MINNEAPOLIS — We were driving down the interstate late at night, Bud Grant and me, talking and watching for deer. I was behind the wheel, and the concern wasn’t that I would crash into a buck or doe. Instead, we were simply on the lookout for wildlife, a favorite pastime of Bud’s while traveling.

An hour or so earlier, we had left a Pheasants Forever banquet in Fergus Falls, Minn. As I recall, this was the first such event held by the organization’s Otter Tail County chapter, making the year 1985.

By then Bud and I had been friends for five years or so, and in that time, together with a handful of buddies, we had traveled to Costa Rica and Alaska to fish and hunt. Bud and I had also driven to North Dakota to chase pheasants and sharp-tailed grouse.

On that North Dakota trip, Bud, who famously possessed a sweet tooth, threw his hands up as I drove by a Dairy Queen.

“Pull over!” he clamored, as if protesting a referee’s call. “Let’s buy a sundae, or at least a cone! Don’t you know it’s bad luck to drive by a Dairy Queen?”

At the time, I was writing this column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Through that outlet, in 1982, with the help of friends Norb Berg and Jeff Finden, among others, I had started Pheasants Forever (PF). PF, together with partner group Quail Forever (QF), is expecting to draw some 25,000 members to its national Pheasant Fest, Feb. 20-22, at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

At my request, Bud had agreed to be a founding PF board member, which explained our trip to Fergus Falls.

Conservation-minded and a bird hunter, Bud had grown up in Superior, Wis., where he learned the fine art of pursuing ruffed grouse. Later, while playing football, basketball and baseball for the Minnesota Gophers, he hunted pheasants, traveling when he could to west-central Minnesota.

On one such trip, after a Saturday football game, Bud and a couple of teammates were on their way to Morris, in Stevens County, to chase ducks and pheasants the following day. For reasons that in retrospect are difficult to fathom, Bud had invited the late Star Tribune sports columnist and close friend Sid Hartman to ride along.

En route, the group was stopped by a state patrolman for speeding. As the story goes, the officer was checking the driver’s credentials when Sid, from the back seat, rolled down his window and opined that the guys in the vehicle were not just regular people, but indeed Gophers football players.

Moreover, Sid enthused — while reaching for his wallet — that he had some tickets for the officer for the next week’s Gophers game, if he wanted to attend.

“Why, thank you very much,” said the officer, while extending a piece of paper to Sid. “And now you’ve got a ticket from me.”

That and other college pheasant-hunting trips notwithstanding, when Bud came to the Vikings from Winnipeg in 1967, he was a dyed-in-the-wool duck hunter. Winnipeg is only an hour’s drive from waterfowl-rich Delta Marsh, where Bud hunted often, and the 13 years he spent with the Blue Bombers imbued in him a love for all things ducks and duck hunting.

Soon after Bud came to the Twin Cities, he met Norb, who years later would help me start PF. A Control Data Corp. executive, Norb had read in the Minneapolis Tribune that Bud hoped to find a place to hunt ducks near Vikings headquarters in Bloomington.

Norb told Bud he had a place where Bud could hunt, if he wanted to go.

“How about tomorrow morning?” Bud said.

At the time, Control Data’s Bloomington headquarters were housed in a tower (it’s still there, under different ownership) a stone’s throw from the Minnesota River Valley, which is now part of a national refuge. Accessed from Control Data property, the river’s backwaters were often flush with mallards and other ducks.

When Bud could, he hunted the area before Vikings practices and sometimes before games, bringing along whatever black Labrador he owned at the time.

If Norb wasn’t traveling or otherwise busy, he’d hunt the same backwaters, and I’d sometimes be with him.

If Bud ended his hunt before we did, he’d row to shore, saying, “I’ve got to go to work. You guys with all the time have it made.”

“Just win the game,” Norb would say.

While coaching, Bud also hunted pheasants. He and the team had Tuesdays off, and on those days he and a handful of friends and players — Roy Winston, Wally Hilgenberg, Lonnie Warwick, Nate Wright and Jeff Siemon among them — drove to Iowa to chase ringnecks.

Traded to the Vikings by the Lions in 1968, Hilgenberg was the playmaker for these outings. An Iowa native and former Hawkeye, he had family and other connections that ensured the Vikings contingent had access to good hunting ground.

Pheasants were so abundant at the time that in 1973 the Iowa rooster harvest broached 1.9 million, a tally that within 10 years, due to habitat loss, had declined by about two-thirds.

In 1982, when I asked Bud to be a founding PF board member in an attempt to restore pheasant populations, he said yes, with the caveat that he was still coaching, so his time would be limited.

That was OK, I said, because his primary role, to use today’s parlance, would be as an “influencer” who could validate the group’s efforts as it attempted to grow.

This was never truer than at PF banquets, which Bud regularly attended as a speaker and crowd-gatherer.

So it was that night while driving back to the Twin Cities from Fergus Falls that Bud and I counted deer while talking about whatever came to mind. Only rarely did this include football. Mostly we chatted about good times outdoors, and plans for more.

We couldn’t know it then, but this would include our final hunting trip together, 35 years later, to North Dakota, for ducks, when Bud was 93.

Could Bud have imagined when we first talked about Pheasants Forever that PF and QF would grow to 164,000 members and spend $123 million a year on pheasant habitat, hunter access and conservation education, as it did in 2025?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I do know Bud — his stoic public persona aside — was an optimist who believed in encouraging and helping friends no matter how crazy their ideas might seem.

As long as they stopped at Dairy Queen to buy a sundae or at least a cone.

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