Here comes the payoff for all those hours he spent studying game tape. He’s watched many hours of Chris Doleman rushing passers. He’s learned that Doleman tips his bull rush—and how can he not?—by the set of his stance, the tilt of his body, his attitude. Now Doleman comes with the bull rush. And he’s ready for it.
What the fan sees is…nothing. Doleman is 270 pounds of raw, explosive muscle. There is probably not a human being among the 62,457 present who could withstand the force of his furious charge. To the naked eye, however, it looks like he’s not even trying. He’s just stuck on the line of scrimmage, leaning against Steve Wallace. Why watch that? Watch, instead, the real action: Jerry Rice catches another touchdown pass!
The next time the 49ers have the ball (they now lead 14–3), Wallace looks up to find Doleman gone. Doleman has moved to the other side of the field, in search of a better venue to practice his black art. On the other side of the field, however, he’s in Montana’s line of vision. He also must deal with two blockers, the right tackle plus the tight end. Two plays into the experiment he returns to his natural point of attack. For him it’s the blind side, or nothing.
Today, it’s nothing. Not one sack. A single tackle, and that comes on a rare play when Wallace isn’t assigned to block him. “When you’re locked in,” says Wallace, “you can’t explain it. You just feel it.” Today, he was locked in.
At halftime the score is 21–3. Joe Montana has thrown three touchdown passes. Just as Montana received more than his share of the credit when things went well, he received more than his share of the blame when things went badly. Before the game, a lot of people were saying and writing that Joe Montana was washed up. Finished. Over the hill. Montana was only thirty-two years old. But the 49ers had lost their previous three playoff games. In those three games Montana had thrown four interceptions, zero touchdown passes, and for a grand total of 529 yards. This one half he’d thrown three touchdown passes and had been, as John Madden put it, “about as efficient as a quarterback can be.” All talk of Joe Montana being finished, said the announcers, was obviously silly. Joe Montana was going to keep on playing, and become maybe the greatest quarterback ever to play the game.
No one ever mentions Steve Wallace’s name. The cameras never once find him. His work is evidently too boring to watch for long without being distracted by whatever’s happening to the football. Worse, the better he does his job, the more boring to watch he becomes. His job is to eliminate what people pay to see—the sight of Chris Doleman crushing Joe Montana.
In Instant Replay, a diary of a year playing on the offensive line for Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, Jerry Kramer points out that without instant replay technology no one would ever notice line play. As Steve Wallace arrives in his magnificent rec room, and begins to fiddle with the remote control to his VCR, he suggests that there are limits to what instant replay will do for a lineman. He finds the old tape of the 1988 Vikings–49ers playoff game. He fast-forwards through the first three quarters of the game, pausing the tape only three times, after each of Jerry Rice’s touchdowns. Each time Rice arrives in the end zone and turns, he is lifted high in the air by…Steve Wallace. Wallace made a habit of sprinting at full tilt downfield after a touchdown. The main side effect of this behavior was for a picture of Steve Wallace to appear, briefly, in the middle of the television screen. The blocks that made the touchdowns possible, he assumed, weren’t worth watching.
Midway through the fourth quarter, the former left tackle locates a final moment of interest. The 49ers lead 28–9, and have the ball. The game is all but over. Just then, Roger Craig takes a handoff and sprints through the left side of the line for an 80-yard touchdown, the longest in 49er playoff history. Craig has sprinter speed but he barely has time to turn and raise his arms over his head before he collides with…Steve Wallace. Craig ran a forty-yard dash in about 4.5 seconds, and Wallace ran it in about 5.5 seconds, so, in theory, it should have taken at least 2 seconds for Steve Wallace to reach Roger Craig. If so, they were the briefest 2 seconds in the history of time.
“Did you see who the first guy down there with him was?!” shouts John Madden, who alone among the announcers paid some attention to offensive linemen. “The first guy in the end zone with Roger Craig is Steve Wallace! Steve Wallace was the guy who made the first block to break him loose!”
Wallace smiles and rewinds the tape—the game ended with the 49ers on top 34–9. Doleman had more or less given up trying to get to Montana by the middle of the third quarter. None of it matters. Steve Wallace wants to see this one play again. This business of All-for-one-and-one-for-all-and-who-cares-if-I-get-any-attention-or-credit-for-myself-so-long-as-the-team-wins was nice as far as it went. But it didn’t go down to the bottom of Steve Wallace. “As long as you’d play hard and get a little grimy and dirty, Madden would take care of you,” said Wallace. But even Madden needed a little help: that’s why you chased the running back 80 yards to the end zone.
“The first guy in the end zone with Roger Craig is Steve Wallace! Steve Wallace was the guy who made the first block to break him loose!”
Having reviewed his one moment of glory a second time, the former left tackle clicks off his big-screen television, settles back into his fine leather sofa, and smiles. “It’s all part of it,” he says.
THAT SEASON THE 49ERS won the Super Bowl. After the game, Bill Walsh retired, but his innovation continued to sweep the league in various forms. The passing game grew ever more important, the quarterbacks ever more valuable. Yet there was still little change in the value of the people who protected the quarterback. Steve Wallace had no sense that he would one day be rich, and neither did any other lineman. The purest case study was Anthony Muñoz. By the late 1980s, Muñoz was regarded as the finest left tackle ever to play the game. He was quick, huge, versatile, and athletic—in addition to playing football at USC, he’d played third base for the baseball team. He came into the league in 1980 and became a fixture at the Pro Bowl. Even he was constrained in his financial demands by the conceit that one good lineman was no different from any other. All for one and one for all. “They would actually say that linemen are interchangeable and can be replaced at any time,” Muñoz recalled. “They’d actually say we can just take another guy and toss him in there. But you were aware that the left tackle was especially important. He just wasn’t paid as if he was especially important.”
In 1987, after he had been to six straight Pro Bowls, a lot of people were saying Anthony Muñoz might just be the greatest offensive lineman in the history of the game. With his contract about to expire, Muñoz and his agent walked into the Cincinnati Bengals’ front office and asked for a raise. The best NFL quarterbacks were now making more than $2 million dollars a year and the best pass rushers were making $1 million. “We were asking for half a million a year,” recalled Muñoz, “and we were told that there was no lineman alive who was worth that much.”
The people who evaluated football players and football strategies understood that the parts were inextricable from the whole, of course. You didn’t get Joe Montana and Jerry Rice’s “production” without production of some sort from Steve Wallace. Bill Walsh and John McVay obviously understood that if Wallace didn’t do his job, then Montana couldn’t do his. Take a half second away from Joe Montana’s pocket time, and all those people saying Montana was washed up might have been right. But there was a difference between saying that Steve Wallace was necessary and acknowledging that what Steve Wallace did was extremely difficult—that it wasn’t a job for just any old lineman.
The market for football players was rooted in subjective judgments and ancient prejudices. “Before free agency, they just paid you whatever they felt like paying you, and your only recourse was to withhold services,” said Tom Condon, an offensive lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1980s who went on to become a leading players’ agent. But there were hints of how a free market in football players might differ from a shackled one. The amateur draft, for example, which had aspects of an open market. College players had no say in which NFL team they played for, but the NFL teams were free to choose among the college players, and the order of their choices revealed their preferences. And in 1988 the preferences of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers shocked a lot of football people. Ray Perkins was the Buccaneers’ head coach at the time, and Perkins had been the head coach of the New York Giants when they’d drafted Lawrence Taylor. Perkins had the fourth pick of the first round and was expected to take one of the two available star wide receivers, Sterling Sharpe or Tim Brown. Instead, he took a left tackle named Paul Gruber. “We had Gruber rated the highest player on the board,” Perkins told a New York Times reporter. “We would have taken him if we had the first pick of the draft. I’ve changed my mind about the left-tackle position. It’s now a skill position because he lines up against more and more teams’ best athlete, their right defensive end or linebacker, the Lawrence Taylor types. That’s why I feel good about Gruber. He is one of the best athletes I’ve ever seen.”
Whatever had caused Ray Perkins to change his mind about the left tackle was causing a lot of other people to change their minds, too. That became clear after the 1992 season when, to put an end to labor strife, NFL players and owners agreed to a new labor deal. The players accepted salary caps tied to leaguewide revenues, so that salaries would rise with revenues. In addition, players were granted the right of free agency. The new deal had a number of immediate effects. One was to make it possible for teams to go out and buy the players they thought they needed on the newly open market. Another was to focus NFL front office minds on how to allocate their dollars. Every team now had more or less the same number of dollars to spend on players—the number dictated by the cap—and so the team that spent the dollars most efficiently should win. What was the best way to spend those dollars? On a quarterback? On defense?
The new market officially opened on February 1, 1993, the day after the Super Bowl. Two months later, Peter King of Sports Illustrated reported its shocking early verdicts. More than any other football writer, King had earned the trust of NFL’s front offices, and so was able to channel their thoughts. All the players lucky enough to be entering free agency were cutting sweet deals for themselves, he reported. But the real shock was the dollar value the new market assigned to offensive linemen. Just a few years earlier, the Bengals had told Anthony Muñoz that no offensive lineman on earth was worth half a million dollars a year. The Denver Broncos quickly signed a couple of free agent linemen, Brian Habib and Don Maggs, for three times that amount. A few days later, Vikings center Kirk Lowdermilk moved to the Indianapolis Colts for $2 million a year, then groped for the adjective to describe his feelings. “Stunned is not the word,” he told King. “There is no word in the English language to describe it.” A few days after Lowdermilk grappled with his new dollar value, the Green Bay Packers paid $1.52 million a year over three years to buy a guard named Harry Galbraith away from the Miami Dolphins.
The strange bidding frenzy for offensive linemen no one had ever heard of persisted. After the Los Angeles Rams offered $1 million a year to bid away a guard named Leo Goeas from the San Diego Chargers, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran an article under the headline: “Farewell, Leo Goeas, Whoever You Were.” The newspaper sought comments from the Chargers’ old left tackle Billy Shields, who had retired in 1983. “I played eleven years,” said Shields, “and I didn’t make a million dollars over my entire career.”
That was the general drift of public commentary from NFL insiders: bafflement. The Bengals’ offensive line coach Jim McNally called the explosion in pay for linemen “a fast rush to get players who probably aren’t worth it.” One AFC coach called the Habib deal “the worst contract I’ve ever seen in this league.” Another skeptic pointed out that Don Maggs was a B-list left tackle and certainly not the guy to be guarding John Elway’s blind side. Just the past season Maggs had been badly beaten by…Chris Doleman. Retired NFL linemen were the most disturbed; when Friedrich Engels coined the term “false consciousness” to describe the inability of the working class to understand the nature of its oppression, he might just as well have been writing about NFL linemen. The offensive linemen had swallowed hook, line, and sinker other people’s opinion of their worth. They accepted as plain truth the widely held view that they were the team’s most fungible members. You didn’t see a lot of former quarterbacks wondering why current NFL quarterbacks were being paid millions of dollars; but these old linemen couldn’t understand the new value placed on linemen. “There’s a lot going on in football right now that makes no sense,” said old Chicago Bears center Mike Pyle, who made fourteen grand a year back in the 1960s. “And this tops the list.”
Of course the people shelling out the millions tried to explain themselves. They argued that the numbers spoke for themselves: just the previous season, nineteen out of the twenty-eight starting NFL quarterbacks had been knocked out of games with injuries by mid-November. The Broncos’ director of football operations, Bob Ferguson, pointed out that his team’s star quarterback John Elway had been sacked fifty-two times: Maggs and Habib were being paid to stop that kind of thing from happening. Ferguson actually went so far as to thank Broncos’ owner Pat Bowlen for his willingness to spend football money in ways football money had never been spent. “You have to give credit here to Pat,” he said, “because these were not famous guys. When I talked to him about Habib, he kept calling him ‘Rashid.’”