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The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football And Created An NFL Dynasty (2008)

by David Harris(Favorite Author)

3.91 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1400066654 (ISBN13: 9781400066650)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: Decent biography but one which I wish had spanned more time and gone into much greater detail. Over 350 pages or so, Harris summarizes the years Walsh spent as the 49'ers head coach/president between '79 and '88. If you're as unaware of Bill Walsh as I was, then this is a great start. Every 49'ers season in his head coaching career is retold and some major games are described at length, with insights from Walsh, the players and excerpts from the press. But if you're more interested in how Walsh managed all of this, Harris is frustratingly spare with details. Walsh is successful in the NFL Draft, but his approach to scouting players only covers a couple of paragraphs. His revolutionary coaching methods span only two pages and a few pages of general theories. He devises a pr... moreogram to increase minority coaching roles, then hires Harry Edwards ("The Revolt of the Black Athlete") to help with player relations in an increasingly black NFL, but again this is barely touched upon. Other details aren't covered well enough, either. Especially those that cover Walsh's personality, which, to me, would make the book entirely more interesting. This is a coach who took every loss by his team as a personal humiliation, refusing to eat or speak for days afterward. He was also a lousy, absent father and a cheating husband, who gloated to the press after every win and demanded complete control of an entire organization - from janitors to players - in order to feel comfortable. There's barely any analysis of these facets of Walsh, just small snippets here and there. Near the end of the book Harris says (I'm paraphrasing) that it is/was impossible to know Bill Walsh entirely, and there lies my exasperation with the author. If that's what you think, are you sure you're the right person to write about him?
review 2: Fairly readable recap of the 49ers dynasty of the 80's from the coach's perspective. Steered clear of what I usually find to be the boring parts ("his grandparents were immigrants who doted on young.......").I don't think the author regularly writes about sports, or at any rate he does not come across as a football expert. I didn't learn anything about the West Coast offense that I didn't already know, though narrative summaries of individual regular season games from 25 years ago are plentiful here.What I liked best about the book is that, without being a hatchet job, it shows convincingly that Walsh ("the genius" nickname notwithstanding) was just a guy -- uncommonly devoted to and good at figuring out players' skills and how they could help his team win, to be sure, but not an all-around ultra-person. His family life was a mess; he was a workaholic; he alienated lots of the players; he was emotionally devastated by losses; he had a huge ego ("I won the Super Bowl" etc.), and so on. To make a sweeping generalization, I think this is the norm -- someone who becomes widely known as fantastically accomplished in one area is no more likely to have mastered others than anyone else. For this reason, the marketing of successful coaches' insights as though they will help you in business, relationships, life, etc. seems like a hoax -- probably the most tedious example being that endlessly repeated ad a few years ago with Coach K assuring us that "I don't think of myself as a basketball coach. I think of myself as a leader...who happens to coach basketball."Thankfully, this book, while not riveting, at least sidesteps the temptation to imply that if only you cut people out of your life a year or two before they hit the end of the line, and emphasize "yards after catch" in all your endeavors, you too can be successful like Coach Walsh. less

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