Dennis Ryan was 16 years old, still a student at Highland Park High School, when he had his first memorable encounter with the late Bud Grant.
Recruited while working for the City of St. Paul on the grounds crew for the old Midway Stadium on Snelling, Ryan helped move the Vikings to and from training camp in Mankato during the summer of 1975.
“On the move down, we saw nobody. It was mid-July and they were setting up for camp,” Ryan recalled. “But when we went down to pick up, everybody was around.”
Including Grant, the no-nonsense coach who led the Vikings to four Super Bowl appearances and already had become a Minnesota icon. Grant was waiting in his dorm room for someone to come pick up a boxful of playbooks to load up for the trip back to the Twin Cities.
Enter Ryan, who picked up the box only to have the bottom fall out and dump playbooks all over the floor.
“He stood over me, and I stared up at him,” Ryan said.
And the look the coach gave him?
“It was that look you saw on TV.”
After becoming a full-time Vikings employee, first as an assistant to equipment manager Jim “Stubby” Eason in 1977, then as the equipment manager in 1981, Ryan had an epiphany of sorts about that August day in 1975.
“I realized a few years later, when I got to know him better, (that) he set that up on purpose,” Ryan said. “No doubt. ‘Just watch this kid scramble. What will he do with all those playbooks?’ ”
After 47 years with the Vikings, one of only two equipment managers the Vikings have employed since joining the NFL as an expansion team in 1961, Ryan is retiring. He worked with nine of the team’s 10 head coaches, the last of which was Kevin O’Connell, entering his second season this spring. The Vikings are in the final stages of choosing Ryan’s successor.
“I’m thankful I had a chance to work with Dennis and see firsthand what so many players, coaches and staff members observed and respected for nearly five decades,” O’Connell said. “His humility, attention to detail and constant positive presence will be greatly missed.”
Ryan, 63, was only 21 when Grant promoted him after Eason passed away from cancer.
“I was very fortunate … that Bud Grant had faith and took a chance and gave it to a young guy — because they could have easily gone and hired an experienced person and somebody else,” Ryan said Tuesday at TCO Performance Center, where Vikings players and coaches were going through the second of four days of voluntary workouts.
Ryan did pretty well for himself, working with nine of the team’s 10 head coaches and earning a reputation as a guy who would fill a player’s locker with everything he wanted before he was even asked.
When Warren Moon joined the team for the 1994 season, his old equipment manager in Houston called Ryan and told him Moon liked to have six sticks of gum — three of one brand, three of another — in his locker before practice.
“You surprise him and have that for him. And he was impressed,” Ryan said. “He was like, ‘How did you know?’ And then we did carry that on for the rest of his years with us.”
Surprisingly, Ryan never wrote that stuff down.
“It’s mostly right there,” he said, pointing to his head. “And I keep it there and just remember.”
Ryan said he has accepted that might not always be the case, one reason he started thinking seriously about retirement. “I know I feel young,” he said, “but I know I’m not young.” Another was to spend more time with his wife, Laura; the two are taking a trip to Europe this spring and will meet family and friends.
“It’s time to focus on some other things,” he said.
Ryan grew up in Highland Park and still lives there, “About two miles from where I grew up.” His father, Bob, was the football coach at Humboldt High School and Dennis was a wrestler at Highland Park. During summers, he worked part time for the City of St. Paul, and the Vikings used to practice at Midway Stadium when the Twins were playing at Metropolitan Stadium. He was just out of high school, only 18, when the Vikings offered him a full-time job.
“I stepped into a very fortunate situation,” he said. “I didn’t even think about doing this in high school. It didn’t even cross my mind. But just helping the team move to Mankato, I thought, ‘This is great.’ ”
In his 47 years, Ryan missed only two Vikings games. One was a road game in Atlanta after his mother, Rita, passed away. The other was a home game against the Packers during the COVID season of 2021.
During the COVID season, Ryan said, was the first time he thought about retiring. He worked the entire season in pain because of a compression fracture in his spine and getting worn out by the additional health protocols added to an already-taxing job.
“I thought, ‘Boy, it would be nice to not have to work through that,’ ” he said.
Now that retirement has come, Ryan wonders exactly how he’ll spend his time. After starting workdays at 5 a.m. for nearly 50 years, he is resigned to being an early-riser for life. Ryan has always worked and always liked it, which made the equipment manager job ideal.
“I don’t like to sit and putz,” he said, “so I’ve always been happy. Never really had to think about, ‘What am I going to do today?’ There’s always work. You can always find something to do, so it’s always been easy to do that.”
Much has changed since he started as an assistant in 1975. For instance, back then, Rawlings and Wilson made all the NFL’s shoulder pads. Now, he said, those companies don’t make any. With the use of technology, the NFL now tracks the equipment players wear. Microchips in balls track NextGen statistics. Coaches communicate with quarterbacks through wireless networks in helmets. It’s all a part of the job now, and Ryan embraced each change.
“Back in 1977, 1979, I would never have thought that there was going to be a group of individuals coming to our locker room, on game day, to activate the footballs — to turn them on before the game,” he said. “All that stuff is just second nature now.”
Yet maybe the biggest change is less about technology and more about how teams take care of their players, something on which Ryan prided himself.
“Stubby used to have a sign up over his desk at Midway Stadium that said, ‘If we don’t have it, you don’t need it,’ ” Ryan said. “Now, I think if I had a sign to put over the desk it would say, ‘If we don’t have it, FedEx will have it here tomorrow.’ It’s a different expectation now, and they’re gonna get what they want.”
