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Author Arne Christensen Interviews Kevin Lynch
-By Arne Christensen


Author Arne Christen and founder of 49ers History Blog interviewed beat writer Kevin Lynch about George Seifert, Bobb McKittrick and Bill Walsh. The interview is transcribed below. We strongly recommend Arne's e-books linked at the end of this article.

Arne: George Seifert was hired to replace Walsh very soon after Super Bowl XXIII against the Bengals.

Kevin: He was flying to an interview in Cleveland, they caught him in Dallas waiting for his connecting flight. The record of coaches succeeding Super Bowl coaches is very poor, and Seifert doesn't get as much credit as he deserves. His teams had something like a 75% winning percentage. One of the big reasons Seifert was successful right away was that he told the players they were the reason for the wins. He didn't have the personality of Walsh, he was quieter, low-key, very humble. He always thought it was the players' team. Seifert felt a lot of people were trying to undermine him as coach.

Later on, in '94, when Young was screaming at him on the sidelines during the Eagles game, he liked that. Seifert said it showed how much the team had developed, for Young to be so passionate about the team.

Arne: Talking about Bobb McKittrick, the offensive line coordinator, there's the caricature of him in the t-shirt, the shaved head, the ex-Marine. But I get the sense there was more to him than that image. Do you have any insights into how important McKittrick was to the offense?

Kevin: McKittrick always had the smallest line in the league. He rarely wanted to pick linemen high in the draft. There was Barton, he was maybe a first round pick in '87, and Bubba Paris, but the others, they were low-round picks or free agents, guys no one else wanted. He had the most unique offensive linemen, and he'd shape them. He had a Tommy Prothro-style approach. McKittrick coached for Prothro with UCLA and then the Rams and Chargers in the '70s, and Prothro was Bobb's coach at OSU in the '50s.

And Prothro had a real small line based on traps, counters, sweeps, often to the weak side. He used the pulling guards a lot. And Bobb had that same sort of approach. He had a saying, "If you're a defensive lineman and you do everything right, you'll still be wrong." He meant you'd still get hurt by the 49ers' linemen, and you wouldn't be able to make the play.

Bobb was really quiet, not a yeller, almost never raised his voice. He had that image of the tough guy, the hard-nosed Marine, but he wasn't a drill sergeant type at all. He was just in control. I remember once he had major surgery on half his stomach: I think he'd had appendicitis at some point and it may have been involved with that. Anyway, he couldn't stand up, so he laid down on the table during a meeting with the linemen, talking on his back. That was just a meeting, not even a game. Bobb had a real high threshold for pain and cold. He was really a lot of the foundation for what they did. Walsh not having to use a high-round pick on a lineman freed him up to do other things in the draft.

Arne: Walsh has that whole image of "The Genius," but do you think he made some mistakes as a coach, had some weaknesses?

Kevin: He was often very, very unpopular. He had a huge ego. But as a coach he was pretty flawless. Mostly his style worked. That thing he'd say about trying to get rid of players before they hit their downside, it did work, usually. Of course it created a lot of insecurity. But with Montana in '88, he was motivated, wanted to prove he could fill that starting role still. He'd won the two Super Bowls, but he still had motivation. The flaw in Walsh maybe was that he really believed his system was so good, he could throw in almost any player and it would work. He didn't give the players their due. He could be distant. Toward the end of his life he really connected with the players, he reversed all that distance.

Arne: Later on in life, especially toward the end, did Walsh talk about '88, his last few seasons, looking back on his time as coach?

Kevin: He said he'd quit too early, that maybe he should have taken a year off and then come back. He thought he could have won more Super Bowls. I was actually maybe the last guy to interview him. I was with John McVay, and we met Walsh in the hospital. He was going up, down: his status was very irregular. He really changed at the end. He was trying to help people; he talked to Mike Nolan a lot, every Monday, going over the games, trying to point things out to Nolan. He became a guy who just wanted to dispense his advice. Maybe because he was aware he was close to passing on.

Arne notes that he's cut the prices for his e-books covering the 49ers' 1981, 1984, and 1988 seasons to $4 each, and to $10 for the e-book covering Walsh's full 10-year span as Niners coach. 1981 1983 1988 Complete E-Book