Bill Walsh and Tom Snyder

Bill Walsh has died. If you’ve enjoyed football at any point in the last twenty-five years, you’ve got Bill Walsh to thank. Walsh coached the Beloved San Francisco 49ers for ten years, taking the club from a 2-14 mark his first season to a Super Bowl win his third. In those ten years the Beloved Niners won six division titles and three Super Bowls, back when winning Super Bowls meant something (before the league was significantly watered down because so much talent was spread so thin between so many teams). Walsh was the architect of what today is called the West Coast offense, a system so groundbreaking that it took the rest of the NFL until well into the 1990s to realize what it was seeing. (By that time, the Beloved Niners had tacked on two more World championships.) A leader of men and a crafter of character, team first and always, one of the greatest minds to ever walk the sidelines. Bill Walsh suffered leukemia and died Monday, at 75. R.I.P.

Tom Snyder has died. This is a crippling blow to whatever remains of the spirit of civility and good humor on television, as Snyder was perhaps the last relevant, thoughtful and competent interviewer of his generation (and one of the two, of any generation, anywhere near American broadcasting). You may not have ever seen Snyder host Tomorrow with Tom Snyder (1973 – 1982), but you’ve seen footage of that influential show everywhere over the years: Wendy O. Williams destroyed a car during a Plasmatics appearance in 1980; John Lennon conducted his last televised interview there; U2 debuted there in 1981, as did “Weird Al” Yankovic; not to forget a Charles Manson interview that even today would have to be seen to be believed. Network meddling with the show’s format forced Snyder aside in 1982 and David Letterman took the slot in 1983. As part of his later contract with CBS, Letterman was able to develop his own 12.35am show, and in 1995 he offered Snyder The Late Late Show, from which he retired in 1999. He was never The Star, and was the perfect remedy for a cesspool of mediocrity and thoughtless jackassery we today lament as simply being modern television. Tom Snyder suffered leukemia and died Sunday, at 71. R.I.P.