Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Harry Peter "Bud" Grant Jr.
Superior-born athlete and coach; NBA champion with the Minneapolis Lakers; CFL Grey Cups; Minnesota Vikings head coach; Pro Football Hall of Fame 1994
$10,000
Harry Peter "Bud" Grant Jr. was the stone-faced coach of the Minnesota Vikings and one of the few athletes who won championships in both the NBA and the CFL before remaking an NFL sideline. Born in Superior, Wisconsin, on May 20, 1927, he grew up as Buddy Boy to his mother Bernice. A doctor found polio in the boy and told him to play sports so the legs would hold. He started with baseball, then basketball, then football. When the schools did not field teams, he organized games between neighborhoods and called kids from other schools. Weekends he hunted rabbits alone. On November 11, 1940, he and two friends were duck hunting on Yellow Lake when the Armistice Day Blizzard came down; he heard a train horn, found the tracks, and waited it out in a gas station. After Navy service at Great Lakes on Paul Brown's service team, he used a Wisconsin acceptance letter to get discharged and went to Minnesota instead, earning nine letters in football, basketball, and baseball. He won an NBA title with the Minneapolis Lakers in 1950 and was drafted that same year in the NFL's first round, fourteenth overall, by the Philadelphia Eagles and in the NBA's fourth round by the Lakers. With Winnipeg he intercepted five passes in one 1953 playoff game, a record in any league, and as the youngest head coach in the CFL won four Grey Cups. He coached the Vikings from 1967 to 1983 and again in 1985, reaching four Super Bowls with no heaters on the sideline and the team standing in a straight line through the anthem. The Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him in 1994. He kept later outdoor life and a cabin at Gordon in Douglas County, south of the city, and never stopped saying he was from Superior, Wis. He died in Bloomington, Minnesota, on March 11, 2023.