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Bill Walsh, 49ers Football and Excellence in the Martial Arts.
As well as practicing martial arts, I am also a big fan of various sports, especially the English Premier League (Chelsea) and the National Football League in the US (Washington Redskins). Despite my favorite teams, I have a great deal of time for particular players, managers and coaches in these sports and others whether or not they play for my teams. In the Premier League I have a huge amount of respect for Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United. In the NFL I like players like Troy Polamalu and Ray Lewis as well as coaches like Bill Belichick. Another man I respect from more than 20 years ago is Bill Walsh, the former coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
During his reign Walsh turned the 49ers around, won three Super Bowls, created what would later become known as the West Coast Offense (characterized by the use of up to 5 receivers who would run timed pass routes to hit specific parts of the field at staggered times allowing for shorter, faster passes) and was christened The Genius.
I am nearing the end of a very interesting book written about Walsh and the 49ers called The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty by David Harris, a book I recommend to anyone who wants to get an insight into how to be successful in a highly competitive arena and the price being at the top of your game exacts.
Walsh offered his players plenty of coaching along with advice on things like how to deal with the media. He went on to set up seminars on financial management for team. Certain principles though he returned to time and time again, emphasizing key lessons that would form the backbone of what he called '49ers football'. Having read them and spent a short time dwelling on them, I think they are worth sharing as they can be adopted by a martial artist to improve his or her individual performance while also being useful for a sensei to discuss with his or her class.
Beat the Opposition to the Punch.
Obviously this has a direct relationship with martial arts and in fact Walsh, an accomplished and would-be professional boxer, used the example of pugilism to demonstrate what he meant. Not only does beating your opponent to the punch offer an immediate and obvious advantage, over a period of time what starts as a small point of superiority can swell into a dominant one that assures victory. Bill Walsh valued quickness and explosiveness over toughness. He wanted players to be decisive, believing that anyone who wanted to simply stand and trade (a tough opponent) would be gradually beaten up before a final blow would signal the end. In Japanese martial arts we could call this sen sen no sen.
Set a Standard of Performance and Meet It.
Walsh emphasized playing as well as you could, week in and week out, irrespective of how your opposition were performing. Set yourself a high standard and determine that you will consistently meet that level. This was not just at game time; the mindset was also to be applied to practice, where the process started. Outperform the people around you in training and you will be able to outperform them in competition. This point can be applied to any endeavor.
Be Precise in All Things and Always Pay Close Attention to Detail.
Bill Walsh saw effective football as the end result of a combination of a multitude of minute details. Approximations of exactitude were not enough: everything had to be precise and practice was intended to accomplish that goal. Walsh wanted his positional coaches to be similarly exact in their feedback to players, whether positive or negative.
This attention to detail will be familiar to many who train in their chosen art with any degree of seriousness. Generating greater and greater power can be hindered by the smallest misalignment of the body. A small error in the execution of a punch can lead you to injuring your own hand more than any opponent. Attempting to execute a lock or choke when the pressure is angled wrong will lead to failure. Pressure points require not only a very high degree of accuracy, but also must be attacked from specific angles. Your instructor should be correcting your performance with evermore precise feedback as your technique becomes further honed.
Everyone Has a Role and Every Role is Essential.
The Genius believed that "championships are won with the bottom half of the roster." He certainly valued his stars, men such as Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, but he made sure everyone knew they were important and their successful execution of their role within the team was vital to gaining victory.
At first blush this principle may not seem to have a lot to do with the practice of martial arts. However, while martial arts are executed in isolation, skill is developed by interacting with the people around you in your dojo. In this sense learning a fighting art can be seen as a team effort. With the team working together effectively to build the skills of everyone involved, everyone can progress. Seen from this point of view your role in the gym is not merely to hone your own ability, but to play a role - an essential one - in helping your training partners to develop too. Skilled black belts or the equivalent are the result of not only their own effort, but of the input and challenges set by other members. Try to look at the dojo as less a collection of individuals pursuing individual goals and more as a team committed to seeing and helping everyone get better. Steve Morris (No Holds Barred) encourages sparring to be done with specific goals in mind, rather than a mock competition with a "winner" and a "loser". The point of sparring then is not so much to beat the other person, as to work with the other person to enhance particular attributes.
Preparation Breeds Execution and Execution Breeds Success.
Another key concept to 49ers football was the emphasis on execution, above and beyond emotional intensity, which was heavily favored by other coaches at the time. Bill Walsh would argue that strong emotions cannot win games; and in any case, anyone who was starting in the NFL was already at the height of intensity. Correct execution requires practice and repetition. In this way responses become automatic.
This is another key point that is directly applicable to martial arts. Endlessly repeating the basics may threaten boredom, but it is the only way to develop talent and flawless execution. I would say that over a lifetime of practice, this has to be countered with activities that alleviate boredom, but one should always go back to the basics. Learning new kata is important for various reasons, but one of the most satisfying results of this is go to back to your Heian Shodan or whatever equivalent beginners are taught after you have worked on more advanced forms and then re-examine the basics in a new light. It is for this reason that I primarily recommend taking a look at things like tuite and kyusho jutsu; not because they are necessarily more effective in a fight than a stiff jab, but because they had a new dimension of interest to the same patterns of movement.
Keep Your Wits at All Times.
Maintaining concentration in the face of adversity, fatigue, discouragement and a highly skilled opponent was of significance importance to 49ers football. Every play requires the full emotional commitment of each player. Small mental mistakes can have vast negative consequences. Being able to think under pressure then is a key skill. Repetition in practice, to return to the point above, breeds neuro-muscular memory which is what a player will revert to in times of stress.
Zanshin, a total awareness, remains a key concept in Japanese martial arts and can be forged in various ways. The grading system, sometimes much maligned by traditionalists, does allow for a uniform approach to inducing stress in practitioners and seeing if they sink or swim as it were. Can the karateka deal with the stress and still perform the basics? Competition, even just sparring for some, may be another way to test if someone can function under pressure. Obviously full contact matches such as MMA fights take this stress to an even higher level.
Communication is Vital.
Players and staff had to constantly talk to one another for 49ers football to work. Bill Walsh therefore cultivated communication. This was particularly important when things were not going as planned. This allowed the team to identify an issue and initiate a process of correction.
I think this point is also highly applicable to developing effective fighting skills. Most obviously communication between a student and his or her teacher is vital; but so too is that between students. Remembering that training should be undertaken with an attitude of teamwork to build skills, part of this process inevitably involves effectively communicating what is being done well and what is not effective. Certainly there is a lot to learn from self-examination, but sometimes the solution to a problem can be more easily discerned by the person on the receiving end. This feedback needs to be offered without any sense of superiority or one upmanship and taken without the ego intruding and becoming hurt if there is a perception of criticism.
Football Requires Endless Adaptation.
Walsh maintained that everyone involved with the team had to be adaptable to different circumstances and situations. Throughout the ebb and flow of a game and a season everyone also had to maintain a high level of concentration. What Walsh meant then was not passive acceptance of a situation, but pro-active adaption to new circumstances.
The idea of achieving harmony with an opponent (and, at a deeper level of understanding, of time and space) is central to the teachings of many martial arts. The very idea of karate as an empty hand form of combat is taken not only to imply that no weapons are used, but that the fighting method has no fixed style. It is "empty" until it finds a moment of expression. We are also reminded of the teaching of master Funakoshi that "form is emptiness; emptiness is form", a teaching taken from the Buddhist Heart sutra.
Count on One Another.
Walsh maintained that having high expectations among team members (not just coaches) was a vital component of success. This extended to the requirement that each player would sacrifice himself for the good of team because each individual cared about the whole. The Genius expected everyone to help everyone else improve.
Again, we have to recognize that martial arts seem to be more an individual effort than anything else but in order to improve we are reliant on the people around us; not just for instruction but for the challenge and feedback each person can provide to us. Sacrifice is perhaps too strong a word for an amateur training in the dojo nearest to his home 2 or 3 times a week, but nevertheless, a willingness to participate in drills and activities for the overall good of the gym, if accepted by all members, will create and maintain a healthy training environment.
Conclusion.
I think Bill Walsh has a lot to offer with his ideas on 49ers football, not just in the realms of the NFL or martial arts, but for anyone seeking to improve his skills in a particular area. The key ideas seem to be to always seek perfection and that no man is an island. To achieve perfection we need the help of our training partners, which suggests (and the legend Steve Morris seems to concur) that exercises in the gym should be less about competition and more about co-operative action intended to improve specific and overall performance (though there is a time and a place for some hard, competitive sparring).
Before interacting with a training partner in many martial arts we bow to one another or give some other signal of respect. Respect is a very broad term and can mean many things, but one meaning, the meaning I think Walsh would emphasize, is the appreciation for your training partner as he helps you to develop. Something I have encountered in my training here in Japan is that along with a bow people are prone to also say "Onegaishimasu". Directly translated, this means "please", but a more accurate interpretative translation would be something like "Please help me develop my skill". This is not only confined to the practice of martial arts.
There is a lot to study here and I can say that my own appreciation of the importance of training partners, to take one example, has changed significantly over the years. Nowadays I do not pay gym fees for the level of instruction I am given, but more for the opportunity to train with people of a high standard.
Train hard, live easy.
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