The Eden Prairie Lions’ 51st Annual Wild Game Dinner saw some new additions to the menu and some reminiscences of old Minnesota sports stories from former Vikings players Chuck Foreman and Stu Voigt.
Started by former Eden Prairie elementary school principal Bob Hallett in 1973 as a way to share the bounty of his hunts in what was then a less developed Eden Prairie, the wild game dinner celebrated its golden anniversary last year. The 2024 dinner saw the addition of Swedish moose balls and bear burritos to the menu, along with returning favorites like pheasant egg rolls, pasta served with an elk meat sauce, and venison bourguignon. Ron Rodenwald and his wife, Cindy, returned as chefs. The Eden Prairie Lions donate all proceeds from the $30-per-person dinner and its accompanying silent auction to charities which support the sheltering and adoption of animals.
Although the event is normally held on the first Monday in December, it was pushed back to the third week of the month this year due to the chef’s availability, and then rescheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 17, when it became clear that the Minnesota Vikings would play the Chicago Bears in Monday Night Football on Dec. 16.
Speakers at this year’s Wild Game Dinner included Foreman, a running back for the Vikings from 1973 to 1979, and Voigt, who played tight end for the team from 1970 to 1980. The Vikings appeared in the Super Bowl in 1970, 1974, 1975, and 1977.
Eden Prairie High School football coach Mike Grant, son of former Vikings coach Bud Grant, emceed the conversation and posed the rhetorical query to the audience, “My dad coached in four Super Bowls, and what was his record?” The Vikings lost all four of their Super Bowl appearances, resulting in an 0-4 record. “I never had the courage to bring it up to him,” Grant said.
Grant also acknowledged his high school team’s loss this year that kept them out of state championship play with a 6-4 season. “There was a lot of good teams this year, really good teams,” Grant said. “We hope a lot of kids come back next year. We hope to bring that trophy back here again.”
Memories of Met Stadium and more
Foreman and Voigt shared memories of playing at Metropolitan (“Met”) Stadium, originally built as a minor league baseball stadium and added onto over the years. The Vikings played in Met Stadium, located on the site of the current IKEA near the Mall of America in Bloomington, from the early 1960s until they moved to the Metrodome in the early 1980s.
“That was not a beautiful stadium,” Grant said.
“Because it was a baseball stadium, used by the baseball team, by the time it got put on football, it was just dirt painted green,” Voigt said.
Voigt also remembered other aspects of the facility. “We had a little bitty training room. We shared the locker space with the Twins,” he said. “When they’d leave, the Vikings would move in. In that stadium, the training room was about as big as this table here.”
“That stadium was also unique in that both teams were on the same sidelines,” Voigt added. As the season wore on, wind chills would dip, sometimes significantly below zero. “So when we played the Rams or the Redskins or the Cowboys, they would be on the same side of the field, and they had blowers and heaters. So everybody on the Vikings would go down as close as we could to the other team to warm up,” he said.
The former players recalled another cold-weather story from a game in Buffalo, New York, where Buffalo Bills fans pelted Vikings players with snowballs, hitting Foreman in the head with an ice ball. Foreman prefaced a more recent story about the incident with, “I’m saying this first: If the Vikings ever play in Buffalo in the cold weather and all that, just don’t go. Just watch it on TV.”
About three years ago, however, he said, he received a call from friend Joe DeLamielleure, a former offensive line player for the Bills.
“He says, ‘I got somebody that really needs to talk to you,’” Foreman recounted. “I’m like, ‘Who?’ He says, ‘Remember that game in Buffalo where you got hit upside the head with the ice ball?’ ‘Yeah, I remember that.’ ‘Well, the guy that threw it wants to apologize to you.’”
In a three-way call with Foreman, DeLamielleure, and the Bills fan, Foreman said he received a teary apology. “I’m like, ‘Come on, man, I’ve been over that for I don’t know how many years,'” he recalled.
Foreman, who grew up in Maryland and attended the University of Miami in Florida, also recalled another cold-weather memory from his early Vikings days. It was late in the season, approaching the playoffs, and the weather was cold. Practice was over, he said, and he intended to go inside. Instead, head coach Bud Grant called him back out onto the field.
“He didn’t say anything, he just starts throwing me the football. He threw me the football, and I threw it back at him, and I’m getting teed off, and he’s throwing the football, and I’m throwing it back,” Foreman recounted. “And he finally said, ‘You know what I’m doing this for,’ and I said, ‘No.’ ‘I’m trying to get you acclimated to the weather to catch a football, because you’re going to catch a lot of footballs.’”
Such interactions, the former players said, were typical of Grant’s management style. “He was a man of few words,” Voigt said, recalling that his younger self had longer hair and that Grant preferred shorter hairstyles. “He’d come up and do a little tug at the back of your neck and that meant – didn’t say a word of it – ‘Get a haircut.’”
“In my opinion, he had to be the greatest coach to come play for,” Foreman said. “When I got here, he had a team full of professionals. I’m not saying pro; you can be a pro when you just play the game. I’m talking about professionals. Everybody was always on time. We went on the road, we were dressed to the nines. Everybody looked good. Everything about us showed everybody that we were professional, we were coming to do our job.” In football, he learned from Grant, Foreman said, “the importance of being disciplined, committed, and being all that you can be every play on that field. And that’s, I think, what separated us and took us to a different level than most teams.”
They acknowledged, however, that Bud Grant had a frugal side. His traditional pregame meal for the team consisted of steak and eggs. Knowing many players wouldn’t eat their steak before playing, Foreman recalled the leftover steaks being brought home in bags on the team plane with Grant. He always thought the coach ordered the meal, at least in part, to take the steaks home for his dogs.
“These guys are not liars,” Mike Grant said at the wild game dinner, “because those bags, big bags of steak, my job was to cut them up into portions for each dog to go on top of the food. It’d take me about two hours to do that.”
In appreciation for their appearance at the wild game dinner, each former Viking received a bottled beverage from the Eden Prairie Lions, enclosed in a brown paper bag printed with paw prints.
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