Eric Branch of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an excellent and revealing piece this week about former San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend you do so.
Walsh won a lot more than he lost. Those losses, however, took their toll on the coach who, from the outside, appeared calm and collected.
That wasn't the case.
"His 10 seasons with the team exacted a vicious toll on a man whose brilliance was rivaled by insecurity, sensitivity, and inability to handle failure," wrote Branch in the insightful article.
Former 49ers tight end Brent Jones joined KNBR on Monday and shared what it was like playing with the lofty expectations of winning a Super Bowl each year on your shoulders.
"There was a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations," Jones said. "That was the greatest of our organization, and it was also the pressure. [It was a] pressure cooker, constantly. That's what made Eddie DeBartolo one of the greatest owners. You did not phone it in, whether you were a player, whether you were the general manager, whether you were in personnel, or whether you were Bill Walsh, the head coach."
Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott joined KNBR on Tuesday and shared his perspective on the pressure that led to Walsh walking away from the NFL.
"Bill, when I look at his body of work, and what he stood for, and what he was trying to do, at the end, he was sitting there frustrated and accused of things that probably put him in a situation where he felt like, 'I'm done,'" Lott said on the "Tolbert and Lund" show. "And then once he was done, I think he also then went through this period in his life where he said, 'Why did I do that? Why did I leave?'
"To me, when he would talk about it and discuss it, you always felt that he left some chips on the table. And he left some chips on the table that clearly he could have gone much longer, and I think that's why he went back to Stanford, that's why he got back into it.
"There was more there and the reason there was more there is that he was just a great competitor. But he was a great competitor that got to a point in his life where people were trying to get him to do all kinds of things, picking on him, and saying this, and doing this, and doing that. I think he just said, 'I'm done. I don't want to deal with this. I'm done.'"
You can listen to the entire conversation with Lott below.