I Did It My Way by Bud Grant

Author:Bud Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2013-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

9. Early Vikings

I knew I had to find the leaders on the team if I was going to be successful. I also had to get them to buy into what I was doing. The first thing I had to do was to establish an image of the team. From what I knew about them beforehand, things were kind of helter skelter. Norm Van Brocklin had been a terrific player and had a flamboyant personality, but from what I understood there was not a lot of discipline on the team. He cultivated a barroom-brawl mentality, and I wanted to change that image completely. I didn’t think it was the right way to win football games.

I’d had an outstanding high school coach who commanded respect, and from him I went to Paul Brown, who was a magnificent leader. When they spoke you paid attention. They had something to say and it made sense. I learned a lot from people like that.

The way things had been operating in Minnesota simply wasn’t the way I operated. Things had to change. We needed discipline. When I first got to Winnipeg as a player, there was no discipline. We got away with things as players. We were not held accountable for what we did, and I learned fairly early on that you cannot run a football team like that and be successful. So coming to the Vikings as a coach, I benefited from that experience and had a pretty good idea of what needed changing. We were going to clean up our act on and off the field.

Discipline would set the tone for how we practiced, how we prepared for games, and how we presented our team image. This affected everything, all the way down to the way players wore their uniforms.

One of the very first things that caught my attention was the way the players wore their socks. The first time I saw the team come out for a game, I noticed that every player had a different way of wearing them. Some wore them high, some wore them low, and some wore different colors on the inside and outside. There was no uniformity to speak of.

Then and there I made a rule. Everyone’s socks had to look the same. White socks were to be worn over purple socks. They were not to be worn halfway to the knee or not down around the ankles. “We have to look alike if we are going to play alike and be a team,” I told the players.

I explained it simply and didn’t dwell on it. If I would see them before a game, all I had to do was point to their socks and they knew what I was talking about. It was a rule that was easy to enforce.

It was the same when we went out on the practice field. It was not the time for them to fool around, tease each other, or slack off, as they had been used to. I told them, “We will all get dressed and we will all leave the locker room at a certain time.

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