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Show by Jim Murray Mmiirray im Spqprttg 49ers coach rewrites the book Newspaper A Bllll' Page CI Thursday, January 21, 1982 Sound familiar? Miner rally falls sfaon by John Sundquist How many times? Ask Jay Meehan, disc jockey for KPCW. "I have seen the Miners fall behind at the start of a game and come charging back, only to fall short at the buzzer, so many times." Well, it happened again last Friday night against the North Rich Mustangs. With 30 seconds on the game clock, Park City guard Trent Levitt put up the jumper which would have tied the score at 51-51. But the shot was wide and North Rich went on to win a thriller 52-49. On the Saturday night, a obviously flat Miner team was trounced by the Alta-mont Alta-mont Longhorns in a onesided one-sided contest 76-41. The North Rich matchup started out with Park City's Roger Burns getting three fouls in three minutes. He was quickly replaced by Bill Simmons. Park City was shooting erratically and having trouble penetrating the Mustang Mus-tang zone defense. Consequently, Conse-quently, the Miners were forced to take low-percentage outside shots when they could not find the open man. Late in the quarter they were down 15-6. With a minute to go in the first quarter, post man Darren Lawless scored and was fouled on a fine inside move. He was unable to convert the free throw, but Tom Flinders grabbed the rebound and turned it into a four point play to end the quarter at 15-10 North Rich. In the second quarter the Miners were playing good defensive ball. They collapsed col-lapsed on the inside moves of North Rich and choked the attempted layups. But the Miner turnovers and cold shooting kept them back by five points consistently throughout the first half. Another, and perhaps the most damaging aspect of the game for Park City, was at the free throw line. North Rich made 18 of 25 attempts for a 72 percent average, while the Miners sank only 7 of 14 for 50 percent. "The lack of free throws was what beat us," said Coach Bruce Reid. At the first half buzzer, North Rich put in a shot off the backboard to go up by six, 31-25. In the second half, Coach Reid decided to use a full-court press on the Mustangs. Mus-tangs. It forced North Rich Wrestling into several turnovers, but the Mustangs still pulled ahead 43-32 with five minutes to go in the quarter. Roger Burns made two baskets and played well offensively before be-fore he fouled out of - the game at 3:03 in the third quarter. Park City was starting to drive into the North Rich zone with more success. Trent Levitt was hitting from the outside on some 20 footers. The third quarter ended 45-38 for North Rich. The final drive The fourth quarter started with the final drive by Park City to close the gap. The Mustangs committed two turnovers in the first 18 seconds. The full-court press was effective. "We wanted to rattle them, and force them to turn it over," exclaimed Coach Reid. Simmons cut it to 45-40 and North Rich made two more turnovers, but Park City was unable to capitalize on them. The Miners were displaying good defense by getting back and picking up the open man. Darren Lawless put on an inside move for the layup to make the score 47-42. Immediately Im-mediately after Lawless 's basket, Toly was fouled and sank both of them to bring the point spread to three. Toly scored another basket to counter a North Rich two-pointer and then Levitt scored to bring the game to within one, 49-48. Again it was Steve toly at the free throw line and he tied the game at 49. With 2:35 left in the match North Rich came down court and sank the shot to give them a two point lead, 51-49. Coach Reid called time with 30 seconds on the clock. "I just wanted either Toly or Levitt to make the shot. I told them to make sure it was a good shot. We hadn't been able to score from the outside all night and it would be from there." With 18 second Levitt put up a 15-footer which missed. It was rebounded by Jeff Hilsman the North Rich center who had been hurting Park City all evening. Steve Toly then fouled Dave Weston, the weakest North Rich foul shooter. But Weston made the free throw and the game ended 52-49. Trent Levitt led Park City in scoring with 14 points, while Lawless and Burns had eight each. Coach Reid felt the Miners had their chances to go V 'S! - f 7 ' I 14 " k - i ' "Gimme that ball!" Park City's Bill Simmons (34) tries to tip a rebound away from grimacing Mustang Scott Wamsley. ahead but they could not nuity to our play. I knew it causing many turnovers and break the cold shooting spell. "I was pleased with the comeback; it showed character." charac-ter." Cold Saturday In the Saturday game it was all downhill from the tipoff. The Miners could not get started in the contest while the Longhorns of Altamont played flawless. Three of the Altamont starters ended up in double figures while the high scorer for Park City was Roger Burns with nine points. "We played awful," said Coach Reid, "we looked awful. There was no conti- would be a tough game.' Altamont is a quick, good-shooting good-shooting team which came into the game sporting a 7-2 season record. The Longhorns Long-horns displayed a well-organized well-organized game plan featuring featur-ing a fullcourt press and man-to-man defense. Led by guards Wayne Miles, Lyndon Hansen, and center Eddie Fisher, the Longhorns were ahead 17-4 at the end of the first quarter and 40-14 at the half. As in the game Friday, the Miners came out cold. The Altamont fullcourt press gave Park City trouble, bad passes. The Park City guards got cut off from the forwards and either gave up the ball or made errant passes downcourt. With the Longhorns laden with juniors and sophomores, sopho-mores, they will be no fun to play next year for anybody. For Park City, the plan is simple. Forget the past. "We have to pretend it didn't happen," said Coach Reid. "We cannot dwell upon it." The Park City Miners next travel to Kamas to play South Summit on Friday, Jan. 22. Tebbs, Bair take first in Evanston tourney by John Sundquist The Park City Wrestling Team went to Evanston, Wyoming last weekend to show their opponents that "might makes right," and succeeded. The small Miner squad placed fourth out of a field of nine schools, taking first in the 185 lb. and heavyweight classes. The first annual Evanston Wrestling Meet was held last Friday and Saturday at the Evanston High School, involving in-volving teams from Utah and Wyoming schools. First place went to Star Valley, a perennial wrestling power of Wyoming, with 185.5 points. Second place was awarded to Evanston, which won the state championship cham-pionship last year in Wyoming, Wyo-ming, with 177.5 points. In third place was North Summit Sum-mit with 146.5 points. Park City sewed up fourth and compiled 91 points. Mountain View came in fifth with 78, Kemmer placed sixth with 31, Jackson finished seventh at 17.5, South Rich had 12, and Lyman was shut out. For Park City, it was a good tournament, according to Coach Wayne Carlson. The Miners had four wrestlers wrest-lers in the finals and two in the consolation brackets. Most of the teams came from larger schools with bigger wrestling programs. "There were some real good teams," said Carlson, "very impressive. But we held our own." Getting first place honors for Park City were Greg Bair, who wrestled at 185 lbs, and Tom Tebbs in the heavyweight category. Placing Plac-ing second at 145 lbs was John Howard. Also in the consolation finals was Bill Reed at 155 lbs. He came in fourth. In the consolation bracket, James Meekins placed fourth at 145 lbs, and Chad Hughes wrestled to fifth place for the 165-lb class. Even though Park City did very well in the tournament, Carlson is sure it could have been better. "We should have won the 167 lb class. Chab Hughes came so close to pinning his man and he almost beat the eventual winner of the 167 lb. bracket. Inexperience lost it, but we will work on Hughes for the regionals coming up. "And James Meekins had his man down for five points right away and he didn't go after him. He let the other guy come back to beat him in overtime." This is how the individual wrestlers fared: 98 lb: Sean Krajeski lost to Evan Reeves of Evanston, lost to McKinstroy of Jackson. Jack-son. 1051b: Rex Fletcher lost to Pace of North Summit, lost to Peterson of Mountain View. 119 lb: Jeff Palmer lost to Erickson of Star Valley, lost to DeWeese of North Summit. 126 lb: Jeff Sieverts won in the quarterfinals quarter-finals against Seday of Kemmerer, won in the semi finals by pinning Crandel of Evanston. but lost the final to Jensen of Star Valley. 132 lb: Paul Carpenter lost to Clark of Star Valley, lost to Thomas of Mountain View. 138 lb: no entry. 145 lb: John Howard won in the quarterfinals by pinning Mat Litzelman of Jackson, won in the semifinals by pinning Stuhes of Star Valley, but lost in the finals to Kallas of Evanston. 145 lb: James Meekins won in the quarter finals by pinning Dehler of Mountain View, lost in the semifinals to Anderson of North Summit, pinned Lav-trup Lav-trup of Jackson, but lost to Walker of Star Valley in the consolation final. 155 lb: Bill Reed pinned Stuhr of Mountain View in the quarterfinals, lost to Kofford of Star Valley in the semifinals, beat Patton from North Summit 10-6 in the consolation bracket, then beat Ellingford of Kemmer in the consolation finals. 167 lb: Chad Hughes pinned Long from Kemmer in the quarterfinals, lost to Jensen of Star Valley in the semifinals, semi-finals, lost to Anderson of North Summit in the consolation conso-lation bracked. 1851b: Greg Bair had a bye in the quarterfinals, pinned Jerry Ryther of Evanston in the semifinals, pinned Mike Calderwood of North Summit Sum-mit in the finals. Heavyweight: Heavy-weight: Tom Tebbs had a bye in the quarterfinals, pinned David King of Kemmer Kem-mer in the semifinals, pinned VanSyoc of Evanston in the finals. William Ernest Walsh, of the 49ers, everybody's Coach of the Year, if not the decade, comes into focus as a combination of Robert E, Lee and Lochinvar. He comes off as the kind of leader his troops would follow anywhere. Put him on a white horse with a silver sword and they'd charge a forest fire. Urbane, unflappable, articulate, he stands on the sideline in the heat of a football game as if he were doing nothing more consequential than feeding the birds. You half-suspect his headset is playing Mozart. He got his game plan out of Thomas Aquinas. There's none of that running and screaming and panic you see on most game-day sidelines where the coaching staffs look as if they're presiding at a train wreck. Walsh looks as if he were officiating at a solemn high mass and, if you listen carefully, you could hear the seminary choir or smell the incense. It's a ritual, not a cockfight. Who is Bill Walsh and why isn't his face red, his hair mussed, why aren't his eyes rolling wildly in his head, his lips foaming and his teeth clenched? He acts like there is a tomorrow. Shouldn't he at least be gulping Alka Seltzer? Bill Walsh always had the reputation in the football industry of being too cerebral, a coach's coach in a way a man can be a doctor's doctor or an actor's actor. Not for the masses. A Shakespearean actor, not a cowboy star, a master theoretician, not a guy who does face lifts. You kept him in a backroom designing these gorgeous, futuristic futuris-tic innovations, these 21st-century visions, Flash Gordon football. The head coaches took this, divided it by the square root, used that, and then sent Bill back to the drawing board. Oh, they paid him homage. No one had a more flattering public image. But if you listened carefully, you could pick out the buzz words. "Bill is an offensive genius." Everyone said that. You had to know how to listen. What it meant was "Confidentially, he's flashy, but I wouldn't want my daughter to be married to him." The "offensive" genius. English translation: Half a coach. The worst half. Football coaches, the ones who had found work, were convinced to a man that defense wins football. Their disciples were everywhere: every-where: "He who lives by the pass, dies by the pass." (Red Sanders, 1950.) "When you put a football in the air, three things can happen and two of them are bad." (Woody Hayes, 1960.) "There's no secrets in this game. Don't give me the plays, give me the players, and I'll draw plays in the huddle, on the ground with a stick." (Buck Shaw, Sand Francisco 49ers, 1947.) "Football is blocking and tackling, everything else is mythology." (Vince Lombardi, circa 1961, whose word was not exactly "mythology" but something synonymous.) "Any time you have to throw 60 passes in a game, you're losing." (George Allen, 1970.) And so on. Bill Walsh was a visionary. He saw things as they never were and said, why not? But his things would never work in football, they said, confidentially. In football, you had to protect your flanks. Like all of history's "geniuses," he would win battles, not the wars. Walsh finally got a head coaching job. At Stanford, where you had to be able to read to play football. Walsh went 9-3, 8-4. He won the Bluebonnet Bowl 25-22 after trailing 22-0. The 49ers hired him but the league was scarcely alarmed. "Just means we'll beat the Niners, 45-21, instead of 19-3," they assured their fans. At first, they looked prescient. Bill Walsh went 2-11. But he lost games by 28-22, 27-24, 35-24, 28-27, 38-28. The league said "See!" In 1980, the team record improved. But it still lost 48-26, 24-23, 31-17. It won a few six but by the same scores. The league felt that took care of that. But Bill Walsh refused to return to the 19th century. His teams took the field with plays memorized for the first 20 times it had the ball. At least. "He'll give his team a headache," predicted the league. Instead, it was the league that got the headache. This year, Bill Walsh won games 21-17, 33-31, 30-17, 38-28, 45-14. And so on. They tell you, in this league, you can't play a quarterback till he has served three years manning the clipboards and the head phones. You don't even let him touch the football until then. Bill Walsh made Joe Montana the league's premier quarterback in what was really only his second full season. They say you can't play rookies in this league except on special teams or mop-up games. Walsh started three of them in the deep secondary, key skill positions in this game, really the office of the team's national security administration. Bill Walsh didn't rewrite the Book. He threw it away altogether. Innovators come along in this game only infrequently a Pop Warner with his double-wing attack in the pre-radio days, a Rockne, not inventing, but potentializing the forward pass, a Clark Shaughnessy dusting off the T-formation for the 1940 Stanfords, a George Halas removing the restrictions on a forward pass that said it had to be thrown five yards behind the line of scrimmage and two successive incomplete passes resulted in a loss of five yards. Walsh's contribution is less dramatic. But it's well to remember, in the decades before they finally let Walsh out of the ivory tower, teams were famed not for their attack but for their defense. Crowds chanted "Dee-fense!" on Saturday afternoons, and you had "The Steel Curtain," "The No-Name Defense," "The Fearsome Foursome," the "Doomsday Defense," the "Flex Defense," "The Silver Rush." Even in college ball, it was the "Chinese Bandits," and "The Wild Bunch." This era of football is about to be Walshed away. And if that man on the sidelines more resembles a man forced by his wife to watch a dull opera than an interested coach, you have to remember geniuses are not like the rest of us. They dwell in a time that has not yet come. I remember a colleague in the press box once pointing to Walsh and exclaiming to a magazine writer, "You mean to tell me he's 25 plays into this game already before it started?" And the other fellow snorted, "This game?! He's 20 plays into 1984!" (c) 1982, Los Angeles Times How many times have you thought about Western real estate ...and thought ...and thought ...and thought? Boettcher & Company invites you to attend a seminar on the Boettcher Western Properties Fund 1981-1982. The Fund offers limited partnership interests in a $30,000,000 portfolio of Western United States real estate. When: Thursday, January 21, 1982 7:30 PM Where: Yarrow Holiday Inn 1800 Park Avenue Park City, UT Prospective:, wii; tie distributed -j! tt.f jerr..r;'ir This is neither an alter to sell nor a solicitation ot an oiler to buy any securities. Such ottering is made only by the Prospectus which may be obtained only in the states which have approved the ottering. 11 Wall Street of the Rockies f Boettcher 8 Company Ml Investment Bankers Since 1910 Mtvrt-er Slf'C University Club Building 136 East South Temple Salt Lake City, UT 84111 (801) 364-0600 Denver Albuquerque Boise Boulder Casper Colorado Springs Durango Fort Collins Glenwood Springs Grand lunction Greeley Houston Longmont New York Phoenix Salt Lake City Tucson |