill Walsh and a 49ers dynasty that lasted 20 years.
Using the West Coast offense he developed, Walsh and the Niners together would win 2 more Super Bowls(XIX over the Dolphins and XXIII over the Bengals). It was following Super Bowl XXIII that Bill Walsh announced retirement from coaching. He would be a commentator for three years for NBC, before returning to Stanford. However, Walsh's 2nd run in Stanford failed to live up to the first and he permanantly retired from the game in 1994. In 2004, Walsh announced that he had been diagnosed with leukemia. He would spend the final years of his life battling the disease before dying today at 10:45am at his home in California.
Basically, today is a sad day for Football fans all over the world as another great is loss. A great coach who produced perhaps, the best dynasty in sports and is credited for bringing out such coaches as Mike Holmgren(Seattle Seahawks), George Seifert(former 49er head coach) and Dennis Green(former Arizona Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings coach). For that I say, Rest in Peace to a great coach, father, and offensive mastermind.
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