NFL Films: Bud Grant-The Legend and The Legacy

[Music] the woodlands the fish laden streams and the duck ponds always beckoned by drink but ultimately it was the priority of family before football that signaled the end of his 17-year coaching reign in minnesota football was my job sports have been my life i've been involved in sports all of my life and this was a thing that i could do best to make a comfortable home and family atmosphere those commitments have been taken care of five of my children now have graduated from college i have one more boy who will be a senior in high school and he'll be able to do college work and that's pretty well taken care of so really my commitments to my family have pretty well been taken care of mud grant's final year at the helm of the vikings was in some ways his most difficult and challenging the vikings bright optimism of reaching the playoffs for the 13th time under bud grant was dimmed by a long list of season-ending injuries that included quarterback tommy cramer but in true minnesota football fashion the defense rose to the occasion and threw its weight around translating turnovers into touchdowns that kept the vikings ahead of the nfc central for much of the season although the vikings barely failed to capture another division crown they did finish with a respectable 8-8 record it is this team of capable veterans and talented youngsters that bud grant leaves behind it now passes on to former offensive assistant les steckel with the age of 37 becomes only the third head coach in viking football history i'm not replacing but grant is the head football coach i'm following bud grant as head football coach in the minnesota vikings and i believe that we're taking a new direction but we plan to maintain all the viking traditions that we've had in the past because they've been quite successful and we plan to be quite successful in the future les deckel follows in a proud tradition of minnesota viking football that bud grant helped build into legendary proportions and he is left with the legacy of a man who stands only second to george hales as the winningest professional football coach of all time [Music] [Applause] the nfl first shined its bright light on minnesota by granting a football franchise in 1960 but like the cold terrain they often played on the early years of the minnesota vikings were fogged with defeat and shrouded in a mist of mediocrity it was a situation that began to clear considerably in 1967 when bud grant arrived from the canadian football league he started by molding the minnesota players into his mirror image of self-control and discipline doing it with a set of rules that affected the hair on their heads to the uniformly similar black shoes on their feet rules that were met with equal amounts of sarcasm and skepticism we were getting ready to play the bud's first exhibition game here and we hadn't gone over the kick and game we hadn't done a hell of a lot of things we hadn't gone over we didn't think we were very prepared and practice is almost over we thought we were going to kicking game but as us lining up for a attention for the national anthem and he had carl eller and some of the guys in the national guard were the inspectors and in fact we sang the mickey mouse to him i think or some song to him after that when you know i arrived here we had we had some talent and but it was undisciplined talent it was like you know a bunch of let's go out and wing it and have a good time and if we win fine if we don't find by by working together and providing you know some of the mickey mouse that we came in here with they all found that hey this stuff works and it's it's more fun to win than it is to lose and that was a great satisfaction of that group of players who really were a lot of individuals when we got here it was under bud grant that the powers of four distinct defensive linemen were first harnessed then unleashed jim marshall gary larson alan page and carl eller comprised minnesota's famed purple people leaders and in 1969 in bud grant's third year they ravaged the powerful los angeles rams bringing the vikings to the brink of an nfl title with their first ever playoff victory although tough defense came to characterize viking football budgrant also professed that a successful coach needed a good wife a loyal dog and a great quarterback joe cap was none of these things but he was a bud grant import from canada who provided the vikings a much needed on the field leadership and an ability to get the job done whatever the cost was to his own body this former group of underachievers that captured the 1969 nfl title were a team in every sense of the world and words to that effect were eloquently put forth when an attempt was made to single out the achievements of just one i know for a fact that there is no most valuable viking there are only 40 most valuable vikings i i just can't accept this thank you [Applause] butt grant's vikings were not always at the top of the mountain but for 17 years they stayed very close to the summit one way he kept them there was to turn the often overrated home field advantage into a viable weapon of winning that more often than not cut his opponents down to size under bud grant the minnesota vikings did indeed become the abominable snowmen of the nfl he said you're only out there for two hours you're not going to get sick you're not going to catch a cold you catch a cold from germs not from cold weather so he believed that we made us believe it so pretty quick we were all believing that cold weather really didn't affect us but you know later on now that you know i still live here and it does get cold minnesota and when it is very cold i go outside and i always think of bud saying you know cold weather doesn't hurt you you know it's not gonna bother you being cold is something that is akin to being hot i mean you're uncomfortable but you can function up to a certain point i think i knew what that point was i tried to convince the players of that to the extent that some of them bought it where bill brown or mick tinglehoff would just you know we'd get out there and the windshield would be 20 below or 30 below and they'd roll their sleeves up wooden war wouldn't wear a warm up jacket and go out in the other team but you know you could see them they were looking at it say those guys are crazy and i think it gave us an advantage [Music] here [Music] [Applause] [Music] twice during the decade of the 1970s the los angeles rams came to the north country to contest the nfc championship twice they came away cold and beaten neither rain nor sleep nor swirling snow could keep the men of minnesota from delivering their own brand of fire and brimstone on the field this braving of the elements would endure from the hard-nosed days of joe capp and dave osborne to the more free-wheeling times of fran tarkenton and ahmad rashad although the vikings performed with a soldier-like precision they were a band of free thinkers who were never restrained from following their own on the field instincts you guys knew if you performed for bud grant he wasn't going to mess with you we didn't have to go out every training camp and prove ourselves or every practice if you did your job and did what he expected he didn't mess with you and if you're playing pro football you don't want to be messed with if you're doing your job grant's sideline approach may have been stoic and icy but it belied the trickery and cunning of his offense defense and special teams this is a chip shot there's a snap a bit high the bottom king is blocked down the mic look at the score it's bobby brad [Applause] at the 50-40 the 35-30 the 25-20 to 15-10-5 touchdown [Applause] and goes the distance unbelievable the vikings special team unit was not a suicide squad they were instead a life force under themselves whose terror tactics were the cause of many kickers nightmares pro football may never again see a team so capable of converting so many block punts and field goals into so many points equally demoralizing was the viking defense an opportunistic demolition crew that not only squeezed the air out of their opponent's attack but found ways of taking turnovers into the end zone that could never have been diagrammed on a blackboard [Music] while viking defense and special teams often pulled off the unbelievable unpredictable was the only way to describe their offense [Music] led by their resourceful ringmaster fran tarkington the vikings let loose with a circus show supreme that stood second to none [Music] with their ever swift and always smart set of receivers complimenting a flash dance running game that featured chuck foreman minnesota not only rivaled the ingenuity of tom landry's dallas cowboys but defeated them for the nfc championship in 1973. the vikings always found a way into the end zone and the playoffs and when bud grant put the ball into the hands of fran tarkenton's successor tommy cramer minnesota continued to march merrily along into post-season play as if it was business as usual 23 to 22 in favor of cleveland five seconds left first down queen 46. three wide receivers right kramer back to pass he's going deep down the right side and it is of the great dramatic finishes of any football game anywhere the vikings go to the playoffs [Music] many a victorious nfl coach has been buried beneath the heavy burdens of pressure that success always seems to bring [Music] but in the modern day vernacular of pro football the word burnout never applied to harry p grant nor to the teams he coached they were rising to the heights of an nfc playoff victory or sinking to the depths of despair that followed their four super bowl losses the vikings somehow managed to hold on and come back to win consistently year after year like their leader they were in a sense true survivors of the nfl wars and chuck foreman who conducted an informal little poll on a plane coming back from detroit once and he proposed a scenario you were thrust into a jungle 100 crocodiles you know agonizing experience only one chance and a billion to get you out alive who would get you out and he took a poll and the anonymous selection of all the players was hp but grant he could get you out of there before anybody could because he knew how to survive he had some kind of formula [Music] blood grant's formula for success and survival has been his simple precept that before a man presumes to influence the measures that control the lives of others he must control himself unfortunately in the public eye this gave bud grant the personality of a man who mistakenly got off in minnesota on his way to mount rushmore where he had a date to be carved in granite [Music] there are many different sides to bud grant and i think the public only had an opportunity to see one and that was that was the stone-faced coach standing on the sidelines that nothing seemed to affect him you know no emotion you know but he was he was a very emotion-filled uh human being i don't deny that he sometimes looks like he's a little cold out there but as far as his luck uh some people called him stone face and other things you know and uh the great ghost and uh well i knew bud pretty well and i could talk to him anytime and i didn't have any problem we kid back and forth and uh it's probably the biggest practical joker i've ever seen guys go go fishing and he'd he'd take a take one of the fish and kind of stick it down in the in a one of the places in their car that wouldn't be noticed for several weeks and you can imagine what that would do [Music] if there was an advertised parody to bud grant's image it was conceived in part by the coach himself [Music] yet there was nothing complex about the manner in which this man held dear to his heart the true joys of living from his earliest days when his family was young bud grant made it known that he would never sleep in his office and that he would snowshoe home in a blizzard not to because beyond his hunting dogs and his beloved birds of game there were ideals that this quiet man put into practice ideals that many people only talk about and when all is said and done they go a long way in explaining the forces that drove bud grant to earn success as a coach and respect as a man should i go and let the dogs out an hour do you want to do that later well let's just do one more ride coach okay you've got six children you come from absolute zero your main commitment of life is to take care of your family and to provide them possibly with the things that you didn't have and you get satisfaction i get more satisfaction out of providing for my family than i ever did coaching a football game so bud would teach football coach football and be there at the sideline and be a very good coach on the sideline but when it was over that was the ball game he went home to his family and on the odd day would go into the duck blind and the player understanding from his coaching at college and high school where they made life and death out of this thing would look at this guy and say hey maybe he knows something more than i do maybe he knows something more than the other guys knew he must know because he keeps winning [Music] the vikings moved from the old met into the balmy confines of the metrodome heralded in a new age of pro football in minnesota and for the man who personified frostbite football for millions of television viewers it was perhaps a tip-off that his day too was passing the times were a-changing in minnesota as were the heads and the stands and the faces on the field but viking tradition did indeed carry on from the pre-game ritual of respect for the american flag to the yearly minnesota ritual of making the playoffs [Applause] um [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] in the first ever playoff game played under the metrodome the vikings triumphed over the atlanta falcons proving that no matter where his team played or what era he lived in bud grant would always be a winner if you couldn't play for bud grant you couldn't play at all he is the greatest leader of men that i've ever worked with he taught me more about life than anybody that i've ever been with with maybe the exception of my father he has more common sense than anybody that i've ever worked with amazing human being and one that the relationship i i had with him i cherish very much [Music] whether the vikings can withstand the retirement of butt grant as they have withstood the departure of their leading players from the past is a matter that only time will tell [Music] but grant was never able to put into words what qualities of leadership he possessed but in the obscure prose of the ancient chinese philosopher laut say he was able to clearly define the necessities all good leaders must have values that in the end thoughtfully sum up bud grant's career on leadership there's a quote that i had clipped many many years ago and this was a quote by an old chinese prophet and goes way back to 585 bc exactly it stated that a leader is best and people barely know he exists not so good when people obey and acclaim him worse when they despise him but of a good leader who talks little when this work is done is aim fulfilled they will say we did it ourselves you

Channel: Grey Beard

Views: 1,994

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: NFL Films, Steve Sabol, Ed Sabol, Minnesota Vikings, Super Bowl, Bud Grant, Metropolitian Stadium

Id: VCZzUqpZYAY

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020