But to constantly being called the Genius, often with a sneer? I wondered how he really felt about that.

"Genius ... wouldn't you say that's term usually associated with some figment of crackpot?" he said.

But how many real football geniuses have there been? If you'd been around Marv Levy's 1962 University of California staff when Walsh was a 30-year-old defensive assistant, you'd have seen a mentality so high-powered, filled with ideas that poured out so fast that he could barely get them on the blackboard in time. It was like watching simultaneous board chess matches.

"We ran our coaches' meetings in a room with three blackboards," Levy once said. "Walsh would scribble a play, but before he'd finish, his mind would shift to another one. He'd move to the second board and begin writing while he was still talking about the first one. I'd follow him around with an eraser and rub out the play because the coaches were getting confused."

When Walsh's name first came up at the Hall of Fame selection meeting, he swept through in almost record time. The one phrase that stayed with me, a criterion I was once taught to serve as a guideline for evaluating coaches, was "How did he change the game?" With Walsh, the answer is in absolutes. He changed it in infinite ways. He changed it forever.