Seahawks’ Pete Carroll ties Bud Grant, thanks to Minnesota sports columnist Sid Hartman

A legendary sports journalist in Minnesota is why Pete Carroll kept coaching in the NFL — instead of perhaps never coming back.

Wait...what?

When his surprising Seahawks beat the New York Giants Sunday, Carroll tied Hall of Famer Bud Grant in all-time NFL coaching wins. Both Carroll and Grant, his mentor, have 168 victories, tied for 18th-most in league history.

In the locker room at Lumen Field minutes after the latest win, Carroll called Grant. He is now 95 living in Minnesota. Carroll wanted to thank the man who kept him in the NFL in 1985.

“It was really fun to talk to him and he was tuned into the games. He’s been watching all day,” Carroll said. “We had a blast. It was fun talking and got to talk to Pat (Bellew), his partner.

“We’ve been keeping up for years.”

Carroll, one of the highest-paid NFL coaches at about $12 million per year, said Grant asked him: “What are doing with all that money?”

Thanks, Sid Hartman

Grant was the iconic, square-jawed coach of the Minnesota Vikings from 1967-83 and again in 1985.

In that ‘85 return season, Grant hired the then-33-year-old Carroll to be the Vikings’ defensive backs coach. It was months after the Bills had fired Carroll from his first NFL job, after just one season as a defensive backs coach with Buffalo.

Yet it’s Sid Hartman who really got Carroll the Vikings job with Grant 37 years ago.

Hartman is a Minneapolis legend. He was a newspaper sports columnist who worked in journalism there for 88(!) years, until his death in 2020. His final column, on Vikings wide receiver Adam Thielen, ran the day Hartman died — at age 100.

The Bills fired Carroll after Buffalo finished the 1984 season 2-14. They also fired Carroll’s colleague on that ‘84 Bills staff, running backs coach Andy MacDonald.

It was early spring, a bad, late time to get NFL coaching jobs.

“I was living in a little church house out there in Orchard Park (New York, where the Bills play, with his wife Glena), and didn’t have many connections,” Carroll said Monday. “I always heard, ‘What got you in the NFL?’ If you got fired your first year you’re in trouble, because nobody wanted to bring you back.”

No team did. So through connections, Carroll lined up interviews for assistant college jobs, at Stanford and at California. He set up a weekend of interviews in the Bay Area that early spring of ‘85.

“About two days before I was supposed to go to those interviews, I get a call from Lou Holtz. At midnight,” Carroll said.

Holtz was then the head coach at the University of Minnesota. He had hired Carroll for Carroll’s first coaching job away from his alma mater, Pacific in Stockton, California. Holtz made Carroll a graduate assistant at Arkansas in 1977.

“At midnight Lou is on the phone, and we start talking,” Carroll said. “Lou said, ‘We have a chance to be a national championship team here at Minnesota — if we can just get a secondary that can play a national-championship level of football. I’m looking for a secondary coach.’”

Carroll said he was “blown away.” Holtz said he’d call back with more details the next day at noon.

“The next day, 12 o’clock rolls around, and I don’t get a call from Lou...the rest of the day I don’t hear from him,” Carroll said. “I figured, ‘Oh well, something fell apart. It didn’t work out.’”

So he went to the airport on a Friday, to fly to the Bay Area for those interviews he had at Stanford and Cal.

“I have a connection in Chicago on my way out from Buffalo. I called Andy (MacDonald), my buddy that was on the staff at Minnesota, and I tried to make a call to him at the Minnesota (Vikings) office while I’m waiting,” Carroll said. “I told the stewardess right across the hall, ‘I have to make one phone call. Don’t close the door. I’m coming. I’ll be there.’

“I’m on a pay phone and I call the office and I said, ‘Can I talk to Andy?’ The secretary says, ‘Well, he’s not here right now.’

“I said, ‘Will you give him a message that Pete Carroll called?’”

The receptionist at Vikings headquarters stunned Carroll when she told him: “Pete Carroll? Coach Grant is talking to your wife on the other line.”

Grant was talking to Glena on Carrolls’ home phone in suburban Buffalo (decades before cell phones). He was trying to reach her husband about a job with the Vikings.

“Next thing I heard was ‘Click,’” Carroll said Monday. “And then I hear, ‘Hello, Pete? Yeah? This is Bud Grant.’

“I’m like, ‘Holy...!’”

Sid Hartman knew people

Grant had coached the Vikings to four Super Bowls by then. Carroll, the young assistant coach, had never spoken to the icon. But he knew all about him.

“So, he said, ‘What are you doing?’” Carroll said. “I said, ‘I’m getting on a flight and I’m going to the west coast. I have an interview at Stanford and at Cal.’

“He said, ‘Don’t get on that flight.’”

The gate agent behind Carroll was closing the doors.

“He says, ‘Pete, don’t get on that flight! Get the next flight to Minneapolis!’” Carroll said of Grant. “I said, ‘OK.’ And I hung up. And I don’t know anything.

“I said, ‘Close the door. I can’t get on the flight.’

“I run through the airport, and I get hooked up and get a flight (to Minneapolis).”

The next morning, Carroll was in Grant’s office at Vikings headquarters. He got a last-minute job offer to stay in the NFL, after all.

What about Holtz? Why did he never call Carroll back about the job at the University of Minnesota?

“I find out that in the morning that I was supposed to hear from Lou, Sid Hartman was sitting with Lou in his office,” Carroll said Monday, “and they had talked a little bit and said, ‘I’m talking to Pete Carroll this afternoon.’

“Sid tells him, ‘Well, Bud Grant is interested in the same guy.’ He didn’t know who he was.”

That was enough to deflate Holtz. The coach knew he couldn’t sway anyone to turn down Bud Grant.

“Well, if Bud is interested, then I’m not going to have the chance to get him.” Holtz told Hartman of Carroll.

“I never hear from him again,” Carroll said.

“Bud offered me the job and felt sorry for me, or whatever. He gave me a chance to come back, so that’s how that happened.

“I felt it was fortuitous and very lucky.”

So Sid Hartman got Carroll to Bud Grant instead of to Lou Holtz, to the Vikings instead of to the Gophers, and staying in the NFL instead of going back to college.

Pete Carroll’s NFL journey

Carroll stayed with Minnesota as its defensive backs coach for five seasons.

From there he became the defensive coordinator for the New York Jets. The Jets promoted him to a first-time head coach in 1994.

The Jets fired Carroll after one season. The 49ers made him their defensive coordinator for two years. New England hired him as head coach in 1997, to replace Bill Parcells. Carroll coached three seasons there. The Patriots fired him after 1999.

He was out of football for a year, immersed in the philosophies of John Wooden, before USC hired him as their third-choice head man in 2001.

Carroll rebuilt a dynasty with the Trojans over a wildly successful decade.

Then in January 2010, Seahawks owner Paul Allen sent chief executive Tod Leiweke to Los Angeles, to convince Carroll to bring his raucous, players-first SC program to Seattle.

Carroll’s been leading the most successful run in Seahawks franchise history since then, including winning Seattle’s only Super Bowl at the end of the 2013 season.

This year, he and general manager John Schneider traded Russell Wilson. They cut Bobby Wagner. They chose as their new quarterback a veteran backup who hadn’t played in eight years, and four teams ago.

Geno Smith is now the top-rated passer in the NFC, the most accurate thrower in the NFL. And Carroll has the Seahawks (5-3) in first place in the NFC West as the league’s biggest surprise.

“Sid Hartman may have been the guy that made it all happen,” Carroll said. “He was negotiating for me — even though he didn’t know who I was.

“From that point on, Sid always kind of took me under his wing, took care of me. We had a great relationship.”

As for having the same number of NFL coaching wins as Grant, who never won the Super Bowl Carroll has, his glib protege has been almost at a loss for words this month talking about it.

“I don’t have a good thought on what it means,” Carroll said.

“I can’t tell you how much I love the guy and how much I’ve respected him throughout my career and the opportunity that he gave me to get me back in the league. I’ve been in the league one year. I got fired, got thrown out of it. And he gave me a chance to come back. I don’t know why he saw it, but he did. And from that point forward, just the relationship that we had has just been meaningful to me in everything that I’ve done.”

“One of the things that it does state, though, that I’m really proud of is being in this organization for so many years and to have the consistency that we’ve had, to give us a chance to keep coming back... A lot of coaches don’t get as many chances as I’ve had.

“To be able to stay in this organization, it’s because of the ownership. It goes right back to Paul and Jody Allen and what they’ve done and how they’ve structured this thing to give us for the consistency and the expectations of the excellence and the standards that we operate by.”