Former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant died today at age 95. Grant was a great athlete, a nine-letterman at the University of Minnesota in football, basketball and baseball. He played both professional football and professional basketball, and coached in the Canadian Football League for ten seasons before taking over the Vikings in 1967.
Grant led the Vikings to four Super Bowls, all of which they lost. Probably they should have won one of them, the first in 1969. The other three times, they were the best team in the NFC but came up against a superior AFC champion.
Grant was known for rarely showing emotion. This was a conscious decision on his part. He believed that one key to winning football was keeping emotions under control, and he wanted to model that for his team. Grant preceded the modern era of obsessed NFL coaches who sleep in their offices and do nothing but watch film. An avid hunter and fisherman, he was known to go duck hunting on Sunday mornings prior to game time.
Grant led the Vikings during the era when they played outdoors, sometimes under bitter winter conditions. Opposing teams would huddle around heaters on their sideline, fretting about the cold and trying to keep warm. Grant didn’t allow heaters on the Vikings sideline. He said he didn’t want his players to be more comfortable on the bench than they were on the field. Also, he no doubt wanted to cultivate the image of his team as impervious to the cold, thus enjoying a considerable home-field advantage.
The apotheosis of this approach came in January 2016, when the Vikings met the Seattle Seahawks in a postseason game at the Minnesota Gophers’ TCF Bank stadium. (The game was outdoors because the Vikings were using the Bank while their new stadium was under construction.) The temperature was six below at kickoff, with a wind chill of -25. Everyone else was freezing, so the crowd roared when Bud, age 88, trotted onto the field for the coin toss wearing a purple golf shirt.
Bud Grant is the man pic.twitter.com/b1Ts22d1Db
— Jake Magnell (@jake_ross2014) January 10, 2016
Grant was a patriot and a conservative. In his later years, he occasionally made waves by speaking his mind. I don’t know whether he ever commented publicly on the detestable practice of kneeling during the National Anthem, but I’m pretty sure I know what he thought about it. When he coached the Vikings, he required his players to stand in a straight line for the anthem. On at least one occasion, he famously had his team practice lining up for the Anthem.
Bud Grant, RIP.
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