A man for all seasons, particularly winter

Bud Grant was more than a coach, but few coaches won more.

Sean McVay won a Super Bowl with the Rams. The next year they went 5-12. After both seasons McVay shared an existential crisis with the public. Should he keep coaching? Was ecstasy worthwile when it didn’t immunize you from agony? Eventually he decided to gallantly push on. He is 37 and will make $14 million this year.

This is not intended to minimize anything that’s going on with McVay. It just came to mind Saturday when we learned of the death of Bud Grant, 95, the Vikings’ coach who used to curtail Saturday practices when conditions seemed favorable for duck hunting.

When Grant left coaching in 1983 (he would return for one season in 1985), Minnesota columnist Patrick Reusse wrote that the Vikings “had lost their last distingushing characteristic.” He did not advertise his toughness. Players said he wouldn’t single them out for criticism in meetings, preferring to wait for the one-on-one conversation. His key assistants, like Jerry Burns and John Michels, were with him forever. He was famous for banning heaters from the Metropolitan Stadium sideline and for braving the winter Sundays in short sleeves.

Seven years ago he was introduced as the Vikings’ honorary captain before a playoff game against Seattle, when they were playing in the U. of Minnesota’s outdoor stadium. Sure enough Grant walked to the middle of the field in a short-sleeved shirt. The temperature was minus-6. He was 88 then. He explained that this was the Vikings’ final outdoor game before moving into US Bank Stadium, and he just wanted to punctuate it.

He was famous for losing four Super Bowls. In fact, Otis Taylor died the day before Grant did, and Taylor was the unstoppable Kansas City receiver that torched the Vikings in the fourth Super Bowl. Grant was less famous for winning four Grey Cups as a coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and another as a player, and most of his fans would have no idea that Grant might have been the best athlete in the history of NFL coaching. When he died he was the oldest living NBA champion, having sat on the bench for the 1950 Minneapolis Lakers, but he also intercepted five passes in one playoff game (!) for the Blue Bombers. The franchise built a statue for Grant in front of its stadium, and he was a member of both the Canadian and American Football Halls of Fame. Grant also caught 57 passes for the Philadelphia Eagles in a season when you’d be lucky to see 57 passes thrown in a month. He wasn’t exiled to Canada, he just got paid more to play there.

Grant also pitched well into his dotage for Minnesota “Town Ball’ teams. Town Ball is still a thing in Minnesota, to an extent. Each village would take its native sons, add a ringer or two, and go play other villages for cash prizes. You could take home $150 in one afternoon. One day Grant’s team was playing for actual land. That’s how Bud wound up with room for eight cemetery plots, one of which will be used for him. His son Mike, who won 11 state football titles while coaching Eden Prairie, asked him how he knew he would have six children (Bud’s wife Pat passed away 14 years ago), and that eight plots would be perfect. “That’s all they would give me,” Bud replied.

Grant’s tribulations weren’t “first world” stuff. He was born in 1927 and was a polio victim during the cruelest years of the Great Depression, in Superior, Wis. His family basically had nothing. Sports, and the Navy, were the escape route. He wound up at Minnesota, where he was an all-conference football player and a team MVP in basketball and baseball.

Kids from the 1930s never lost their grip on fresh dollar bills. When Grant returned to the Vikings, he negotiated a deal for free gas. He would drive his car up to the pumps, at the Vikings’ facility, and fill it up, then bring all the other family vehicles and fill those up, too. He also negotiated a lifelong deal for an office in the building that had to have a window. When the Vikings tried to move him into a more confined area, he found the contract and showed it to them. He still had that room with a view when he died.

The Vikings never have played in a Super Bowl without Grant, and only four coaches have participated in more. Grant has the same career winning percentage as Joe Gibbs (.621) but Gibbs won all three of his Super Bowls. In a 8-year span beginning in 1969, the Vikings either went 11-3 or 12-2 six times. Fran Tarkenton had his most producitve years with Grant, and the Purple People Eaters didn’t need to blitz to catch quarterbacks, with Carl Eller and Alan Page making the Hall of Fame.

Grant was a particular bogeyman for the Rams, who lost three playoff games in the ramshackle chill of Metropolitan Stadium. In 1976 the Rams finally got the Vikings in the L.A. Coliseum and figured they would claim revenge, especially with Tarkenton hurt. Minnesota still won, 14-7, with Bob Lee throwing 10 passes in January slop.

But the Vikings were either too uptight or too limited to beat AFC teams when the world was watching. “You die a little bit when you lose,” Grant said, “but you have to put it behind you. Sometimes the other team is just better.”

That’s the benefit of living in a time when coaching was a profession, a way to get by, instead of an obsession or a personal referendum. Grant bought a modest home in Bloomington when he took the Vikings job and he never left, refusing to surrender to an assisted-living facility. He never golfed but loved to spend frigid mornings looking for ducks and grouse. Fewer people, less small talk.

He also had veered close enough to death to know that it wasn’t the equivalent of an overime loss to Seattle. In 1940 he and friends were ambushed by the Armistice Day Blizzard, which took 154 lives, and Grant could have drowned in a boat, been stranded without food or firewood in a cabin, or died of exposure while walking to find help.

On a 2015 hunting trip in Canada, his twin-engine plane lost its landing gear and instrument control, and his pilot managed to land it on its belly.

In 1956 Grant played in the CFL All-Star Game in Vancouver. He changed his return flight to Winnipeg the next day, and thus did not board a Trans-Canada flight that ran into a mountain, killing 62.

Through it all he was the Coach Next Door. He held periodic yard sales. Customers who bought $25 worth of Grant’s leftovers could also get his autograph. He was once able to sell an old minnow bucket for $48. People would come from all over just to buy a little bit of Minnesota.

Either you rely on your won-loss record as your distinguishing characteristic, or you realize you’re a person first and a coach second. There’s a boundary involved with that. Grant always got both feet down.