He frowned. How to break it gently to this idiot?

"The problem would be," he said slowly, "that you would fill a roster with players who'd look good chasing guys over the goal line."

But when you admitted to absolute, absent-minded helplessness, he could tune in. I told him that with the advance of age, I found the need to carry around a pocket-sized notebook and constantly record, "Things to remember," when I could remember where I put the notebook, that is.

"How about this one?" he said. "I've been out in a parking lot at 2 a.m. looking for a rental car, with absolutely no memory of what it looked like or where I'd left my luggage. And how's this? I stop at a coffee shop an hour before I have to be at a banquet. I tell myself, 'Now don't lock the keys in the car,' and as I'm saying it, I'm doing it. Slam! I have to call the police, call the banquet ... 'Sorry, but I'm going to be late.'"

"Tell him about the plays on my back," said his wife, Geri.

"I'll be out with her, and I'll be talking to someone about some pass play, and I'll have my arm around her back," he said, "you know, an affectionate gesture, but I'll be going like this with my fingers." He punched out a pass pattern.

"What will Geri do?" I asked him.

"She'll say, 'Did it work?'"

I never could figure out whether or not he liked the Genius tag people put on him. I know that when they started mislabeling Sid Gillman's West Coast offense a Walsh creation, he called me, quite upset. "My offense is the Cincinnati Offense," he said. "I wouldn't even mind if they called it the Walsh Offense. But the West Coast offense is that Sid Gillman, Don Coryell, Ernie Zampese thing. Why do they keep making that mistake?"

That was in the early days of the West Coast. As it gained in popularity, Walsh's complaints lessened noticeably. 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.