Chapter 1 - A Little Bit of Dignity and Class
It all began with “Mr. D,” though in the fall of 1978 few in the nine Bay Area counties used such terms of endearment when identifying Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., the hapless owner of their favorite football team. Nor was he yet referred to with the more hip “Eddie D,” or even the double-edged “Junior.” Instead, it was “that rich kid whose daddy bought him a football team” or “that Mafioso dip stick who destroyed the Niners,” or, for short, “that asshole.” Every fan within two hours drive of San Francisco knew who you meant. DeBartolo had joined the NFL in the spring of 1977 as its youngest franchise owner, hoping to become a man of stature in the sports world, bringing honor on his family while realizing his own deeply held aspirations for belonging, triumph, and acclaim. So far, however, Eddie—barely 32 years old, short, pudgy, and in charge for the first time in his life—was a complete flop. And he finally figured out late that fall that he had to do something radical to reverse the situation before it was too late.
The most personally trying element in Eddie D’s dilemma was his fear of disappointing his father, Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., the original “Mr D,” who was described by his son as close enough to him to be “like my brother.” DeBartolo Sr., now 69, was the architect of the family fortune. Born in the impoverished “Hollow” neighborhood in Youngstown during 1909, three months after the death of his natural father, Anthony Paonessa, Senior had taken the family name of his stepfather—an immigrant who neither read nor wrote English—and followed him into the cement contracting business. Then, at the insistence of his mother, Senior worked his way through engineering school at Notre Dame University during the Depression by laboring all night at construction sites. He rejoined his stepfather’s Youngstown contracting business until the Second World War, when he was drafted into the Army Corps of Engineers for the duration. Senior returned from the war with an officer’s commission and a $1500 nest egg won in military crap games and used it to capitalize the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation shortly after his first child and only son was born.
DeBartolo Sr. threw his new enterprise into the still infant shopping center business and developed some of the first such commercial installations at a time when there were less than a dozen in the entire United States. Eventually his company built the largest enclosed shopping mall ever, as well as hundreds of similar properties in more than a dozen states, ranking as the nation’s largest shopping center developer by the time the 1970’s began. He also acquired several banks, numerous hotels, three horse racing tracks, the Pittsburgh franchise in the National Hockey League, and some seventy other subsidiary enterprises, all headquartered in Youngstown. By the time Eddie fell on his face out in San Francisco, the privately held DeBartolo family business was worth at least $400 million and Edward Sr. would soon be listed in the Forbes Magazine directory of the world’s 400 wealthiest. He was also suspected of Mafia connections, largely because he was a rich Italian contractor from Youngstown. Eddie’s father dismissed the innuendo with great annoyance. “This kind of talk is the curse of anyone successful whose name ends in an i or an o,” he complained. “I got where I am by working my ass off every day of my life. I could have turned to certain characters in this town. I’m not saying I don’t know them. But I solved my own problems.”
Edward Sr. was the archetypal patriarch—almost as short as his son but thin, quiet, dignified, and always dressed in a dark suit. One friend who had known him for forty years said he had only seen Eddie’s father twice without a tie, both times when he was wearing swimming trunks. In public he kept his tongue but in private was known to swear like a Teamster. Such was the original Mr. D’s stature around Youngstown that a thief who stole his briefcase returned it untouched as soon as he discovered who owned it. Over more than forty years of working, Senior had never taken a vacation and if he wasn’t traveling he was always home for dinner at the end of his customary fourteen hour shift. He started his day at 5:30 a.m. over a Styrofoam cup full of coffee, usually with Eddie. Senior’s idea of a good time was to watch three televisions side by side, tuned to three different football games. His corporation’s two story brick headquarters in suburban Youngstown was just down the road from his enormous house and from his son’s of similar size. When Senior traveled, he used one of the corporation’s three Lear jets—flying more than 500 hours a year—and was surrounded by a small swarm of aides charged with initiating the decisions he made on the spot. Upon his return, his son greeted him with a kiss.
Not surprisingly, Junior grew up wanting to be Senior more than he wanted to be anybody else. The expectations Eddie put on himself with that identification were “brutal,” he would later admit. “It almost broke up my marriage before I realized I can’t fill those big shoes. I can’t be Edward DeBartolo Sr. and I don’t have to be. I have to carry on a tradition, not an identity and I’ll do that in a different way. He’s helped me by letting me handle things my own way, to be my own man.” During the fall of 1978, however, that evolution was still very much in process.
According to Eddie, his greatest gift from his father was “the common man’s touch,” largely passed on during his childhood in Youngstown. Halfway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, the DeBartolos’ home town had once hosted a legion of steel mills, fabricators, and blast furnaces, many of which were empty and rusting by the time Eddie got into the football business. And football was also part of his Youngstown inheritance. No region in America was more wedded to the game than the industrial Midwest and, rich or not, the DeBartolo scion was anything but an exception. He played on the Junior Varsity squad during his freshman year at Youngstown’s Cardinal Mooney High School, but, still an inch and half and several pounds short of his adult five foot seven and a half inches and 160 pounds, he was doomed as a player. Junior swallowed his disappointment and settled for making a lot of working class buddies from the team who became regulars at the DeBartolo mansion for games of pool. Intent on hanging out as just one of the guys, Eddie D’s most distinguishing feature as a teenager was his sartorial flair. “Eddie came up the easy way,” one of the Mooney High School faculty remembered, “but, other than his clothes, he never showed it.” Even when he was an adult, one of Eddie’s closest friends was a foundry worker from his days with the JVs.
After Cardinal Mooney, Junior followed his father’s footsteps to Notre Dame but Senior still kept track of him, using a contact in the football program to give him updates on how his son was doing. After graduating with a degree in business, Eddie was moved into the corporation and shuffled through assignments to learn all the company’s functions. At each stop, other corporation executives were tasked with reporting to his father about the son. When on assignment in Dayton, Eddie reprised his Youngstown days and began hanging out with a group of players from the Dayton University football team. He married his high school sweetheart along the way, fathered three daughters, and had just been named the family corporation’s executive in charge of sports operations when the DeBartolos began pursuing the possibility of purchasing the Forty Niners early in 1977. The year before, they had made an unsuccessful $16 million bid in the auction to secure rights to the NFL expansion franchise in Tampa, Florida, a state where DeBartolo Corp. had numerous business interests.
By then, Eddie had begun the process of becoming his “own man,” and, though often imitative of Senior down to the smallest details, Eddie’s “own man” was also anything but a carbon copy. For starters, Junior was every inch the party animal that Senior was not. One acquaintance who enjoyed Eddie’s typical restaurant hospitality recalled “there was just bottle after bottle. I finally had to stop drinking because I couldn’t function, but Eddie and his buddies just kept going.” The younger DeBartolo also had a serious attachment to gambling, especially at the tables in Las Vegas where he would soon establish a reputation as a high roller. One of his fellow NFL owners would eventually describe him as “on coke half the time” as well. Dressed to the nines in very expensive Italian suits, Edward DeBartolo Jr. “loved life,” one Forty Niner employee explained, “and loved living it.” When traveling for pleasure, he usually brought along an entourage of his Youngstown buddies and was rarely seen without his bodyguard, Leo, a very large man with a bump under his armpit where he kept his pistol. “Eddie may not have been a gangster,” one San Franciscan remembered, “but he sure looked like one when he rolled into town.”
Chapter 4 - Growing Into The Game
Edward DeBartolo Jr. may have been a “spoiled little rich kid,” but no one would ever say that about the man he was thinking of hiring to coach his football team. William Ernest Walsh had been born in Los Angeles on the last day of November, 1931, during the nadir of the Great Depression. He marked the third successive generation of Walsh males named Bill, each distinguished from his predecessor by a different middle name. His father, William Archibald, was 23 years old at the time his son was born, his mother, Ruth, was 19, and Bill was the first of their two children. Ruth had been born in LA and William Archibald had moved there at the age of 6. Both their families—one with Irish roots, the other German—had emigrated to southern California from Colorado, where the men had worked in the mines and brickyards around Denver. Bill’s father had left school after the eighth grade to search for work wherever he could find it, enduring a long stretch of Depression unemployment during which he and Ruth had lived on little more than a daily meal of flap jacks. By November, 1931, however, William Archibald had been hired on the automobile assembly line at the Los Angeles Chrysler manufacturing plant for thirty three cents an hour and was supplementing his pay with freelance body and fender repair on the weekends. His boy Bill would have to work for everything he got.
The home of Walsh’s childhood memories was a workingman’s bungalow in South Central LA, two miles from the Los Angeles Coliseum, in the residential corridor lining Vermont, Figueroa, and Normandie Avenues. The house occupied a postage stamp sized lot and had two bedrooms—one of which Bill shared with his sister, Maureen—a living room, dining room, bathroom, and kitchen, plus a garage and a tiny two room cottage out back which the Walshes rented to a succession of tenants. In the evening, after dinner, the family often sat out on the front porch. Bill recalled the house as “quite nice” until he revisited it a few years before his death. “My God,” he then exclaimed, “it was a tiny little box just sitting there. The front porch was hardly as big as a sofa. And all the houses for blocks around were just the same.” Most of the residents of South Central in those days were immigrants of one sort or another who spoke little or no English. The kids played in the streets after school or down at the playground for games of baseball or football, but there were no organized sports programs with coaches and uniforms. Virtually the only trips Bill took out of the neighborhood came every month or two, when the whole family would pile into their old car and take a Sunday drive to the beach at Santa Monica.
Bill’s mother was the anchor of the Walshes’ family life, keeping house until the advent of World War II when jobs opened up for women and she joined the workforce. His grandparents on both sides were also a regular presence, but by far the heaviest influence on his childhood was his father, William Archibald Walsh. “I don’t think Bill ever had a great closeness with his dad,” one of his best friends explained. “He was a tall man, kind of cold. He was like all the men of that time—my dad was similar—Depression men, closed up guys with thick skins, the kind of fathers who left their children with a hole in their soul where that closeness should have been.” William Archibald was, Bill remembered, “a hard working guy who was typical of the men of his era. He worked and he drank and that was it. There were no other activities—no golf, no fishing, nothing. He couldn’t afford them or he couldn’t envision doing them. I guess he was a kind of sports fan from a distance, maybe listening to a game on the radio every now and then, but that was it.” In his more candid moments, Bill would dismiss his father as “a lout” who had never been a father to him at all.
Bill would nonetheless credit William Archibald with instilling the “work ethic” which would later become a staple of Walsh’s football career. Starting at age 10, young Bill was expected to spend his weekends helping his dad with his body and fender business. “While some kids were outside playing,” he remembered, “I was out in the garage working with the men. My dad had things for me to do, sanding cars, getting them ready to paint. I didn’t have a choice, but I was never mad about it. It was for the family and those were the days everybody did things for the family to survive. Other boys my age were doing the same thing for their dads. He’d give me a dollar every now and then when he thought I did a particularly good job. What stuck was the level of detail he demanded from me. His expectations were hard and stark. It wasn’t like, ‘Maybe you better try to.’ It was ‘Get that goddamn thing over here and line it up right. That’s not lined up right. Take it off and do it again.’ He’d blow his stack if he thought you screwed up, even if you hadn’t. It was tough love if you want to call it that. It had a real hard side to it.” Sixty years later, when Bill’s doctors were trying to identify the origins of the leukemia that was killing him, they would point to those teenage work days with his dad, breathing without protection in a shop full of paint fumes and solvents.
There was still time for some sports in his Los Angeles childhood and of all those Bill played—including baseball, basketball, and gymnastics—football was always his favorite. When he was twelve, he and one of his buddies would visit the practice fields of the University of Southern California football team near the LA Coliseum after school and shag stray balls or anything else they could talk their way into doing. He saw his very first live football game at the Coliseum one Saturday when USC hosted Notre Dame and his father and a bunch of his father’s friends brought him along to cheer for the Fighting Irish. It was the only game Bill could remember his father ever watching. Notre Dame won, 13-0, thanks to the heroics of Heisman Trophy winning running back Angelo Bertelli. The teenaged Bill kept his eyes glued to the action but Bill’s dad and his pals were more intent on celebrating the outcome than following the game itself and were all drunk by the fourth quarter.
Chapter 12 - That Kind of Season
Despite their awful record, the Niners’ 1979 season—thanks to the franchise’s newly anointed “king”—would live on as a football landmark, an elbow in the game’s development that would be visible for years to come. Bill Walsh had arrived and, three decades later, his advent would be ranked among the more significant events in NFL history. Two and fourteen or not, the game would never be played quite the same way again.
The foremost reason was his offense.
The game as commonly practiced in the 1979 NFL was without much in the way of subtlety and was infinitely predictable. Ball control was the prime offensive object and that domination was considered a by product of the running game and only the running game. Despite the pioneering work of coaches like Sid Gilman and Paul Brown, the pass was largely an afterthought, utilized only when the running game came up short. The adage in wide use was that when you passed the ball, three things could happen and two of them were bad. Teams ran on first down, ran on second down, and only then, faced with a third down and long yardage, would they pass. The other use of the pass was always late in the game, when trailing. And the passing game itself was conceived of almost exclusively in vertical terms. The object was to go downfield, often as far as possible. The pass patterns run by receivers involved a minimum of deception and the strategy directing them was largely devoid of complexity. Many teams just sent their receivers out and told the quarterback to throw the ball to whichever one he thought was open. A fifty percent completion rate was the established standard of quarterback excellence. “Smash mouth” was the game’s favorite expression and the frontal assault was not just a strategy but almost a matter of honor. “Men were men,” one NFL veteran of the time observed, “and if you didn’t run over people, you weren’t playing football.”
The transformation Walsh was about to bring to the game was aided enormously by two rule changes recently instituted by the NFL. The first limited the amount of contact a defensive back could make with an offensive pass receiver. Heretofore, the defense could shove and jostle the men they were guarding all the way down the field until the ball was actually in the air, making precise disciplined routes extremely difficult to run. Limiting that kind of activity to within five yards of the line of scrimmage opened up enormous possibilities of which Walsh would take great advantage. The second rule change concerned the way the offensive line was allowed to block. Previously, any use of the hands was considered holding and drew a ten yard penalty. In theory, blocking was to be done with the shoulders alone and the hands were to be kept against the offensive lineman’s body. Now, the hands could be used, even extended to the front and pressed against the opponent, as long as they stayed inside the blocker’s shoulders and didn’t actually grasp the man being blocked. This made pass protection blocking far easier than it had been, again opening up increased opportunities for the passing game.
And the passing game Walsh brought was unlike anything else in use. First developed in Cincinnati, then enlarged and installed in San Diego, further enlarged and reinstalled at Stanford, and now enlarged even further and installed again at his Santa Clara training camp, it was sophisticated, complex, and imaginative—favoring maneuver and deception over confrontation, choreography over blunt force. His playbook—two and a half inches thick, ten plays to the page, with names like “Double Wing Left Near, F Short, Roll Right H.B. Sail” or “Brown Right Tight Zoom, A Left 76 X Shallow Cross”—was three times the size of any his players had ever seen before and grew almost daily. To multiply the offense’s deception, all plays could be run out of as many as a half dozen different formations so they looked completely different to the defense trying to thwart them. Rather than simplify his approach until his team caught on, Bill had introduced the full system that summer, knowing full well it would take far more than one season for them to come close to mastering it.
The offense’s essential premise was that the passing game could be used for ball control even more effectively than running had been. Walsh never had fewer than three receivers in patterns on any given play, often as many as five, utilizing not only the two wide receivers and the tight end but both running backs as well. All the patterns were coordinated so that covering one or two would always leave another one open. Much of the passing was for less than ten yards and all of it designed to create mismatches, overload zones, or find and exploit the holes in coverage. Rather than just vertical, he added a horizontal dimension as well, spreading the field with crossing patterns underneath the linebackers and forcing the defense to defend its entire width. Passes were thrown on timing, as the quarterback read through a progression of options, each designed to come open in a designed succession, and often the ball was released before the intended recipient even looked back at the quarterback. The patterns were designed to get the ball to a receiver quicker than the defense could respond and cover him. All routes were adjusted to the defensive coverage, then run to precise spots to which the quarterback threw. And passes were thrown on first down or second down as well as third, early in the game even more than late.
In concept, Walsh conceived of his short passing game as just long hand offs over the line of scrimmage and counted for fifty percent of his yardage to come after the receiver had made the catch. The result was a drumbeat of incessant completions—four yards, six yards, ten yards—accumulating first downs, keeping the pressure on the defense that, never able to quite catch up, often became more and more frustrated as the game progressed. The approach was derided as “dink and dunk” but it worked, even in the hands of Walsh’s 2-14 acolytes. After one game that year, the opposing coach, having just survived a close call in which the Niners had, as usual, collected more than three hundred yards of total offense, mostly through the air, scratched his head with a perplexed look as he accepted Walsh’s post game congratulations. “God,” he exhaled with noticeable relief, “you can really throw the football.”
That was an understatement. Proof of as much could be found in the play of Steve DeBerg. Walsh’s starting quarterback would stay in the league for almost two decades as a journeyman starter and backup with another three teams after Walsh’s, but Bill was extremely aware of his limitations and had already decided he was not a long term answer to the quarterback position. DeBerg’s slow footedness was a handicap and his penchant for critical mistakes drove Walsh up a mental tree. Nothing was worse for his offense than interceptions and his quarterback threw a lot of them, even under Walsh’s tutelage. That said, the system Walsh brought nonetheless transformed DeBerg. In 1978, he had completed 137 of 302 passes, a completion rate of 45 percent. Under Walsh in 1979, Steve DeBerg threw 578 passes, more than any quarterback in the history of the NFL, and completed sixty percent of them, also more than any other quarterback in NFL history. At the end of the season, the Forty Niners, whose offense had ranked twenty eighth and last in the league the previous season, would rank sixth.
That didn’t, however, necessarily translate into wins. The Niners blew a lead against the Rams and lost by three. Against New Orleans, DeBerg threw three interceptions, the defense gave up more than 500 yards, and they lost by nine. Playing Seattle, the Niners were driving to go ahead late in the game then threw a pass in the flat that was intercepted and run the length of the field for a touchdown, securing another defeat. Through it all, Bill worked at bolstering his squad. One of his favorite lectures to them was about how to hold themselves in the face of adversity. He pointed out that when zebras were under attack by lions, in the final moments their posture changed, they bowed their heads, and submitted to their fate. Walsh told his players never to bow their heads, to keep standing straight, never adopt the posture of defeat, and refuse to give in. When the Niners arrived in New York at 0-6 for a game with the Giants, several of the Giants’ locker room staff remarked to the Niners’ trainer that “they had been expecting to see a team that looked dispirited and like it was just going through the motions. Instead the Niners looked confident as though they were expecting to win. The Giants hadn’t expected that attitude at all.” Nonetheless, the Niners left New York 0-7.
Their first win came in week 8, when they returned home and beat the visiting Atlanta Falcons, 20-15. Appropriately, the team gave the credit to their coach. By then, most of them were convinced that the Silver Fox could find a way to move the ball against anybody.
Chapter 26 - Banged Up, Beaten Down, Then Shattered
“The 49ers… had arguably been the best team in the NFL,” one of the Chronicle’s columnists wrote on the day of Montana’s surgery, but had now “suddenly become just another good team.”
It would require all of Walsh’s skills to keep his squad from letting Joe’s loss send them sliding backwards down the slope they had just begun to ascend. Afterwards, the same prognosticators who were lining up in September to announce the Niners’ impending doom would, come the end of December, pronounce this “the best coaching job in Walsh’s career with the Forty Niners.” He showed no external signs of panic at the situation. “We really leaned on the foundation we’d built,” he later pointed out, “on intensity, on communication, focus and the rest. We’d built a really solid foundation for when things would go wrong and we managed to keep things going. As vital as Joe was, the team just continued to play.”
And Bill immediately adjusted his system to fit his new quarterback. Kemp was under six foot tall, mobile and possessed a strong arm, but his height made seeing downfield and getting enough clearance to make his passes in the face of a pass rush problematic. To compensate, “our linemen were asked to engage their pass rushers earlier and stay in front of them,” Bill explained. In so doing, “they sacrificed their ability to sustain their blocks, but if they stopped the rushers early, Jeff could get some clearance and his height disadvantage wouldn’t be a factor. We also emphasized the play pass because faking the run would take some of the heat off. But, again, anytime you play-fake and offensive linemen drive out much as they do when they’re run blocking, they can lose their men quickly. In Jeff’s case, he’d get the time he needed to get the ball off, but he’d be hit right after he threw, almost without exception.” Bill also put more emphasis on deep pass patterns to make maximum use of Kemp’s arm. The results were impressive. Jeff Kemp, who had averaged under fifty percent completions heretofore in his career, began completing almost sixty percent of his throws and, within three weeks, was leading the league in passing.
After losing to the Rams, the Niners formed up behind Kemp and handled the Saints at home, 26-17. The following Sunday they faced the Dolphins down in Miami and, despite Miami’s ranking as the second best offense in the NFL plus 90 degree temperatures accompanied by sixty percent humidity, the Niners defense was dominant. “Marino was made to look more like Steve DeBerg than the quarterback who a week ago became the NFL’s top rated passer of all time,” the Chronicle reported. “He finally left the game to a chorus of boos midway through the fourth quarter, after Lott’s second interception [which] he lateraled to Tom Holmoe [who] went 66 yards for a touchdown.” The final score was 31-16.
After another win and a loss, the Niners’ bad quarterback luck also reared its head again in a 14-14 tie with the mediocre Atlanta Falcons. Jeff Kemp played the whole game but sustained a hip injury that would sit him down for at least three weeks. Now San Francisco was down to its third string signal caller, Mike Moroski, a journeyman backup who had been with the team barely two weeks. Nonetheless, Bill coached him up and turned him into a 59 percent passer the next week in Green Bay against the struggling Packers, where the Niners won 31-17. Going into New Orleans in week 9, Walsh’s Montana and Kemp-less squad was nonetheless 5-2-1 and in the thick of the Division race. At the same time, the Bears were leading their Division on the way to a 14-2 season, the Giants were leading theirs, also headed for 14-2, and the Redskins were only a game back and headed for 12-4 and a wild card berth.
The Saints game was a big one for Eddie D. The DeBartolos had significant business interests in New Orleans, so it was something of a bragging rights contest. The game was also being played on Eddie D’s fortieth birthday. The Niners, however, went into the contest short some significant players. In addition to Montana and Kemp, Lott was out, so was Eric Wright, Wendell Tyler was fresh off the injured list, Micheal Carter would last a quarter before leaving on crutches, and Roger Craig would sustain a hip injury that made him little more than a decoy for the bulk of the game. And the Saints, in the process of extricating themselves from among the league’s weak underside, were no easy mark.
Stumbling out of the gate, the Niners gave up two quick touchdowns and fell behind 14-0. It looked like they had got one of those touchdowns back when Rice broke open for what looked like a 36 yard scoring pass, but he dropped the ball. The Niners managed a field goal instead and next brought the score to 14-10 after an interception return down to the Saints 1. Then Walsh’s offense started screwing up. On a series that had reached the New Orleans 9, Moroski threw a second down pass outside when his receiver broke inside and gave the ball back to the Saints. On the following Niner drive, with less than two minutes remaining in the half and the Niners on the Saints 24, Wendell Tyler coughed up the ball. Then on the first series of the second half, a 52 yard pass from Moroski to Russ Francis put the Niners on the New Orleans 5, but the next three plays lost 10 yards and when the Niners settled for a field goal, it was blocked. After that, the game was essentially over. The offense couldn’t move and the Saints drove for three straight field goals and won going away, 23-10.
Afterwards, Eddie—who had apparently been drinking—was beside himself. He watched the end of the fourth quarter in the Niners’ locker room, where he threw a glass at the television monitor, sending broken shards flying all over. According to one reporter who witnessed the scene, DeBartolo looked as though “his eyes might rocket out of his skull… Eddie D was seething and he suddenly noticed one of the 49er public relations men… Eddie grabbed the guy from behind and wheeled him around and started yelling at him. You would have thought Eddie D. owned the guy.” When one of the team doctors showed up, Eddie gave him similar treatment, but saved his worst for the players as they straggled in, covered with sweat, blood, and rug burns from the Super Dome’s artificial grass.
The Niners’ owner was yelling at them when Bill entered the locker room. Walsh immediately pulled his boss towards the head coach’s office, the first room off the corridor that led to the lockers. Bill told Eddie he couldn’t talk to the team that way, he wouldn’t allow it, and with that, the two went at it, yelling at each other at top volume. It was, one witness remembered, “fuck you this and fuck you that.” When Mike Holmgren walked in from the press box where he’d been manning the headphones, the two were in the hallway, screaming at each other with Carmen Policy wedged between them. Holmgren squeezed by as quickly as he could. Eddie finally ended the confrontation by telling Bill to have his lawyer call Eddie’s lawyer in the morning to talk about terminating his contract. Then he stomped out with his entourage in pursuit.
Decades later, when asked what provoked Eddie to this outburst, Walsh would speculate off the record that it had a lot to do with whatever DeBartolo had been drinking or snorting and he would suggest that “Eddie had probably done some pretty heavy gambling” on the game. By then, Bill had come to accept DeBartolo’s abuse—though hurtful and disturbing—as part of the price he had paid for keeping his job. At the time, however, it was devastating coming as it did on top of his own post game trauma. Bill retreated into the coach’s room to gather himself and then went out to face the press. To them he spoke bravely about the Niners still being in the Division race, just a game back of the Rams. “We’re not ready to concede anything,” he insisted.
“A few moments later, however,” according to a report in the Chronicle, “Walsh walked into his private dressing room, which had a glass door. Looking through the door, one could see Walsh become a tired, deflated, white-haired figure slumped in a chair, his eyes on the floor. It was as though, with his speech to the press completed, he had wandered back into that room, sat down, and hit rock bottom.” It was a long flight back to San Francisco that night. And when he was finally holed up in his office at 711 Nevada, Bill called Kristine Hanson and told her he didn’t know if he still had a job.
