Honoring Bud Grant: A legendary prankster
To celebrate the life of legendary Minnesota Vikings head coach Bud Grant, we have put together a three-part video and written series of Bud stories in which we dug deep into the archives to find some of the tales that you have probably never heard before.
Part 3 focuses on a part of Bud’s personality that was lesser known to the public: He loved a good prank….
Pretending to arrest someone. Putting live animals in the office. Even going as far as pretending to shoot one of his own players with a gun. These are the top five craziest pranks that legendary Minnesota Vikings head coach Bud Grant ever pulled off.
For those who knew Bud Grant, they knew him as a jokester, a prankster, and as a coach who liked to be loose and not take things too seriously. Said offensive lineman Tim Irwin, who played 13 seasons in Minnesota, four of which were under the guidance of Grant, “hidden under the mask was a sense of humor not many people know about.”
And those who knew Grant knew that you always had to be on your toes, because you never quite knew what he was going to do next. Don’t let his greatness and ability as a football coach fool you – he knew how to joke around with the best of them. As Grant said all the way back in 1968, “football is serious business, but there’s always time for a laugh.”
Take this instance from the final year of his tenure with the Vikings in 1985. After Bud Grant retired following the 1983 season, and Les Steckel had his disastrous stint in 1984 where he was trying to run a military operation, Grant lightened the mood with this prank involving running back Ted Brown, who played under Grant from 1979-83 and was now entering his seventh season in Minnesota.
One day during practice, a cop car rolled up to the practice field, and an officer got out of the car to speak to Grant. After Grant spoke with the officer, he approached Brown, who was in uniform and was getting ready for practice. Grant told Brown that the police needed to see him right away; what exactly he was going to get arrested for and what exactly he did, and what exactly the officer said, I have no clue. However, Brown was frisked by the police, and put into the cop car, as the cops drove away.
Scary stuff, right? That’s got to scare you as a Viking player when you’re talking to Brown one minute, and the next, he’s arrested for something. Well, a few minutes later, the cop car returned, and Brown was all smiles. Brown wasn’t really in trouble. It was just another one of the elaborate pranks that Grant was all too famous for.
But it wasn’t just players that had to be on high alert when it came to Bud Grant’s shenanigans. It was also the secretaries who worked for the Vikings, because every April Fools’ Day, Grant had something planned.
Grant was big on animals, seeing as he was an avid hunter, so every year when the holiday rolled around, some creature would be in the office that wasn’t supposed to be there. One year, he put a chicken in the women’s restroom. In 1984, when Grant was a consultant with the Vikings and not the head coach, he put a crow in the building. In 1980, he even brought an orangutan into the facility. One time, he even hid a rooster in the women’s coat closet. And one of the more notable ones involved putting salamanders in the desk drawers, with a snake even getting out one time and going down the hallway.
But it wasn’t just animals that Grant messed with on April Fools’ Day.
Other pranks by Grant on that day included hiding all of the chairs, hiding all of the coffee pots, and taking a secretary’s desk and taping a skunk-scented cotton wad underneath it, which made the whole place reek.
Now, all of these pranks were in good fun, and even the secretaries had fun trying to get back at Grant with pranks of their own; one time, the secretaries coordinated a prank with the Como Park Zoo to put a bear cub in his office. As Roz Sorenson, one of the secretaries, said on Grant’s joking nature and what to expect on April Fools’ Day, “we’d be shocked if there wasn’t something. The question is never ‘won’t there be something?’ It’s ‘what will it be?’ He likes to get the girls. He thinks we’re kind of squeamish.”
And it wasn’t just secretaries and team employees that Grant liked to mess with, either.
He even messed with other writers. One of his most iconic pranks came during the 1977 season, when he messed with the legendary journalist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sid Hartman. Hartman just got a brand-new car, getting a Buick convertible. Grant, being the animal prankster that he was, decided to put two dead birds on the top of the folds. The prank was simple in nature and when Hartman opened the roof to his car, the birds would land on him. However, to everyone’s surprise, that did not happen. Instead, when Hartman opened the roof of his convertible, the birds didn’t fall onto him, but rather, fell into a compartment, completely unbeknownst to Hartman, and the birds stayed there and ripened. This caused the brand-new car to absolutely reek; any of that new-car smell was gone and was replaced with dead bird smell. It wasn’t for a few weeks after the prank actually happened that Hartman knew what was going on, and knew why the car smelled so badly. Well, it was all because of Grant and his antics.
When I say that no one was immune from the pranks of Bud Grant, I truly mean it. Not even his own family was immune. During one such instance in the 1960s up in Winnipeg, Grant’s kids were at school, and Grant’s wife, Pat, was at the beauty parlor. Now, you’d think that Grant would be at work, coaching up the Blue Bombers. But he decided to stay behind for a bit, and was the last one to leave the house. Grant decided to completely trash the house, turning it completely upside down, almost like it was something out of Cat in the Hat.
When the kids returned from school, they frantically called up their mom and let them know that the house was robbed. They even called up the police, because they were terrified. Pat came rushing back from the beauty parlor, and as the police were taking fingerprints, she realized that the house wasn’t robbed at all. The robber was Bud Grant. Bud was the one that flipped it upside down. As Pat laughed on this, “he may grow up some day. I’ve become oblivious to all this. I never know when to believe him.”
And that wasn’t the only time that he pranked his wife, as one time, during a press conference, he convinced a bunch of writers that his wife knew how to cook crow, and that she made the best crow in the world... even though she had no idea how to cook crow. She said that at least 50 people called her after that story ran, and she had to explain that it was a practical joke, and she had no idea what her husband was even talking about.
But as crazy as these pranks might seem, without a doubt, the craziest prank that Grant ever pulled off, and one that could never be attempted today for obvious reasons, came during one practice he had not as the head coach of the Vikings, but rather, up in Winnipeg as the head coach of the Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League.
The story goes something like this.
One unidentified player on the Blue Bombers was a bit too excitable during practice, and Grant was thinking of a fun way to try and calm him down. So, he hatched up a plan. He had a player on the Blue Bombers intentionally sabotage the practice. Said player would, at the request of Grant, mess up his assignment, and would continue to mess up his assignments. At first, it was no big deal, but every time he messed up, the coaches would pretend to get madder and madder. Obviously, the excitable player had no idea that this was all a set up. Finally, the assistant coach had enough. After the player in on the prank messed up again, the coach went into his pocket, pulled out a 22-pistol, and shot him.
No, I am not making that up. Bud Grant, who was an avid hunter, brought his gun to practice to give to his assistant, and the assistant pulled it out and fired it at him. Now, the gun was blank, so no one actually got hurt during this, but then again, what’s the first rule they teach you in gun safety about always assuming that the gun is loaded?
I’m just trying to imagine any coach trying to pull this off today. There are a lot of things you could get away with in the 1960s that you absolutely cannot get away with today, and this was definitely one of them. However, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the player in question learned his lesson; stop messing up assignments and being too eager, or you might literally get shot and die.
But seeing as Grant went 102-56-2 in the CFL, won four Grey Cups, and made it to the playoffs eight times in 10 years, despite the, shall we say, unconventional nature of his strategies, it clearly worked out.
In many ways, there will never be another head coach like Bud Grant. His style truly was one of a kind. And he showed and taught an important lesson to everyone that you don’t have to take yourself so seriously to get the job done.
Thanks to NFL researcher Collin AKA JaguarGator9 on YouTube for his special research and producer Jonathan Harrison for his video editing on this project.
