By any measure, 2000 was a fantastic year for Minnesota Vikings head coach Dennis Green – on and off the field. Not only is his team on the verge of a Super Bowl berth, he also smashed his 28-year-old personal big bass record.
Dennis Green
Home: Minneapolis, Minn.
Years fishing: 45
Favorite bass lures: Purple worms with a pintail, rigged Texas-style
Favorite fishing hole: Brown’s Bay, Lake Minnetonka, Minn.
Favorite fishing buddies: Wife, Marie, kids, Vanessa, 3, and Zachary, 2, and Vikings personnel Trent Walthers and Keith Johnson
Largest bass ever caught: 6 pounds (smallmouth, Minnesota), 8 pounds (largemouth, Florida)
Largest bass that got away: An estimated 6-pound-plus largemouth that ran underneath the boat while he and his brother, Greg, were fishing on the Susquehanna River, Pa. Green later caught a 5-pound, 14-ounce largemouth the same night, setting a personal record. But his brother was less than enthused. “He was very upset,” Green says, smiling. “He said, `You could have had two of them!'”
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It’s been a good year for Dennis Green, the head coach and vice president of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings. His football team rolled in 2000, achieving an 11-5 regular season record and a divisional playoff victory to advance to Sunday’s NFC Championship game against the New York Giants. Green’s Vikings are once again poised to go to the most celebrated of American sporting events, the Super Bowl.
And while that’s enough to put a smile on the face of almost any pro football coach, Green has reason to grin even wider because of what he achieved off the field in 2000. He caught the two largest bass of his life last year. For the longtime bass angler/football coach, this lesser-known personal accomplishment provides him a fair amount of modest pride.
“I’m never one of those guys who worries too much about his biggest fish,” says Green. “I don’t go big fish hunting or anything like that. I just really enjoy the sport and enjoy being outdoors riding around in the bass boat.”
Still, when prodded, Green tells the tale of a fateful day last May on Lake Minnetonka just west of Minneapolis, “It was my favorite spot on Brown’s Bay. I’d just pulled up at about a quarter to six in the morning the week after the fishing opener. I dropped the trolling motor and – bang – first cast. I hit it – boom – and I got a quick picture, weighed it and got it back in the water within a minute.” He pulls out a photo of himself holding a huge smallmouth bass. “You can tell by how red that tail is, that fish is probably within hours of spawning. That is a monster smallmouth right there.”
A monster indeed. The smallmouth weighed in at 6 pounds even, a catch any angler fishing for smallmouth in the North would be proud to flaunt. For Green, it was a pivotal moment in his fishing career.
“Going to your favorite spot on the lake, your favorite location and have it happen on your first cast,” he says reflectively. “Even though I’ve been fishing my whole life – 45 years worth of memories – that might be one of the best.”
But it’s not even his biggest bass.
In 1972, Green was fishing the Susquehanna River in his home state of Pennsylvania with his older brother, Greg, when he landed a 5-pound, 14-ounce largemouth – his personal record bass at the time.
“If you’re a northern fisherman, a 5-pound, 14-ounce bass is a big bass,” he says.
It was personal record that stood for 28 years. But that came to an end just last March when the coach took a trip to Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Fishing his favorite way with a finesse worm in shallow water, he landed a largemouth weighing 8 pounds, smashing his longstanding mark of 5-14.
“That’s why I love fishing in Florida so much,” he explains. “Okeechobee, which is one of the largest bodies of inland water, is all of 6 feet deep. That’s my favorite type of fishing. That’s why I like fishing the flats in Florida.”
And it certainly contributed to making 2000 a banner year for Dennis Green, head coach of the Minnesota Vikings and one of most avid bass anglers in the NFL. For him, when one season ends, another begins.
From the Susquehanna to Lake Minnetonka
Green grew up fishing for sunfish and smallmouth bass along the Susquehanna River in Eastern Pennsylvania. However, the technique he and his four older brothers used in those days wasn’t exactly a model of conventional, modern bass fishing.
“All these streams flow into the Susquehanna out of the Blue Ridge Mountains,” he explains. “So we’d go in there and do a lot of fly-fishing for smallmouth bass. There are a lot of rocks, ridges and things like that. I still do a lot of smallmouth fishing when I go back there during the summer. I enjoy fly-fishing and fishing streamers for bass. It’s old-fashioned, and you’ve got to have the right situation.”
In his college years at the University of Iowa, Green quenched his thirst for fishing by prowling the flooded rock quarries in and around Iowa City for largemouth. Oftentimes, on the drive home to Harrisburg, Pa., from school, he would gaze longingly past the ditches along Interstate 80.
“You’d always see these huge quarries along the side of the road, and of course you’d always see people fishing. You always wished you could stop and fish each one of them because you know that those rock quarries with crystal-clear blue water had nice big bass. I had two favorite quarries in Iowa City that I would fish out of a canoe. I’ve done a lot of canoe bass fishing. It’s still one of my favorite ways of fishing,” he says.
These days, though, the Vikings’ coach most often takes advantage of state-of-the-art fishing equipment when he ventures out onto Lake Minnetonka. A student of the fishing industry, he mentions he’s a big fan of Ranger Boats, and recently switched from running a Cajun bass boat to a Ranger.
He explains it as only Dennis Green can, “I equate it to football. I mean I love high-performance bass boats. Say you’ve got a boat, then you’ve got a bass boat, then you’ve got a high-performance bass boat. It’s descriptive. It’s like our football team. We’re not just a football team. We see ourselves as a high-performance football team. That means you can go beyond what anyone else can do. That’s the same thing with a high-performance bass boat. When you want it to perform and do certain things, that’s what a high-performance bass boat does. And that’s what a Ranger does.”
And he takes advantage of the opportunity to run his Ranger whenever he can. When the ice is out in Minnesota and the Vikings are all home for the summer, you can find the head coach chasing bass out on Lake Minnetonka no fewer than three times a week.
And Green, who in his 45-year fishing career has enjoyed bass fisheries from San Diego to Miami, loves the Lake Minnetonka fishery.
“When I took this job back in 1992, I did not have a clue that Minnesota had some of the best bass fishing around,” he says. “As a football coach, I don’t really have a lot of time off. A lot of times I get out early in the morning and fish until I go to work. Or if I get a free Saturday or Sunday, I get out and fish.”
The Dennis Green Open
For Green, as with many individuals involved with professional sports, it is the allure of tranquility and temporary escape that draws him to the sport of fishing. His wife, Marie, and kids, Vanessa, 3, and Zachary, 2, are his favorite co-anglers.
“Because of the intensity of your profession and the high concentration of competition, fishing is relaxing,” he says. “You can get on the boat and get away from people, so it’s something that gives you a kind of escape from the everyday pressure of sports. My daughter, I have to restrict her to 12 sunnies or we’d be out there all day. I have the same exact memories of when I would go fishing as a 3- and 4-year-old.”
The head coach isn’t the only Viking with bass fishing in the blood. Green’s closest fishing companions include linebackers coach Trent Walthers – who was there when Green caught his 6-pound smallmouth – and team chaplain Keith Johnson. And, poignantly, Green says he never goes fishing without thinking of his good friend, the late Chip Myers, the former quarterbacks coach who died of a heart attack in 1999.
“Chip was the most passionate angler I ever met,” he says. “He would go 365 days a year – ice fishing or boat fishing. He would fish every single day if he was in town. He was one of my fishing buddies.”
Passion seems to be the operative word when Green discusses his fishing. He is genuinely fond of every minute he spends on the water, and he takes special delight in the thrill of the catch, especially when he hooks one or two fish on his favorite – and fitting for the Vikings coach – purple worm with a pintail, rigged Texas-style.
“I like that anticipation of casting and getting that `tap-tap’ and tightening it down,” he explains. “Then the strike – you can get air, or you’ve got a fish. To really feel that line move and hit it and have that fish on, then come back again and catch three or four fish in a row – I don’t know if there’s anything more exciting than that about fishing.”
It was this kind of excitement that Green brought to hundreds of Minnesota anglers when he used to sponsor the Dennis Green Open bass tournament on Lake Minnetonka. For about five years, he hosted the one-day local tourney, introducing couples, families and good friends to the sport of competitive bass fishing.
“The great thing about it was that it was a chance for a husband to fish with his wife, for best friends to fish together, as well as fathers and sons,” he says. “We had a lot of those types of combinations simply because the prize money was not so high, and you could really run those types of tournaments. Of course Minnetonka’s reputation has grown so much since ’95 or ’96 that they’ve had these huge tournaments locally, and the catches are just absolutely incredible.”
As long as Green is busy leading his team toward the Super Bowl, fishing will of course take a back seat to football. But once he retires from the game he loves, he’s determined to shift his fervor from the field to the stream. He looks forward to taking long trips around the country with his trusty purple finesse worm in tow, striving to catch his next big smallmouth.
Says the coach, “That’ll be my passion. It’ll be something I can do year-round. … Know this: When you are no longer working, you have to have a tremendous passion, whether it’s golfing or whatever the case may be. My passion for fishing is so strong that fishing in different places around the U.S. is something that I’ll really be into.”
And who knows? Maybe 2001 will bring him more than a Super Bowl ring. It just might bring him a 9-pound bass.