It was the 80's. My family had just immigrated to the States. I was sitting on the living room floor of our one bedroom apartment in Southern California flipping through channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Some caught my attention. I was mesmerized. It was American Football. Something I had seen often but never paid much attention to because I was raised on soccer and basketball. But this game was different than any I had seen before. One team, the Niners, looked like ballerinas in pads, gracefully moving in unison, as if they were one body performing an intricate dance to a melody only they could hear, while their opponents, the Rams, all disjointed, moved as if traversing through mud, battling gravity itself to get from point A to point B. I had no idea who Bill Walsh or Joe Montana were on that day, but my young mind somehow recognized the genius that was responsible for transforming the game of football, a brutish game played by brutish men, into an art as sublime as any I had seen. Despite all the praise heaped upon Bellecheat over the years, I had not seen genius like this, or been mesmerized by the game of football, until a year ago, when the Niners lost Jimmy G for the season and Shanahan was forced to use all his wiles and wits to keep the team competitive. That is when I began seeing a brand of football I had never seen before: one which relied on movement, precision, timing, and camelflage to not just unleash, but magnify and accentuate, the raw power and speed of the players executing the plays. It was, and is, a sight to behold. There are very few coaches in the history of the game that have transformed the way the game is played: Kyle Shanahan is one of them.
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