Bud Grant

Bud Grant died yesterday at the age of 95.

A Bud Grant miscellany:

(1) Grant played two seasons in the NBA, and was at the end of his life the oldest living NBA champion! He was on the 1950 Minneapolis Lakers team that eventually became the Los Angeles Lakers. Speaking of teams that got wildly inappropriate nicknames because of migration, the Utah Jazz are the Jazz, even though Utah is the least jazzy spot on Earth, because when the franchise moved from New Orleans it had several thousand t-shirts in a warehouse that just said “Jazz” on them, with the team logo.

(2) I was an obsessive little NFL fan in the 1970s, and saw the Vikings at least five times per year between games against the Lions, the occasional Monday Night Football game, and the playoffs. Despite their total domination of the Lions, I always rooted for them in the Super Bowl, which they always lost. (I think I liked the uniforms and Fran Tarkenton and Chuck Foreman and Alan Page). This makes it all the more odd to me that I didn’t realize until this very day that Grant played in the NBA. How was this not mentioned at least twice during every Minnesota Vikings’ telecast? (It certainly would be today).

(3) Grant had an almost comically stoic demeanor during games. Between him and Tom Landry I got the notion that the Platonic ideal of a football coach was no more likely to smile than he was to show up to practice in drag. Grant also forbade heaters on the sidelines, in Minnesota, pre-climate change.

(4) The Vikings went 8-8 in 1983, and Grant then retired. They promptly went 3-13 the next season, so he came back for one more year in which they went 7-9. That probably says at least a little about the value of a head coach.

(5) Grant’s second and final retirement began when was when he was 58. He said at the time that he wanted to retire while he could still hunt and fish, which seems like a very sensible attitude. The thing is if you had asked me in say 1973 how old Grant was I would have said maybe 65? (He was 46). It’s a common observation that people used to look much older back then, and Grant is along with Sparky Anderson the best 1970s sports example of this truth.