Pro No. 12: For Mike Walter, 10 years with 49ers reaped 3 Super Bowl rings

It’s been almost 30 years, Mike Walter, since you laced up your cleats and played a game in the NFL. Does it feel like a long time ago?

“You know something? It kind of does,” says the former Sheldon High and Oregon standout, whose 11-year NFL career spanned from 1983-93, the last 10 years as a 6-3 1/2, 240-pound inside linebacker with the San Francisco 49ers. “I just watched (the docuseries) ‘Joe Montana: Cool Under Pressure.’ I loved it. It brought back a lot of memories. I found out some things I didn’t even know. It made me feel kind of old.”

Walter, 61, is the answer to a trivia question:

Who played for both Tom Landry and Bill Walsh during his NFL career?

If you said Terrell Owens, you have the right teams but the wrong era.

Walter played his rookie season for Landry and the Dallas Cowboys in 1983, then spent the first four years of his 10 years with San Francisco under Walsh.

Walter had much different experiences under the two Hall of Fame coaches.

He played sparingly, and mostly on special teams, during his single season under Landry in Dallas. Walter was a stalwart for Walsh and his successor, George Seifert, in San Francisco, helping the 49ers to Super Bowl championships in 1985, ’89 and ’90.

Landry was in his 24th season as the only head coach the Cowboys had known when Walter arrived after a fine career as a defensive end at Oregon. They didn’t establish a warm personal relationship.

“I talked to Landry twice — the day I came and the day I left,” says Walter, a commercial broker for Oak Tree Insurance in Lake Oswego for the past 21 years. “It was a very ‘top down’ organization. By that, I mean that everything came from the head coach down to the assistants down to the players. I get to the 49ers, we’d have a meeting and the defensive coordinator would say, ‘Well, we could do it this way.’ They’re asking the players questions — a new concept.

“In Dallas, they’d been doing it the Landry way forever. I had respect for Tom Landry and what he had done, but Bill Walsh was such an innovator. Being around him when he was doing that was a treat. Not only with the offense, but the way he ran the organization. People wanted to play for the 49ers. We didn’t beat each other up all week. Toward the middle and end of a season, we rarely had full pads on practice. It was different than Dallas, where every practice was a blood bath, competing and hitting. Very old school.”

It was more than a bit of an upset that Walter had an NFL career at all. Basketball was his game as a kid growing up in Eugene. He didn’t play football until his senior year in high school, and then almost as an afterthought.

“I figured out I could play small college basketball, but I could never play D-I basketball,” he says. “I couldn’t shoot or dribble — things that are kind of important if you want to go anywhere in basketball.

“About a week before practice begin, I decided, ‘I’m going to go out for football, just for the the fun of it.’ Dick Arbuckle, who had been Sheldon’s head coach before, then was an assistant at Oregon, had come back to coach at Sheldon. It was a big deal to play for him.”

Walter wound up as a star defensive end for the Irish and earned Most Valuable Player honors in a losing cause in the 1979 Shrine Game. At Oregon, he started out as a linebacker, then converted to defensive end midway late in his freshman season. A three-year starter who filled out to 230 pounds, Walter had 13 sacks and 18 tackles-for-loss as a senior in 1982 playing for Rich Brooks during the early years of his 18-year coaching reign with the Ducks.

“A great coach,” Walter says of Brooks. “I really admired him. You certainly respected him. There was some fear involved, too. He would go after his assistant coaches if things weren’t going well. You’d feel bad for them sometimes. There was a lot of pressure there. He was a tough dude.

“It’s so funny. Now that I know him more on a personal level, it’s completely different. We get together sometimes. It’s something to be Coach Brooks’ friend. He’s a great guy. He has joined (Ex-UO teammates) Greg Hogensen, Ed Hagerty and me on a fishing trip on the Deschutes. (Brooks) is in the river 10 minutes after his car is parked. He is a fishing fool.”

Dallas took Walter in the second round of the 1983 NFL draft and immediately switched him to outside linebacker. He played sparingly — mostly on special teams.

“I’d never covered (pass routes) before,” Walter says. “I haven’t seen many guys make that transition smoothly. I wasn’t setting the world on fire.”

The Cowboys waived him in training camp prior to the 1984 season. The 49ers picked him up the next day, then moved him to inside linebacker. He spent the season as backup to veteran Jack “Hacksaw” Reynolds, winning the first of his three Super Bowl rings. For most of the rest of his career, Walter was a starter, leading the 49ers in tackles three consecutive seasons (1987-89).

The 49ers of those years had the stars —Montana, Ronnie Lott, Dwight Clark, Jerry Rice.

“But I also had some great teammates who aren’t household names, guys like Kevin Fagan and Pierce Holt,” Walter says. “John Taylor, a very good receiver, was one of my favorite teammates.

“It was just a great bunch of guys. That was the best thing about being with the 49ers, especially in the early years. We were such a close-knit group. It was a fraternity of guys you go through things with.”

During the 1984 season, there were five Ducks on the 49ers roster — Walter, Mario Clark, Jeff Stover, Fred Quillan and Russ Francis, along with defensive coordinator George Seifert, who had coached at Oregon.

Seifert was San Francisco’s defensive coordinator from 1983-88 before taking over the head-coaching reins for Walsh in 1989. Seifert would keep the position through 1996, winning Super Bowls his first season and again the year after Walter retired.

“For the first few years, George was the guy who was in charge of yelling at me,” Walter says with a laugh. “I didn’t have much experience as a linebacker at that point. My position coach, Norb Hecker, didn’t do a lot of coaching. In meetings, it was George who was always trying to coach me up. He was a fabulous defensive coordinator.

“As head coach, he was very detail-oriented. He ran things a little different than Bill, though he used a lot of what we had done before. I always gave him the benefit of the doubt because he had been a Duck (coach).”

One of Walter’s career highlights was an interception off John Elway as the 49ers thrashed Denver 55-10 to win the 1990 Super Bowl game.

“I was the same year as John and played against him in college, and we played together in the East-West Shrine Game, so I got to know him a little bit,” he says. “Funny thing about that interception — nobody in Eugene saw it. The power happened to go out in the city for a few minutes during the first part of the third quarter. I went back to Eugene and it was like it never happened.”

One thing missing from Walter’s resume is a Pro Bowl appearance.

“I know Walsh pushed for me to make it a couple of times,” he says. “I probably came pretty dang close. But there were a lot of great linebackers during that era. They always used to say, once you had a locker in Hawaii, it was yours. I never got there.”

Walter keeps in excellent shape, his weight at about 225 pounds. He lives in Charbonneau with long-time girlfriend Laura Chaney and is a member of Arrowhead Golf Club in Molalla.

“I used to really be into cycling,” he says. “Now I play pickleball. I’d play every day if I could. I quit lifting through COVID. My shoulder is bad right now, but I have to get back into the gym.”

Walter has two daughters and now two grandchildren — Julane, 8, and Tatum, 6.

“I had wonderful children,” he says, “and the grandkids are even better. I cut work short one day a week and we do something with them. It’s so much fun.”

Walter no longer has season tickets to Oregon football but keeps in the loop. He participated in new coach Dan Lanning’s recent Zoom conference with Duck football alums.

“He seemed like a really good guy,” Walter says. “He has a lot of energy. I like what I heard from him. I’m holding out hope. He’s young, though. So are a lot of his staff. There are so many (young coaches) in college football these days. They all come from this trajectory of success. They haven’t had a lot of adversity. Sometimes the hard part is down the road.”

Walter has volunteered to serve as a celebrity forecaster of NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games in the “Pros vs. Joes” Bracket Challenge on kerryeggers.com. He is a veteran of such things.

“One year I turned in four brackets, and I was on fire with one of them,” he says. “Just killed it. Won it all. Every year since then, I always think I can bring back the magic I had that one time. I never do.”

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