The sack came during the regular season in a game the 49ers won, 24–21. Doleman had got by Wallace just that once, but he had crushed Joe Montana. Wallace didn’t need to be reminded of the play. That one sack was all he had thought about for days. Doleman had beaten him to the outside. Wallace had reached out to punch him but he, not Doleman, had lost his footing. Doleman rose up off Montana, jumped around celebrating, and then found Wallace, to editorialize.
“You got this all day,” he’d said.
Wallace responded as he had done thirteen other times that season, by starting a fight. “I remember thinking: if I don’t do something, he may get ten sacks,” he said. “So I decided to mix it up.” The NFL hadn’t yet begun to levy big fines for fights, and Wallace had taken full advantage of the freebies. He now had a reputation as one of the league’s dirtiest linemen—because he started so many fights. “I thought that’s how it had to be,” he said. “I had to fight if I was going to make it. And I had some folks to feed. And when you have some folks to feed you have a whole different mentality.”
That really was how Wallace thought about these beasts bent on killing Joe Montana: you go by me and my family goes hungry. And it wasn’t all that far from the truth. His first paychecks would be so thoroughly consumed by the $1,426 monthly note on the new house his parents had bought for themselves that he’d finally summoned the nerve to tell them to sell the house. He was deeply insecure. People were saying that he wasn’t a good pass blocker, and he wasn’t all that sure they were wrong. Just that morning—the morning Walsh played the tape of the Doleman sack—Doleman was quoted in the paper saying “the reason Wallace fights so much is to cover up his lack of ability.”
Now he had to face Doleman again. Doleman was about to go to the Pro Bowl for the second straight year. No one on the team had forgotten what Doleman and Millard had done to them in the playoffs the year before. And yet Bill Walsh felt the need to replay that one sack. Over and over again Wallace watched Doleman beat him and crunch Joe Montana. He didn’t understand why Walsh needed to humiliate him. He said nothing, of course, but was at once livid and ashamed. He wasn’t going to sleep tonight anyway; now he wasn’t going to sleep with a vengeance. “All night long I’m laying there thinking: why did he show that one play? A lot of times you can’t understand what Walsh was doing until he’s done it.” At some point that night he decided “the lesson for me was to concentrate one play longer. As hard as you can possibly work, you can do it for one more play.”
The next day, after he’d suited up, Wallace received another explanation for Walsh’s perverse behavior. John McVay, the team’s director of football operations, pulled him aside in the hallway and said, “You are going to be the key to this game. The game is going to turn on your performance.” This wasn’t the front office pep-talking. McVay was a former NFL head coach—and he was completely serious.
This was new. Until this season, his first as a starting NFL left tackle, Steve Wallace had never experienced line play as an individualistic event. But that is what the left tackle position had become: a one-on-one encounter, a boxing match. The passing game, increasingly, was built around the idea of getting as many receivers out into patterns as quickly as possible. More receivers meant fewer pass blockers. Fewer pass blockers meant the left tackle had to deal with whatever was coming at him all by himself. Every now and then a running back might nip at Doleman’s heels on his way out to catch a pass. On very rare occasions a tight end might line up beside Wallace and lend a shoulder. But mostly it would be just him and Doleman, one on one. And the importance of the private battle was now clear to him. “No one had ever said anything like that to me before,” said Wallace. “No one had ever said, ‘The game depends on you.’ I never thought a lineman could be that important. I started thinking, ‘Oh my goodness…’”
NUMBER 74 TROTS to the edge of the tunnel leading from the locker room to the field. He loves this moment. This moment is the offensive lineman’s one shot at positive recognition. Later in his career he’ll milk it for drama. He’d sprint so fast from the tunnel that the other players wouldn’t put a hand out to slap his “because they were afraid I’d break it off.” When he’d started playing football as a kid, he wanted to play tight end; even then, he preferred basketball. He enjoyed attention. It’s still not natural to him to play a game in front of millions of people and go completely unnoticed. It’s like playing the cantaloupe in the school play.
“At left tackle, Number Seventy-four, Steve Wallace!”
His name is announced to the packed stadium and he runs out. He’s still so nervous and new that he concentrates on not stumbling. The day is sunny and bright but the turf, he notices, is slick and muddy. That’s a break. Opposing teams who came to Candlestick Park were deceived by the sunshine. They’d think: on such a nice day the ground just must be firm. The ground was seldom firm. By the second quarter they’d be slipping and sliding, yet they wouldn’t think to change their cleats. A pass rusher like Doleman counted on traction to turn the corner. If he forced Doleman to carve especially tight turns, Wallace knew, the turf might do the rest.
When he reaches the 49ers’ sideline he looks across the field, to find Doleman. “I’m looking to see if he’s all cocky, like, ‘I’m gonna kick your butt,’ you know.” Back when Bubba was starting, he’d engaged in this tribal chest-pounding ritual with certain opponents. Before the game he’d look across the field, find the guy he was going up against, and literally start howling and beating his chest. Wallace is too worried about the task at hand to pound his chest. In any case, he doesn’t catch Doleman’s eye; but as he looks around, he notices another piece of luck: Jerry Markbreit. Markbreit will referee the game. He’s Wallace’s favorite ref. Jerry let left tackles get away with a lot, like where they’d line up. On passing plays he’d want to line up a few inches further back from the line of scrimmage than was strictly legal. If it became a race to cut off Doleman on a wide loop, those few inches might make all the difference. A lot of other refs would just flag you for not being exactly on the line. Jerry at least warned you before he flagged you.
The Vikings got the ball first. Steve Wallace thinks: just get to halftime. Worry about the rest of the game then. He couldn’t even think about an entire game. Before he mucked out the Augean stables, Hercules probably carved them in half in his mind, too. Wallace thinks in terms of getting through the half without humiliation. He thinks: make it to halftime without a sack, you got a chance.
He watches the 49er defense try to stop the Vikings offense and prays they don’t leave the 49er offense with their backs to their own goal line. If we get the ball in a bad place, he thinks, Doleman’s gonna be even harder to handle.
They give up a field goal: 3–0 Vikings. The offense takes over on its own twenty-yard line. That was fine.
Wallace had made up his mind before the game that he would take a different approach. He’d play within himself. Doleman’s words in the paper had stung: the reason Wallace fights so much is to cover up his lack of ability. “I said to myself: no matter what happens, I’m not going to fight him today. And it helped me to become a true left tackle.”
When he looks back over his career from the end of it, he will say that this was the day he embraced his position. He is focused on his technique—on where his feet are, where his hands are, the timing of his contact. He adjusts according to the tiny hints that Doleman gave him of what he plans to do next. Wallace keeps a mental list of the different moves of pass rushers. He has names for them: the spin, the swim, the power, the shoulder grab, the arm drag, the hand slap, the hip toss, the dead leg (“they fake as if they’re stopping just to make you freeze your feet”). Each guy was a little different; each guy had his own moves. Doleman hasn’t yet learned to spin. He’d develop a spin move later and it would make him so good at getting to quarterbacks that he’d break the NFL’s single-season sack record. But he has a swim move, where he brings his arms crashing down on top of the left tackle’s arms, to break his hold. He also has a speed move—which is what he’d used to beat Wallace during the regular season.
Wallace worries about Doleman’s initial move. He worries even more about the move Doleman will make in response to whaever Wallace has done to defend himself against the initial move. “It’s all feet and hands,” said Wallace. “Once your body gets engaged with a guy, he can very easily use a counter—once you’ve stopped his initial move, he pushes off. That’s why you can’t stop moving your feet.”
The first series is a bust in which he plays no role. Bill Walsh decided, uncharacteristically, to open the game running the ball. He achieved nothing but predictability. After two runs for losses, on third and very long, everyone in the stadium knows that Montana will pass. The Vikings blitz with what appears to be their entire team and sack Montana. Three plays, minus nine yards, and punt.
But the defense quickly gets back the ball. It’s during this second series that the heavyweight bout between Chris Doleman and Steve Wallace really begins. On the first play, Montana takes a five-step drop and Doleman comes with the same speed rush that he used to beat Wallace the first time they met. Wallace now understands that he’d gotten beat that one time because he’d been too jumpy, too eager to make contact. He prides himself on playing offense with the aggression of a defensive player, but that aggression is now counterproductive. The left tackle position is all about control—of self, and of the man coming at you. “Control the number,” Wallace tells himself. “Control that inside number. As long as I can control that inside number, I can push through him.” He fixates on the “6” on Doleman’s jersey, the way a basketball defender stares at the midsection of the dribbling opponent.
Doleman lines up far outside and, at the snap of the ball, sprints straight upfield. He’s quicker than Wallace, and has the distinct advantage of running straight ahead while Wallace backpeddles. Wallace can’t get a purchase on him; his only hope is to give him a single hard push at exactly the right moment. If he hits Doleman the moment after the snap, he will achieve nothing. He’ll throw himself off balance, just as he did before, and speed Doleman on his journey upfield, en route to Joe Montana’s back.
What happens on this first serious encounter between these two huge men happens so fast it’s nearly impossible to comprehend with the naked eye in real time. Doleman sprints upfield, probably expecting to collide with Wallace on his first or second step—but he doesn’t. Wallace has taken a new angle. “I had to make sure that his body was completely by me…Wait…Wait…Wait…Then I hit him.”
He’d met Doleman as deep in the backfield as he possibly could without missing him altogether. They collided, briefly, at the spot where Doleman wanted to be making a sharp left to get at Montana. The hit kept Doleman from turning, and drove him further upfield. Steve Wallace had traded the pleasure of violence for the comfort of real estate.
Nobody notices, of course. His contribution was the opposite of drama. He’d removed the antagonist from the play entirely. What the fans and the television cameras see is 49er wide receiver John Taylor come wide open in the middle of the field. Joe Montana hits him with a pass, and Taylor races for a gain of twenty yards.
Doleman must have thought that first play was a fluke, because on the next one he tries exactly the same move. Upfield he comes, at speed, and once again Wallace takes him right on past the action. What the fans see is Jerry Rice catching a touchdown pass. What Chris Doleman sees, from a distance, is Joe Montana throwing a touchdown pass. What the fans at home hear is the announcer, John Madden, saying, “The 49ers need production out of three key people. Two of them just produced.” The three key people to whom Madden refers are Montana, Rice, and running back Roger Craig. They are stars; they accumulated the important statistics: yards, touchdowns, receptions, completions. Wallace is not considered a producer. He has no statistics.
The next time the 49ers get the ball, Steve Wallace suspects that Doleman might adjust. Doleman now knows that Wallace is quick enough and agile enough and intelligent enough to deal with his speed rush. He’ll come with his bull rush.
In the playoff game the year before—which Wallace had watched from the sidelines—Doleman had opened the game with a bull rush and knocked Bubba Paris flat on his back. (“When you knock a three-hundred-thirty-pound guy on his ass,” Wallace observed, “that’s a very serious thing.”) He expected the bull rush early. If Doleman established his ability to knock Wallace flat on his back—to run right over him—he’d force Wallace to plant his feet early, to brace himself. Planted feet doom a left tackle. Planted feet are slow feet. If he plants his feet, Wallace knows, Doleman will see that his feet are planted—and then he’ll go right back to his speed rush. When a left tackle plants his feet, he gives the pass rusher a half step head start in his race to the quarterback. That half step might be the difference between a productive Joe Montana and a Joe Montana being carried off the field on a stretcher.
As in sumo wrestling, the awesome crudeness on the surface of the battle disguised the finesse underneath. Keeping Doleman off Montana’s back is less a matter of brute force than leverage, angles, and anticipation. The outcome of the struggle turns on half steps and milliseconds. “I know early there are maybe three plays where he is going to try to bull-rush me,” says Wallace. “And you know that if you’re not ready, he’s going to beat you like a dog for the rest of the day, because then you are setting with slow, controlled feet rather than happy feet. The trick is to see that bull rush coming early, and go out and pop him. You deliver a quick karate blow—Pow!—like a real quick punch, to stun him. But your feet never stop. If your feet ever stop, you’re beat.”