HERE'S A QUICK test to determine if you're a high brow or a low brow. Two men died recently. Both were described as geniuses in their field. Which one meant the most to you? Was it Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director of gloomy, arty movies? Or Bill Walsh, one of the greatest football coaches of all time?

There's no doubt which one the New York Times judges to be the more important: Bergman gets a lengthy tribute not only on the front page of the entire newspaper but also of the Arts sections. Walsh was relegated to a paltry obit on B9. If I were calling the shots at the Newspaper of Record, I would have reversed the story selection, but then I admit to a certain bias here as a devoted 49ers fan of long standing.

I grew up in Los Angeles rooting for the Rams, before they betrayed my hometown by decamping for St. Louis in 1994. By that time my allegiance had already begun to shift, since I moved north to attend the University of California, Berkeley in 1987, at the very height of the 49ers dynasty. Ah, to be young and a football fan in the Bay Area in the 1980s and early 1990s . It must have been like being a New York Yankees fan in the 1920s-30s or a Boston Celtics fan in the 1960s. Bliss it was to watch Joe Montana lofting soft passes to Jerry Rice, Roger Craig coming out of the backfield, Ronnie

Born in 1931 during the Great Depression, the son of a Southern California day laborer, Walsh came up the hard way as a marginal football player (and amateur boxer) at the College of San Mateo and San Jose State. Then he served a long apprenticeship as a junior coach, working as a graduate assistant at San Jose State, a high school head coach, and then as a defensive assistant at Cal (my alma mater) and Stanford (its hated rival). He switched from defense to offense when he joined the Oakland Raiders in 1966 and emerged as a passing guru when he was hired by Paul Brown as an assistant for the expansion Cincinnati Bengals in 1968.

Here he developed what would become known as the West Coast offense, predicated on multiple receiver sets and short, precise, timed passes. Much of the impetus for this new approach was that the Bengals had a lousy running game, so they couldn't simply shove the ball down opponents' throats in the "three yards and a cloud of dust" style favored then and now by so many unimaginative National Football League coaches. Walsh's genius was that he realized that short passes could be an even better way of controlling the game's tempo than a brutal running game; the run could come in later, as a way to grind out the clock, once the quarterback and his receivers had built up a lead.