The Score Takes Care of Itself

The Score Takes Care of Itself

The locker room in Miami smelled of sweat and champagne. It was the night of January 22, 1989, and the San Francisco 49ers had just beaten the Cincinnati Bengals 20-16 in Super Bowl XXIII at Joe Robbie Stadium, a game settled in the final 34 seconds when Joe Montana drove 92 yards on 11 plays and hit John Taylor on a crossing route in the back of the endzone to win it all. The dynasty was confirmed. Three Super Bowls in eight years. The most dramatic finish in Super Bowl history. Bill Walsh walked into the corridor beneath the stadium, away from the noise, and started to cry. Not from joy. He was crying because he already knew what he had to do, and doing it was going to be the hardest decision of his life.

He was 57 years old. He had spent a decade rebuilding an NFL franchise from rubble, pouring every thought, every nervous system, every hour of every day into the machine he called the Standard of Performance. He had invented an offense that would rewrite football for the next thirty years. He had identified talent nobody else in the league could see -- a skinny quarterback from Notre Dame taken with the 82nd pick, a wide receiver from a tiny Mississippi school that nobody wanted. He had assembled a coaching staff that would go on to win seven more Super Bowls after he left. And now, standing under that Miami stadium, alone with the noise of celebration seeping through the walls, he felt something he had not expected: emptiness. The score had taken care of itself. He had nothing left to give.

That moment -- the crying in the corridor, the retirement press conference the next morning when he told the world he was done -- was the end of one of the most consequential coaching careers in American sports history. It was also, in a sense, the beginning of the book he would spend the next eighteen years writing in his head. Published posthumously in 2009, two years after Walsh died of leukemia at 75, co-authored with his son Craig and longtime collaborator Steve Jamison, "The Score Takes Care of Itself" is not a football book. It is a manual for building something extraordinary out of almost nothing, for sustaining excellence under pressure, and for understanding the dark truths about leadership that most leaders are not willing to say out loud.