Blue honour larger-than-life legend Grant

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This article was published 24/10/2014 (4057 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You know how legendary head coach Bud Grant has always been a larger-than-life figure in the history of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Football Club?

Well, now he’ll always be larger than life for Bombers fans in the future too.

On Thursday, the club unveiled a 7-6 bronze likeness of the greatest coach in team history outside the main entrance to Investors Group Field in what marks just the first phase of construction of a new “Walk of Honour” outside the stadium that will highlight the club’s past.

Plaques commemorating every member of the club’s Hall of Fame will be erected outside the stadium in time for the start of the 2015 regular season, team officials said Thursday.

“You need to recognize your past,” explained Bombers CEO Wade Miller, “so you know your future.”

And if it also allows you to forget the beleaguered present — and a 6-10 Bombers team that is on its way to missing the playoffs for the fifth time in the last six years — well, that doesn’t hurt either.

The Bombers won four of their 10 Grey Cups during the 10 seasons from 1957-66 Grant was the team’s head coach.

To put that in stark perspective, consider this: they’ve won just three more in the 48 years since then.

So what made Grant so successful? And are there any lessons to be drawn from his era that could be applied to the betterment of the current team?

The 86-year-old Grant — who went on from the Bombers to a second Hall of Fame career as the longtime head coach of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings — said he still follows the Bombers and believes the current team is headed in the right direction under a new regime that has very methodically set about rebuilding the organization from the ground up.

“If you follow and go back over history, these things run in cycles,” said Grant.

“Nobody can stay on top and nobody stays at the bottom. They go on and you have to ride the wave. When you’re up on top, you’ve got to enjoy it. And when you’re down on bottom, you’ve got to work harder to get to the top.

“But you can’t do it overnight. There’s not one thing you can do. You have to do it in a progressive way. And I think the Bombers are on the right track.”

That begins at the quarterback position, a spot the Bombers struggled for years to find stability in until they brought in a new starter in Drew Willy — and what appears to be competent backups in Brian Brohm and Robert Marve — last off-season.

Grant said if there was one lesson to be drawn from all the success his teams had it was that success on the field in the CFL begins and ends at the quarterback spot.

“The catalyst of all that, the whole thing revolved around this gentleman right here — Kenny Ploen,” Grant told a crowd of about 100 invited guests at Thursday’s unveiling that included Ploen, the Canadian Football Hall of Famer.

“If I was to say what the No. 1 ingredient to our success was originally, it was this guy right here. Without him, we wouldn’t have made it.”

While no one is yet comparing Willy to Ploen — who played five different positions for the Bombers and won three Grey Cups as a starting QB — the lessons of the Grant era are not lost on Winnipeg’s current head coach, Mike O’Shea.

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O’Shea said he was hoping to sit down with Grant at some point for a long, long chat.

“I could probably talk to him for a couple years straight and not get everything I need,” said O’Shea. “I’d like to hear about all the things he thought were mistakes he’d made.”

But why would you want to hear about mistakes from a man who made so few of them, O’Shea was asked?

“Because you don’t need to repeat them,” he replied.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek